We must remind ourselves here that we are only discussing value delivery in terms of the firm's use of its resources to deliver technology projects. We have yet to come onto the actual measurement of the value of such projects to the business activities of the firm in terms of what the deployment actually does. The key measurables in the above model are of course (i) how much do you predict this will cost and (ii) how much did it actually cost. The effectiveness of this tool is directly proportional to the granularity with which it is deployed. If you just apply the test at the topspend level, you may achieve the 95% confidence in your project management, you just won't know why or how. If you take the model down to lower levels of granularity, you will have both a better understanding of why your projects are getting better budgeting and a better use from your professional development expenditure. When it comes to planning, the same rules apply, the measurables are different. Many firms use project management software to improve project delivery and certainly most of these have some budgeting and time measurement elements to them. Few, if any however, provide any intuitive improvement tools. In other words, the project manager can input project elements and move them around within certain constraints; usually certain project elements cannot start until a certain stage has been reached in others.
This hides an important flaw in delivering value from planning. The constraint management gives the impression that the end result plan is actually the most effective use of time and materials to achieve the objective. Actually this is very far from the truth. The reality is that there is no information whatsoever in these tools to prove that any given plan is the best. They merely prove that all the constraints have been met. In other words its ‘a' plan, not the best plan. In my time at university studying materials technology I came across this principle many times when researching the packing of atoms in a molecular structure. If you're given a bucket of sand and you pour in into a measuring jug, it may appear to show a certain volume.
But we all know that if we shake the jug around, the volume will appear to decrease as the sand granules find, through gravity, a more effective way to pack themselves together. So if the plan is to put sand efficiently into a measuring jug, we know that ‘pour it in' is ‘a' plan, but its not the best plan. The best plan would be ‘pour it in then shake it'. Following the analogy from a technology management perspective of course the question then becomes how long must I shake the jug before I get no further improvement in packing.
So, please don't assume that because you have project planning applications, you don't need to pay attention to planning as a possible improvement area. Let me use another slightly more direct analogy to highlight the issue that project planning applications hide. Say you have ten programmers, twenty-five people in the UAT team, three business analysts and a documentation and specification person Typically, you would take a business specification and begin the planning process to assess scale and scope, then flow into the deployment processes themselves. Whatever process you've used, it falls over the same unwarranted assumption - that your staff are all equally capable and properly trained to do their jobs within the project. As I hope I've shown earlier in this article, the fact that any given project manager, when budgeting, is unlikely to be close to the 95% limit, all your staff will also be at different levels of knowledge, ability, experience, enthusiasm, skill and political sensitivity.
With the exception of the last in this list, every project manager and C-level executive I have ever met, falls into the trap of assuming a consistent and usually high level of all of these factors. When you think about it, this is clearly an untenable position. So, at the more granular level, you have a plan to create and it needs three programmers. Two have been with the firm for three years and are highly skilled. One has been with you six months and while he/she has good skills, he/she isn't familiar with your systems yet. From a planning perspective, how would you deploy the team to achieve its objective? If you put the experienced people on the job and give the new guy a simpler job, you run the risk of disillusioning him or her which will ultimately mean a shorter employment, greater spend in HR to find someone new and train them up.
This may seem like a very narrow case, but it is important t understand the principle. All you have to do is look at the variables within your resource base in any project to understand that if you assume a constant high level of each, you, as a planner, are not going to be delivering value.
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