I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about Project Management, not so much at the execution level (i.e. me being a Project Manager) but more at the research level. Now Project Management success statistics might be high in your neck of the woods, but in IT about 85% of IT projects fail (see http://kenning.co.nz/business/85-of-it-projects-fail-i-know-why/).
I guess I’m interested in how to improve that statistic, especially around the use of collaborative tools. I don’t count Microsoft Project (or even Project Server) as collaborative for that matter. In fact, the vast majority of project management tools are designed purely from the Project Manager’s point of view of executing the project, but not really taking into account that projects are actually social constructs made up of groups of people, and so what is the best way to deal with their requirements and thoughts and commitments.
So I’ve attached two documents that demonstrate my current research, one into Work Breakdown Structures, and the other focused on Resource Estimation.
Traditional Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) feature items based on nouns. These are then split into levels with more nouns, and so on. There’s a couple of rules, mainly each item should consist of less than 40 hours effort, and no more than 4% of the total amount of work. My thinking is showing, how do you show gaps in time and size in the different components of the WBS? I’m proposing that the gaps between tasks equates to the period of time between tasks, and also the size of each square that represents a task represents the size of that task, as demonstrated by the attached photo of a WBS. A quick glance at this shows which tasks are relatively big in size, and the amount of time between tasks. I believe this is represented better than the same information in a gantt chart which does show duration, but squishes all tasks next to each other making for poor readability.
You’ll notice that the WBS only consists of nouns which doesn’t make for a useful project plan, but by adding a circle shape for verbs, then we can both demonstrate nouns which are outputs, and verbs which is what we need to do to achieve those outputs.
The second document is an Excel spreadsheet used to try and better estimate how long it takes different tasks to complete. Project Managers tend to think of people as resources, i.e. all people are the same. Hence I should take just as long to do a piece of work as any other Systems Analyst. This is inherently a flawed assumption, because all people have different skills, experience, and motivation, which combines into a modifier for them. This modifier is multiplied by the ‘perfect’ time to do the task, and out comes a more realistic time.
Anyways, that’s my research for now. My goal is to combine these into a ‘Facebook for project management’ that’s inherently more usable and people focused, rather than resource and project focused.