What Is Wrong With The Status Quo?

For any organization that is satisfied with its performance, then obviously nothing is wrong with the status quo.  If the tools and practices are working, why change?  However, many have found that they need to improve such things as:

• the delivery of annual project budgets

• optimization of resources

• turnaround times for customer requests

• customer satisfaction

• employee satisfaction

• internal communication

Traditional project portfolio management systems and concepts were not developed for today's fast-paced business climate.  They were developed with one basic premise: good project management means that the plan must precede the work.  At any given time, the entire organization's work will be 'resource-levelled' and accurately planned.

This concept pre-dates the internet and globalization.  It comes from an era where project teams were rarely interrupted with reactive work, when technology and business climates were controlled from within the company.  During this time, most knowledge workers had an accurate picture of their day before they arrived at work.  People tended to work on one major initiative or project at a time, and it was realistic to expect that they would follow their plans very closely.   

In this paradigm, the focus is primarily on the plan because of the basic assumption that it will be proactively followed.  Today's "Enterprise Project Management" (EPM)  and "Resource Management" (RM) systems rely heavily on projections for what will be done and who will be available to do it.  Manufacturers of these systems have invested heavily in automating the practice of prediction, and the business case for implementation is largely based on saving time in the preparation, distribution, and consumption of these predictions.  

But how valuable are the predictions?  It is important to consider the inputs to these calculations: the current status, work estimates for what is scheduled to happen, the skills of the people who could do the work, and the amount of time they will have available to do the work.

• The current status.  EPM and RM systems are used for making decisions on what will happen months into the future, assuming that the plans covering 'now' until 'then' are valid.  Thus, for the calculations to be valid, the current plan must be accurate and the entire organization must be working from that plan right now.  And for the rest of today.  And tomorrow.  And all day, every day, until the date impacted by the decisions.  And as soon as the plan is invalidated by changes or slippage, the predictions must be re-calculated and re-published.

• Work estimates are critical to these calculations.  To gain value from planning weeks or months into the future, you have to assume that the work estimates will prove to be very accurate.

• Skills for the available people must be accurately described.  If the tools are going to suggest a viable replacement or alternative for a piece of work, then the available resources must be categorized in such a way that a computer program can assign the work and have the estimate still be valid.

• The available time for the people must be accurate, and they must all stay on or close to schedule.

The predications are calculations, and they are only as valuable as the accuracy and validity of the inputs.  So, if an EPM software deployment is cost-justified by how much time it saves in publishing predictions, it's worth looking at the value of the predictions.  Is it believable to cost-justify a purchase because it saves time in producing something that has no value?

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with traditional planning-centric approaches, as long as people follow the plans.  One Task List is a practice that eases these limitations by helping to ensure that today's plans are valid and being followed.

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