How to Fail in Project Management (Without Really Trying)

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How to Fail in Project Management (Without
Really Trying)

• Jeffrey Pinto and Om Kharbanda
• Business Horizons, July-Aug 96

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How to fail in project mgmt (1)

• 1. Ignore the project environment (including
  stakeholders)
• 2. Push a new technology to market too quickly
• 3. Dont bother building in fallback options
• 4. When problems occur, shoot the one most visible

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How to fail in project mgmt (2)

• 5. Let new ideas starve to death from inertia
• 6. Dont bother conducting feasibility studies
• 7. Never admit a project is a failure
• 8. Over manage project managers and their teams

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How to fail in project mgmt (3)

• 9. Never, never conduct post failure reviews
• 10. Never bother to understand project trade-off
• 11. Allow political expediency and infighting to
  dictate crucial project decisions
• 12. Make sure the project is run by a weak leader

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Class Discussion

• Which rule is the best?
• Which rule is ignored most often?

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Industrial-Strength Management Strategies

• Norm Brown
• IEEE Software July 96

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SPMN

• Http//spmn.com

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Software Management Framework

• Identify and correct defects and potential
  problems early
• Plan and estimate
• Minimize rework caused by uncontrolled change
• Make effective use of your people

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Nine Principal Best Practices (1)

• Formal Risk Management
• Agreement on Interfaces
• Formal Inspections
• Metric-based scheduling and management
• Binary quality gates at the inch-pebble level

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Nine Principal Best Practices (2)

• Program-wide visibility of progress vs plan
• Defect tracking against quality targets
• Configuration management
• People-aware management accountability

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Project Control Panel
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(No Transcript)
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Conclusions

• Most people know that productivity must be
  increased
• authentic commitment
• risk in breakthrough projects gives high possible
  payback
• online group memory

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L7bS13 - Group Discussion

• Which approach or advice is most important?
  from CMM, How to fail , or SPMN
• Justify your position
• Answers due Wed, 6/27

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The Mythical Man-Month

• Fred Brooks, Jr,
• classic paper and book

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Why disaster? (1)

• techniques of estimating are poorly developed
• estimating techniques .. confuse effort with
  progress
• managers dont make people wait for quality

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Why disaster? (2)

• schedule progress is poorly monitored
• when schedule slippage is recognized, the
  natural (and traditional) response is to add
  manapower. this makes matters worse