For most people, project management software does not work very well. Most people are using the tools to achieve something they were not designed to do. Compare the following two paragraphs:
Project management software was designed to help medium term planning on one-off, single, complex projects where classes of resources work full time on physical deliverables.
Most project teams need help with short term planning on many similar, relatively simple but overlapping projects where individuals also work part time on non-physical projects.
The vast majority of users of project management software are in the latter group. Managers of such projects have to try and adapt the available project management software tools. It is a bit like using a spanner to hammer a nail.
Confusing terms - project management, multi-project management, project portfolio management and enterprise project management, program or programme management.
It is a simple fact that the terminology has yet to settle down.
My impression is that most people and organisations in the UK's high tech arena use the terms as follows:
Roughly 1/4 people use programme management to mean the management of organisational change - projects that cause change to the host organisations. This nearly always involves benefits management.
Roughly 1/4 people use programme management to mean the management of multiple projects regardless of the purpose of the projects.
Roughly 1/4 people use project management to mean the management of multiple projects - they have always associated project management with a range of projects and have no experience of large single projects.
Roughly 1/4 people use project management to mean the management of a single project.
I am going to use multi-project management in the following article.
Comparisons
Within the preceding two italicised paragraphs a number of issues are deliberately raised. Let’s compare each of these issues to see why these tools are inappropriate to the current multi-project environment.
Medium term Vs short term
The classic use of project management software is in heavy engineering. The bridges, power stations and space shots of this world gave us the early project management tools. Their interest was in planning to predict the demand for resources over the next few months. Project planners calculated the number of resources that would be required in June and the labour department organised the crews. Durations were normally in days and often in weeks.
Foremen and charge hands direct the individual workers on a short term basis and this work is generally not planned by project management software methods. You do not see plans showing that Fred Smith, a welder grade 3, will spend Tuesday afternoon welding on the roof area.
Today most project planning software is used to plan the next few weeks. Most projects have a much shorter overall duration and the project planner’s role is concerned with the long term capacity plus the specific plans for the next week or two. Durations are often in hours and days.
Complex Vs standardised
Those classic engineering projects were unique. They are ‘strangers’. Each presented new challenges and a tool was required to help the team understand the process that would be followed to assemble the deliverable. Much of critical path thinking stems from a need for the Polaris team to understand the logical process of construction and assembly that would lead to a working missile.
Today’s projects generally follow a defined and distinct pattern. They are ‘runners’ and ‘repeaters’. Many projects are run under a methodology that precisely spells out the process in great detail. The problem today is not one of understanding the process, but of scheduling the resources against time, other projects and non-project workloads.
Single Vs multiple projects
Those great projects from the past were isolated. The problem was to maximise the efficiency of the team of workers on this one single project. The complexities of multi-projects were not considered, as they did not exist. There was no need to think about cross project conflicts, multi-project resource optimisation or a whole host of elements that have come to the fore as project management has spread into a world where many projects progressed within the same organisation against a background of non-project work.
Typically, on a single project, the timescale and objectives are set - the team need to know how many resources will be required to achieve these goals. In the multi-project environment, the resource pool is much more stable and the team need to prioritise the work load to keep the resource fully occupied and to finish projects as early as possible.
Classes of resources Vs individuals
‘Big-project’ project management is all about classes of resources. Planners dealt with numbers of welders, bricklayers and labourers. The histogram is a fine tool to demonstrate how many types of resource will be required. It was necessary to reduce the peak demands for each class of resource in the interests of economy.
Today project managers deal with individuals. They are individuals with many skills that may be used to meet the needs of many projects. Histograms are not a useful form when showing how many hours per day a person needs to work - they already know their working hours. Their interest is in what they should be doing during those hours.
Full time Vs part time
Labourers, bricklayers and welders normally work full time on the one project in which they are involved. On today’s projects it is very rare that anyone works full time on any one project. Many projects vie for each resource’s time with the non-project workload and other administrative jobs.
Physical Vs non-physical projects
Engineering projects allow for a simple way of achievement monitoring: you simply count the bricks or pipe-lengths. It is a physical measure of progress. It only gets difficult with work like electrical installations as it is hard to measure. You would not ask a bricklayer when he’s expected to complete a wall.
Most of today’s projects work towards non-physical deliverables. You cannot measure progress towards a software product, a human or marketing project except by an artificial measure like metrics. Hence the need for timesheet recording systems that aim to measure time spent and estimates to complete.
My Interest
Project management tools are wide of the mark by today’s standards. In 1993 Hydra Management brought together expertise in project management software and set about a major rethink of the design and use of these tools.
This is now resulting in a new breed of tools aimed at the current market, not at the builders, civil engineers and space engineers who are well served with high quality useful tools. The new tools are aimed at the majority of project managers who manage a range of small projects.
Hydra is the first of a new breed of tools for which we do not yet have a title. Calling them project management software would be a mistake. Programme planning might be nearer the mark.
