[2] Introduction

During the 4th quarter of 2001 the leadership team of Confluence, a software development company in Pittsburgh, undertook four simple but extraordinarily powerful changes to the management process of the company.

* First, the leadership team adopted an enterprise-wide prioritization and scheduling policy for all the projects of the company.

* Second, the leadership team enacted a weekly meeting between a high-level executive and all the resource managers of the company, during which the near-term deployment of the company’s development resources was determined (that meeting continues at this writing).

* Third, the leadership team required the use of a more effective project-planning process for all new development projects.

* Fourth, the leadership team acknowledged the existence of variation in task duration and in project duration, by requiring the project plans of the enterprise to account for such variation in their designs.

The effectiveness of these changes is illustrated by the control chart of the duration of the projects of Confluence, for the two years before the management changes and for two years after the management changes. Average project duration was reduced from 140 business days per project to a mere 46 days per project. The rate of project completion increased from six projects per year to more than eleven projects per year. And throughout the entire period, Confluence did not hire a single additional developer.
Of the four changes that created such a massive improvement in the logistical performance of Confluence, the first two can be implemented exclusively by the leadership of a company (these will be discussed in a later work that I intend to leave for the two of you). No project manager possesses the authority with which to make the first two changes happen. But the latter two changes (the use of a more effective planning process and the development of project plans that capture and minimize the effects of variation) were merely enabled by the leadership of the company. These latter two changes are entirely within the span of authority of any willing project manager, and they are the heart of Robust Project Design. They will be within your span of authority during the early portions of your careers, when you are most likely to contribute to project plans or perhaps even to manage entire projects. I base the rest of this work on the assumption that at some time early in your careers one or both of you will be asked to fill the roles of project managers.

However, I must also caution you. Although your use of Robust Project Design will yield a measurable benefit, you cannot ever hope to achieve for your employer all that Confluence achieved, unless the leadership of your company deploys the same enterprise-wide multi-project scheduling policy and the weekly meetings. Still, your use of Robust Project Design can bring a non trivial improvement in performance, and it may even alert the leadership of your company that it is possible to nearly double the company’s throughput of projects without hiring a single additional developer, with just some minor policy changes. Your use of Robust Project Design also will provide you with useful, predictive models of your projects, rather than the highly misleading models that your counterparts will be creating.

[1] Robust Project Design(tm)

Project modeling as it should be.

Foreword

My sons, you should know Robust Project Design(tm) . Despite my desire to provide for you and to help and guide both of you at every future step, my time is limited. While my health is ok. I can’t expect to be in this world forever. Still, I have learned much during my years in this world, and I love the two of you enough to want to share what I have learned. This book is one of my bridges between now and the future, your future.

Today you are young; the things that I write about are of no interest to either of you at this time. But they will be of interest to you when you strive to succeed in the world of corporations. At that time, you will face the same challenges that stump the managers and executives of today. If you are mindful of the information that I share with you now, you will know how to make yourselves invaluable to those who invest in whatever corporation you choose to serve, and you will find it easy to compete with your peers. You will find it easy to succeed.

One of the challenges that today’s crop of managers find overwhelmingly daunting involves making predictions regarding the near-term future of a business. Such predictions give us the means with which to make decisions that are consistently constructive, rather than being frequently counterproductive. I intend to discuss here the first steps in making such predictions. Specifically, I intend to share with you all that I have learned about planning, designing, tracking, and managing projects.

The knowledge that I share with you will be invaluable during the early portions of your careers, when you’ll find yourselves competing with peers whose actions and decisions will be driven by a number of prevailing misconceptions. This knowledge will give you a powerful edge. I call it Robust Project Design.

Robust Project Design is the practice of creating models (representations) of real projects, models that yield unbiased estimates of project duration, with minimum uncertainty in those estimates. Once available, the resulting models enable us to monitor the health of the corresponding projects and to make steadily improving predictions regarding the duration from the present to future events of interest. Our Robust Project Design models become the basis for real-time management decisions.