Doing projects: the motivation

Mats Engwall has written on the motivation for doing projects. He gives these reasons:

• As integrating mechanisms enabling cross-functional integration
• As contractual arrangements between markets and hierarchies
• As time-limited teams working towards stipulated deadlines
• As temporary organizations with distinctive characteristics as compared to the permanent organization
• As effective tools in organizing product development
• As the natural work form in … [high tech] companies, and
• As the core units of analysis for understanding the production of high cost, complex products and systems …”

All good reasons, to be sure, but theses are business mechanics.

How about something more compelling? How about: Projects are instruments of strategy; projects are the means to lift all beneficiaries to a better place?

And, you might ask: What is strategy that projects are instruments thereof? Strategy is the plan for the path to the future:

Strategy is about doing similar activities in a different way that achieves goals more effectively; or doing different things than those that are customary to achieve goals.

Michael Porter

"What is strategy" (1996)

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Prima risk management

I recently learned about the risk mitigation built into the new Oakland-San Francisco bay bridge being built to replace the repaired structure damaged in the 1989 earthquake. There are a few problems to deal with:

• Unlike the rock anchoring the Golden Gate across the west bay, the east bay floor is mud for the most part. This poor foundation contributed in part to the 1989 failure
   
• The San Andreas fault runs within a stone's throw, and this is "the big one". It's the same fault line that destroyed SF in 1906.
   
• The bridge carries a lot of traffic, all day and night, so failure is not an option

Of course, this is a zillion-billion dollar infrastructure project, so risk management and project management are not taken lightly.

So, what've we got here?

• First, about the mud: There will be only one tower for the suspension of the road bed, and this tower is anchored on the only rock in the east bay. But, it's actually four towers side by side connected by fusible links designed to fail under high stress loads, allowing each tower segment to go its own way. These links are replaceable after the event

• Second, the suspension is like a self-eating watermelon. That is, think of the road bed and then think of the suspension as a rubber band around the long axis of the road bed and also hung over the tower. You can't put on the rubber band until the road is in place, and you can't put the road in place until the rubber band is there. Obviously, to break this circular dependency, some temporary structure are needed.

• And third, the road bed is actually multiple sections that are joined by sliding joints. It's possible for the road to separate by six feet and then come back together like it is on drawer slides. And with this system, the tower can sway five feet and not affect the road.

Now, what about acceptance testing? I recall projects I worked on that were nuclear event hardened communications systems. The army would never pony up a nuclear event as GFE (government furnished event) for a user acceptance test. Area 51 was not available. So, we went with analysis only. Seems like the same conundrum on this as well.

I hope it works; failure is not an option

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Michael Porter revisited

Some years ago, I spent some time reading Michael Porter's 1980 classic: "Competitive Advantage". It's still a great read. Some years later, Porter answered some of his critics with his 1996 HBR paper "What is Strategy", recently updated as given in an executive education presentation.

Now comes a nice summarization of Porter, and the evolution of his thinking based on accumulated experience, written by his research associate Joan Magretta and entitled: "Understanding Michael Porter: The essential guide to competition and strategy".

Of course, students of Porter have absorbed his idea that strategy is that which creates a sustainable value proposition for customers in the context of a sustainable value chain for the business. For Porter, strategy is unique activity, different from competitors:

The essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do 

Michael Porter, "What is Strategy", 1996 HBR

And the purpose of strategy is enhanced business value; the means of strategy is competitive advantage (thus, the name of the book). Competitive advantage arises from the integrated effect of resources, capabilities, and differention:

But my eye caught something from Margette's book on the integration aspect of strategy (I'm always interested in anything that integrates the dots into a narrative)

The value proposition is the element of strategy that looks outward at customers, at the demand side of the business. The value chain focuses internally on operations. Strategy is fundamentally integrative, bringing the demand and supply sides together.

 Joan Magretta, 

"Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy"

I really thought the integrative effect of strategy was interesting in light of Porter's assertion in 1996 that Japanese companies had no strategies. To my mind, this is a shocking statement; but having worked for a Japanese owned company, I know where he's coming from. Porter says they simply focused on taking improved operational effectiveness (OE) to its maximum---and then they could go no farther, leading to the "lost decade". (Of course, it's a good deal more complicated than that, so I'll leave the lost decade right here). By Porter's definition, OE is not a strategy.

Operational effectiveness is about doing similar activities better than others—in other words, predictable repetition. Strategy is about doing similar activities in a different way that achieves goals more effectively; or doing different things than those that are customary to achieve goals.


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March 6, 1912

100 years ago today, the Oreo cookie went on sale. Having eaten Oreo's all my life, I find this a remarkable business value success. Apparently, worldwide sales are $1.5Billion annually.

I wonder what the original project cost was in 1912? I wonder if it exceeded planned value, PV? Do you suppose they earned the schedule, ES? I hope it was a best value outcome for the managers of the day.

As we ponder (and too often confuse..) project planned value (PV) with post-project business value, Oreo is a great story of  business value success, and such success goes a long way to smooth out any wrinkles caused by problems in R&D--if there were any. Nothing succeeds like success!

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Daniel Kahneman explains Fast and Slow to Charlie Rose

In a recent video interview, Daniel Kahneman explains "Thinking Fast and Slow", his latest book on behavioral psychology. If you've not listened to Kahneman before, this is a good opportunity.

This book, which we commented on already, is about the differences between thinking intuitively and thinking with purpose and analysis. The former is "system-1" fast thinking and the latter is "system-2" slow thinking.

One comparison that's been made is with Malcolm Gladwell's popular book "Blink". In Blink, Gladwell posits the idea of "thin slice" thinking, somewhat equivalent to Kahneman's 'system-1'. Both Gladwell and Kahneman say that intuition is often as good as it gets and that analysis can not improve on it.

However, Gladwell is a journalist for the New Yorker, and Kahneman is a Nobel laureate for his work in judgment and decision making. In the interview, cited above, Kahneman takes on Gladwell a bit, urging some caution in accepting Blink's thesis. However, it's evident that Kahneman respects Gladwell's ability to convey in the popular press some of these quite

A review of Blink is found here.

You might be interested in Jonah Lehrer's "How we think"

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Nash Equilibrium Part III

Back in October of 2010, we mused about game theory and the Nash Equilibrium. If you missed that two part blog, start here.

 

Since that October posting, the staff here at Musings discovered a Kindle gem on Amazon--and, only 99c delivered instantly to my free Kindle reader on my laptop. It's a self-published book by a graduate student William Spaniel, who is, as he himself explains:

.... a PhD student in political science at the University of Rochester, creator of the popular YouTube series Game Theory 101, and founder of gametheory101.com.

 

Our posting was based on original source material by Princeton economist Alan Blinder published in 1982. But the same stuff is in Spaniel's e-book in Lesson 1.3: The Stag Hunt, Pure Strategy Nash Equilibrium, and Best Responses.

 

Actually, the Stag hunt is a popular explanation of the Nash Equilibrium, and you can find many references to it.

 

So, why is this a topic for project management? Because it's about getting to a balance, an equilibrium, and a win-win with important relationships:

• Buyer/seller;
• Stakeholder/project manager;
• Functional manager/project manager 
• User/project manager.

 

Anywhere and any time there might be a need to get to non-zero-sum, where no one loses everything, and there is privacy that inhibits open collaboration, then the Nash Equilibrium applies.

Here's a introductory video. When you look at it, think in terms of a project management strategy as a substitute for "law".

 

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WSJ and the stand-up meeting

In the check-out line at the grocer I glanced at the Wall Street Journal (print edition) and right there on page 1, albeit below the fold, was an article extolling the stand-up meeting.

Has this gone main-stream? I mean really!--the front page of the WSJ? Isn't there the Euro-crises or something to take up that valuable real estate?

But no, we learn this bit:

Holding meetings standing up isn't new. Some military leaders did it during World War I, according to Allen Bluedorn, a business professor at the University of Missouri.

But then reporter Rachel Emma Sliverman goes on to explain the agile phenomenon and the agilists adoption of the stand-up meeting.

And, there's some interesting metrics that comport intuitively with what you would imagine:

.... a study back in 1998 that found that standing meetings were about a third shorter than sitting meetings and the quality of decision-making was about the same.

And, we learn the humorous stuff, like:

• Playing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" to keep the pace up
• Passing around a 10 pound bowling ball
• Passing around a rubber chicken
• Charging a nominal fee for tardiness or verbosity

Not to miss out on an opportunity, the American entrepreneur is at work:

Office outfitters are responding by designing work spaces with standing sessions in mind. Furniture maker Steelcase Inc.'s Turnstone division, for example, recently introduced the "Big Table," a large standing-height table designed for quick meetings.

And then of course, the ultimate stand-up is no gathering at all; it's a variant of the traditional "sit-down"

At Freshbooks.com, a Toronto-based company that makes online accounting software, teams try to do daily 10 a.m. stand-ups. But on days when everyone is too swamped to gather around the company Ping-Pong table, team members will shout out their status updates from their desks, which are arranged in a circle.

They call those meetings "sit-downs."

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