Why Systems Fail LO10376

RLucadello@aol.com
Tue, 8 Oct 1996 08:23:56 -0400

Replying to LO10312 --

Dale asks:

>"How about the rest of you? In what cases do you trust the
>system to deal with deviations from their plans? In what
>cases do you succumb to the urge to tweak? What makes the
>difference between the cases?"

Here's a couple thoughts:

The obvious comment is that a chunk of Statistical Process Control (SPC)
theory is devoted to identifying real system shifts (which require
"tweaks") from random variation in the process. If your process is
repeatable, this may well be applicable.

Donald Reinertsen, in his work on short cycle time techniques, extends the
concept of random process variation to project management. He writes:

"As schedules are broken down into more and more activities, they become
increasingly 'noisy' or less predictable. The noise creates a fundamental
management problem. Do we ignore these variances or react to them? If we
ignore them, we signal that schedules don't really matter. If we react to
them, we waste effort explaining the unpredictable . . . Engineering is
extremely hard to schedule. Microscheduling can be a huge drain of design
resources. Focus instead on a handful of critical high level milestones."

In other work, he sums this up as "Micro-Plan, but Macro-Schedule", which
I would sum up as "plan in detail, but only 'tweak' based on major
schedule events."

A "major Schedule Event" is one that is a natural landmark (such as "demo
units delivered") as opposed to an arbitrary, internal, point (such as
"concept design complete").

Actually, I believe that a lot of Reinertsen's thinking about short cycle
time engineering projects is applicable to project management in general.
If you can get ahold of a reprint of his 1992 article "The Mythology of
Speed", from Machine Design, March 26,1992, it is a very good four page
primer on getting projects done without being lead astray by competing
Project Management theories.

Regards,
Robert Lucadello
RLucadello@AOL.com

-- 

RLucadello@aol.com

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