The Book that you MUST Read in Project Management

When it comes to project management, there’s a book that stands out as a must-read for both beginners and experts: “Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme” by Robert K. Wysocki, Ph.D. With over 40 years of experience as a project management consultant and trainer, the author provides invaluable insights, drawing from the Project Management Institute (PMI) process groups and knowledge areas.

My Reading Through Effective Project Management Text Book

“The contemporary project environment is characterized by high speed, high change, lower costs, complexity, uncertainty, and a host of other factors.”

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1. Navigating “Effective Project Management”

In this book, Wysocki addresses the contemporary project environment, characterized by high speed, constant change, cost constraints, complexity, and uncertainty. He emphasizes that effective project management isn’t a rigid set of steps but rather an approach tailored to the project’s specifics. Understanding the level of change expected plays a crucial role in choosing the right Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC) model:

· Traditional Project Management (TPM): When the goal and solution are clear.

· Agile Project Management (APM): When the goal is clear, but the solution isn’t.

· Extreme Project Management (xPM): When neither the goal nor the solution is clear.

· Emertxe Project Management (MPx): When the goal is not clear, but the solution is.

Every project that has ever existed or will exist falls into one and only one of these four categories. Each category gives rise to a PMLC, and each PMLC has at least one specific project management approach in it. This four-category classification gives rise to five PMLC models. It is these models — their recognition and use — that are the subject of this book.

2. Defining Project Management as “Organized Common Sense”

Wysocki’s book researches the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), a hierarchical description of all the work needed to complete a project as defined in the Resource Breakdown Structure (RBS). The book clarifies the distinction between “activity” and “task” and adopts the convention that activities consist of two or more tasks.

The WBS serves multiple purposes:

1. Thought Process Tool

2. Architectural Design Tool

3. Planning Tool

4. Project Status Reporting Tool

However, it strongly advises against building the WBS through informal means, such as emailing participants to complete their parts. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of a Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS) for a comprehensive and successful WBS.

3. Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS).

WARNING do not build the WBS by walking around the workplace or e-mail space and asking participants to complete their part of the WBS. It may seem like a faster way to generate the WBS and it is much easier than conducting the JPPS, but it is a ticket to failure. You need several pairs of eyes looking at the WBS and critiquing it for completeness.

4. Six Criteria for a Complete WBS

The book highlights that a well-constructed WBS is pivotal and must meet six characteristics to be deemed complete:

1. Measurable Status and Completion

2. Bounded

3. Deliverable

4. Easily Estimated Time and Cost

5. Activity Duration Within Limits

6. Independent Work Assignments

These characteristics ensure that an activity has transitioned into a task within the WBS.

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5. Building the WBS: Different Approaches

The book explores three general approaches for constructing the WBS:

1. Noun-Type Approaches: Define deliverables based on components (physical or functional), aligning with PMI’s recommendations.

2. Verb-Type Approaches: Define deliverables based on the actions required to produce them. It includes approaches like design-build-test-implement.

3. Organizational Approaches: Define deliverables based on the organizational units responsible for the project, encompassing departments, processes, and geographic locations.

6. Estimation Challenges and Techniques

Estimating task duration causes challenges, primarily due to inconsistency among team members. The book advises considering both labor hours and clock time in estimates. It introduces the concept of the “cash point” where adding more resources no longer reduces task duration linearly.

Efficiency and variation are two key factors affecting task duration. Unexpected events, skill variations, interruptions, mistakes, and common cause variations all contribute to uncertainty.

The duration of a project is the elapsed time in business working days, not including weekends, holidays, or other non-work days.

Work effort is the labor required to complete a task. That labor can be consecutive or nonconsecutive hours.

NOTE: when estimating task duration, you have a choice to make. Do you want to estimate hours of labor to complete the task, or do you want to estimate the clock time required to complete the task? You will probably want to do both. The labor hours are needed to bill the client.

The elapsed clock time is needed to estimate the project completion date. Some project managers will estimate labor and convert it to duration by dividing labor time by an established efficiency factor, typically ranging from 0.6 to 0.75.

The duration of a task is influenced by the amount of resources scheduled to work on it.

7. Variation in Task Duration

Because you cannot know what factors will be operative when work is underway on a task, you cannot know exactly how long it will take. There will, of course, be varying estimates with varying precision for each task. One of your goals in estimating task duration is to define the task to a level of granularity such that your estimates have a narrow variance — that is, the estimate is as good as you can get it at the project’s planning stages.

Varying skill levels: Your strategy is to estimate task duration based on using people of average skills assigned to work on the task. In actuality, this may not happen. You may get a higher- or lower-skilled person assigned to the task, causing the actual duration to vary from the planned duration. These varying skill levels will be both a help and a hindrance to you.

· Unexpected events:

Murphy’s Law is lurking around every bend in the road and will surely make his presence known, but in what way and at what time you do not know. Random acts of nature, vendor delays, incorrect shipments of materials, traffic jams, power failures, and sabotage are but a few of the possibilities.

· Efficiency of worker’s time:

Every time a worker is interrupted, it takes additional time to get back to the level of productivity attained before the interruption. You cannot control the frequency or time of interruptions, but you do know that they will happen. As to their effect on staff productivity, you can only guess. Some will be more affected than others.

· Mistakes and misunderstandings:

Despite all of your efforts to clearly and concisely describe each task that is to be performed, you will most likely miss a few. This will take its toll on reworking or scrapping semi-completed work.

8. Six Methods for Estimating Task Duration

The book outlines six methods for estimating task duration:

1. Similarity to Other Activities

2. Historical Data

3. Expert Advice

4. Delphi Technique

5. Three-Point Technique

6. Wide-Band Delphi Technique

The Delphi technique leverages group knowledge to arrive at estimates when expert advice is lacking. The Three-Point Technique considers optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely times to calculate estimates. Combining Delphi and three-point methods results in the Wide-Band Delphi Technique, which refines estimates iteratively.

9. Applying the Delphi Technique

The Delphi technique can produce good estimates in the absence of expert advice. This is a group technique that extracts and summarizes the knowledge of the group to arrive at an estimate.

After the group is briefed on the project and the nature of the task, each individual in the group is asked to make his or her best guess of the task duration. The results are tabulated and presented to the group in a histogram labeled First Pass, as shown.

Participants whose estimates fall in the outer quartiles are asked to share the reason for their guess. After listening to the arguments, each group member is asked to guess again.

The results are presented as a histogram labeled Second Pass, and again the outer quartile estimates are defended. A third guess is made, and the histogram plotted is labeled Third Pass.

Final adjustments are allowed. The average of the third guess is used as the group’s estimate. Even though the technique seems rather simplistic, it is effective in the absence of expert advice.

10. Applying the Three-Point Technique

Task duration is a random variable. If it was possible to repeat the task several times under identical circumstances, duration times would vary. That variation may be tightly grouped around a central value, or it might be widely dispersed.

· Optimistic:

The optimistic time is defined as the shortest duration one has experienced or might expect to experience given that everything happens as expected.

· Pessimistic:

The pessimistic time is the duration that one would experience (or have experienced) if everything that could go wrong did go wrong, yet the task was completed.

· Most likely:

The most likely time is the time they usually experience.

Then the estimated duration is given by the formula (O + 4M + P) / 6

11. Applying the Wide-Band Delphi Technique

Combining the Delphi and three-point methods results in the wide-band Delphi technique. It involves a panel, as in the Delphi method. In place of a single estimate, the panel members are asked, at each iteration, to give their optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely estimates for the duration of the chosen task.

The results are compiled, and any extreme estimates are removed. Averages are computed for each of the three estimates, and the averages are used as the optimistic, pessimistic, and most likely estimates of task duration.

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