Breaking down project management: It's rocket science

Breaking down project management: It’s rocket science

September 16th, 2010

Joe Procopio

By Joe Procopio

You’ve never met someone who consults on project management who hates it as much as I do. You might think you hate project management, you might count yourself among those who equate Microsoft Project with Invasive Dentistry and Risk Assessment Sessions with Timeshare Sales Seminars.

You might think that.

When I talk about project management, and I do it a lot, probably more than I’d like, it’s not the recipe for disaster that is PMBOK, PMI, PMP, and PDUs. Believe me, there’s nothing more satisfying than walking into a project and tearing up a 60-page Gantt chart.

But it’s not as simple as they make it out in Rework either.

Oh yeah, it’s also necessary.

Let’s Build Our Rocket!

So here’s project management.

We’re building a rocket in three parts, the engine at the back, the cockpit at the front, and then a collection of what we’ll call “rocket parts” in the middle And let’s say we’ve got a million dollars to build our rocket.

No Project Planning

Mostly, what we techies do is start with the funnest thing first, so we’ll set to picking out our engine. We will weigh all of the factors of combustion and thrust and come away with an awesome engine that does a little more than we needed it to, but does it all very elegantly.

Right, techies? Elegantly.

And we’ll drop $600K on the engine.

Then we’ll move on to the cockpit and we’ll make sure the UX is slick and we’ve got nav and leather and so on and so forth. We’ll wind up spending $200K for something decent.

Then we’ll move on to the boring, somewhat vague rocket parts in the middle to connect the whole thing. And along the way, we’ll realize that, at a minimum, it’s going to cost $400K to connect the engine to the cockpit.

Oops. $200K worth of oops. Or one powerful, comfortable rocket held together with balsa wood and duct tape.

With Project Planning

In it’s most basic sense, project management is the science of figuring out what we need to build, when we need it built, what resources we have, and making all three work together.

Ah, but wait, that’s project planning, not project management, and unfortunately, that’s also where most project planning stops.

With proper project planning, we’re not only obligated to figure out how much these components cost ($1.2 million) against the resources we have ($1.0 million), but all of the variables involved in what we need and when we need it and what the contingency plans are (risk management) for when A doesn’t equal B.

But What About Project Management?

Glad you asked. Project Management is the science of identifying, at the earliest possible moment, which of our guesses were wrong, and what we need to do about it (issue resolution).

How far does our rocket need to go, exactly?

What happens if we don’t launch on time?

Did anyone keep the receipt for the engine and the cockpit?

Of course, with proper project planning, these questions were asked before we started building. Project management is executing the proverbial plan Bs.

A Million Dollar Lesson

There are two reasons I talk about building the rocket in terms of dollars instead of time.

One is that everything, I mean everything – time, people, tools, requirements – comes down to dollars, or at least it should. Features should be based on ROI, fixed assets depreciate, opportunity cost lingers over every decision.

The second is that the dollar equation is something we’re all already familiar with. Most of us manage our finances by tracking our spending, dumping every Starbucks receipt or App Store transaction into a software program and watching the totals as they get close to the paycheck.

And for the vast majority of the aforementioned most of us, this is where our financial management ends and ultimately fails. When we realize this failure, we start keeping another tool handy, like a spreadsheet or a list, of our recurring and non-recurring expenses, when they’re due, and how much we think they’ll be. Then we try to spend within those means.

Budgeting. Which also equals invasive dentistry.

See? You Already Know This.

Just like budgeting, you’re never going to catch the surprises, the busted toilet, the flaky transmission, the Worldwide Internet Lottery scam, those things that pop up and waste resources when you need them the most.

And just like budgeting, we tend to compensate for this lack of visibility by getting way down into the weeds and trying to estimate every McGriddle and Frappe we plan to buy during a certain month.

At some point, this becomes an exercise in quantity. Tasks in the project plan expand to the lowest level of detail. No one can keep an eye on it all so status reports appear and become instantly laborious. Then come the meetings to clarify the status reports, and the massive meeting agendas to make sure nothing is missed

Then the meeting rules to make sure everyone stays on track during the meetings, then the checkpoint meetings between the meetings to discuss the stuff you didn’t discuss in the meeting because you ran out of time.

*Headdesk*

Another rocket story. There’s an episode of the Simpsons in which Homer joins NASA. As he’s about to take his rocket ride and the countdown gets to zero, the countdown voice shouts “Make rocket go now!”

This is something that has always stuck with me for its simplicity, a joke in the episode, but it’s really what all good project management should be about. It’s a four letter sentence with action, subject, goal, and deadline all wrapped into one.

This is the epitome of what’s usually missing from project management and what keeps it from being effective – when the project becomes hundreds of tasks and dozens of meetings, with reams of documentation existing only to prove its own value, it’s worse than no project management at all, because you’ll have spent a bunch of time and money monitoring the progress of every last detail, and you’ll still wind up being short $200K for rocket parts.

Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Company, a technical and management consulting firm that has spun out publishing company/creative network Intrepid Media and digital incubator ExitEvent (exitevent.com). As you might guess, Joe is obsessed with rockets after being kicked out of the Aerospace Engineering program for “night putting.” He can be reached at joe@intrepidcompany.com or twitter @jproco.

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Breaking down project management: It’s rocket science

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