The Art of Project Management - Chapter Three

Having recently read Sun Tzu's 'Art of War' I saw many similarities between war and managing projects. Call the enemies risk and chaos and most of the 2,500 year old advice applies quite well. So I am going to dedicate a few posts to what I humbly call: 'The Art of Project Management.' I give Sun Tzu full credit for his observations. I simply paraphrase him to shift the advice to my field.

Chapter Three

Risk Management

1. Sun Tzu said: The good Project Managers of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, then waited for an opportunity of defeating the project risks.
2. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating risks is provided by the risks themselves.
3. Thus the good Project Manager is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the risks.
4. Hence the saying: One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.
5. Security against defeat implies risk management; ability to defeat risks means Planning Risk Responses.
6. Risk Avoidance indicates insufficient strength; Risk Acceptance, a superabundance of strength.
7. The Project Manager who is skilled in Risk Avoidance hides in teh most secret recesses of the earth; he who is skilled in Risk Acceptance flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven. Thus on the one hand we have the ability to protect ourselves; on the other, a victory that is complete.
8. To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence.
9. Neither is it the acme of excellence if you execute and succeed and the whole organization says "Well done!"
10. To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a sharp ear.
11. What the ancients called a clever Project Manager is one who not only succeeds but excels in succeeding with ease.
12. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage.
13. He succeeds in his projects by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory; for it means conquering risks that have already been mitigated.
14. Hence the skillful Project Manager puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating his risks.
15. Thus it is in Project Management that the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
16. The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success.
17. In respect of Risk Management, we have, firstly, Plan Risk Management; secondly, Identify Risks; thirdly, Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis; fourthly, Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis; fifthly, Plan Risk Responses; sixthly, Monitor and Control Risks; seventhly, Success.
18. Plan Risk Management owes its existence to the organization; Identify Risks to Plan Risk Management; Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis to Identify Risks; Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis to Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis; Plan Risk Responses to Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis; Monitor and Control Risks to Plan Risk Responses; Success to Monitor and Control Risks.
19. A successful project opposed to a failed one, is a pound's weight placed in the scale against a single grain.
20. The onrush of a well-planned project is like the bursting of pent-up waters into a chasm a thousand fathoms deep.

Dear PM Advisor. Oct 28, 2013

Dear PM Advisor,

My company has been unstable lately and my team members are leaving for more secure opportunities. What do I do with the schedule now that fewer and fewer people are working on the same amount of activities?

Sinking Ship in Washington, D.C

Dear Sinking Ship,

I'm hoping you resource-loaded your Project Schedule to show the effort required for each activity. That way you can show how many hours of effort are required. Remember, the hours don't leave with the vanishing team member.

You can then reassign those hours to the remaining team members and level the work to reflect that they only work 8 - 10 hours a day.

This inevitably results in lengthening the duration of the activities and the end date of your project. If anyone argues about your lengthening schedule, show them the facts that indicate why this was necessary.

If you weren't proactive enough to load your project correctly before, sit down with your existing team and plan out the number of hours of effort on the remaining activities and schedule them according to the availability of these resources. Now you just have to tell management: "I had thirteen team members, I'm down to ten, here's the effect on my schedule. If I lose any more, it will increase in duration, if you give me additional resources, I can reduce the schedule. The two go hand in hand."

Good luck,

PM Advisor.

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTable PM.com

PMBOK 5th edition exam aid

Back in 2011 I posted some aids to help you study for the PMP exam. But the cheat sheet I asked you to memorize and recreate once you get into the exam room has been significantly obsoleted by the fifth edition of the PMBOK.

So I've created a new one for you. You need to print out page one on legal size paper. A3 should work for Europeans.

Get access to a word version of it by clicking on this link:

The Art of Project Management - Chapter Two

Having recently read Sun Tzu's 'Art of War' I saw many similarities between war and managing projects. Call the enemies risk and chaos and most of the 2,500 year old advice applies quite well. So I am going to dedicate a few posts to what I humbly call: 'The Art of Project Management.' I give Sun Tzu full credit for his observations. I simply paraphrase him to shift the advice to my field.

Chapter Two

Executing

1. Sun Tzu said: In the execution of a project, where there are in the field ten extended team leaders, as many technical experts and a hundred team members, with supplies to run the project for one year, the expenditure at home and in the field, including the entertaining of customers, small items such as paper and shipping, and sums spent on travel and housing, will reach the total of $30 million.
2. When you engage in project execution, if success is delayed in coming, the team member's skills grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay a protracted siege to an obstacle, you will exhaust your strength.
3. Again, if the execution is delayed, the resources of the company will not be equal to the strain.
4. Now, when your skills are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other companies will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.
5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid waste in moving to execution too fast, cleverness has never been associated with long delays.
6. There is no instance of a company having benefited from a long delayed project.
7. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the complexities of project executions that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.
8. The skillful Project Manager does not ask to increase the budget, neither are the same parts ordered twice from his vendors.
16. Now in order to work long hours when required, the team must be roused to excitement; that there may be advantage from completing the project, they must have their rewards.
17. Therefore in weekend and late night work, those should be rewarded who volunteered first.
20. Thus it may be known that the Project Manager is the arbiter of people's fate, the man on whom it depends whether the company shall succeed or fail. 

Dear PM Advisor. Oct 21, 2013

Dear PM Advisor,

My project was just cancelled even though I was ahead of schedule and under budget. My management says it's not my fault and they cancelled it for business reasons. But I still feel like a loser and find myself having to justify the project cancellation to my friends and co-workers. Any words of consolation?

Failure in Washington, D.C.

Dear Failure,

When I audit companies for adherence to Good Project Management Practices, I take the cancellation of the occasional project as a sign of good health. Bad ideas that are pushed through to completion just because we've already spent a lot of money and time on them is a sign of bad health.

Project are cancelled for any number of reasons, not all to do with the performance of the team. Your project might have been cancelled because your competitor came out with a product that made your project obsolete. Or there may have been two competing projects in your organization and the other one looked more promising at this point. Or there may not be enough resources to staff all the projects and there was another project added to the list that has a better payback than yours.

Often it is the job of a Project Manager to recommend the cancellation of their own project. Perhaps a technical obstacle proves to be too expensive to resolve.

None of these reasons are any reflection on the skill of the Project Manager. You did the best job you could shepherding the project to this point and you will be rewarded (punished) with annother challenging project.

Chin up!

PM Advisor.

Send your questions to Bruce@RoundTablePM.com

Sevety-first excerpt from 'Twelve Towers'

          Two weeks later, when the crew had departed and the family was getting ready for supper, Gwilym went to his scroll case and pressed something on the inside, releasing a flap on the bottom. Gwilym turned the box on its side so that the flap was facing up. The boys gathered around. The secret compartment was filled with a lustrous, black cloth. Gwilym removed the cloth and unwrapped the object covered by it. Inside was a long scimitar. The handle was gold coated and inscribed with Arabic script. The blade was curved silver with lettering running along the center.

       “Wow!” breathed Jac.

       “Can I touch it?” asked Llawen.

       Gwilym lifted it by the hilt and, moving outside the circle of boys, swung it around a few times to test the weight. His muscle memory returned and he practiced a few strokes. Then he returned it to the cloth.

       “This is a dangerous weapon, boys. The blade is sharp. It will take a man’s head off with a single stroke.”

       Jac reached out and touched the concave edge of the blade. Gwilym was prepared to stop him if he got too close to the sharp edge but withheld his hand when he saw the target of the boy’s touch. “It’s not sharp at all, Da.”

       “This isn’t a sickle, son. The sharp edge is the other side and I’ll ask you to keep your fingers far from there.”

       Bleddyn looked curious. “But why is that the sharp edge, Da? Wouldn’t it just slip off a man if you were trying to cut him? It would be better if you sharpened the other side so it worked like a sickle. Or made it straight like a sword and had both sides sharp.”

       Gwilym wrapped the scimitar back up and placed it back in the box. “I’ll show you why at supper, son.”

       Later, as they ate at the tavern, Gwilym took a piece of meat from the stew and placed it on the board resting between their knees. “Bleddyn. How would you cut this meat?”

       Bleddyn held the meat with his fingers and sliced through it with his knife. He looked up at his dad.

       “Now cut at it as if your knife was a sword and that was the neck of your enemy.” Bleddyn looked confused. Gwilym picked up his knife and swung it in arcs at the piece of meat, pushing straight down each time with the sharp edge, rather than slicing. Bleddyn and his brothers all swung their knives at the meat, damaging it but not cutting straight through it. Often it stuck to the knife and had to be knocked back off.

       “Do you see now why the scimitar is shaped that way? When you swing it at your foe, and it hits him, the continuation of your swing will pull the weapon along the wound, slicing it rather than trying to dig straight into the body. That’s the advantage of the scimitar. And it never,” he held Llawen’s wrist with his knife stuck in the piece of meat, “sticks in the body of your opponent. That leaves you helpless to a counterattack.”

       “If the sharp edge were on the inside curve, like a sickle, it would be even worse. The blade would never slice, and you would always stick to the wound.”

       Bleddyn asked, “But your scimitar has only one sharp edge. So you can’t strike both ways. Isn’t that a disadvantage?”

       “Aye, somewhat. But you learn different moves and use your wrists and elbows more than a British swordsman does. I’ll show you after we eat.”

       He took his boys out to the beach. The moon was full. The night was clear, though cold. The boys were bundled in clothes and blankets, but Gwilym was wearing little. He directed them to stay behind a line he scraped in the sand with his heel. He held the scimitar, and then started making moves with his feet, hips, and arms. He seemed to be tracing slow, deliberate dance steps, each one ending with a swing or two from his scimitar. His moves became more and more complex, until he seemed to be swinging at four imaginary opponents surrounding him.

       He took a deep breath then erupted into a whirl of legs and arms. After about twenty seconds of this, Bleddyn could make out the patterns his father was making to be the patterns he was doing earlier, but now at a speed that seemed ten times as fast.

       Gwilym stopped and raised his scimitar over his head, stretching his chest and rasping air into his lungs. His chest was heaving and his boys saw the muscles on his arms and legs twitching on their own. After about five minutes Gwilym’s breathing returned to normal. He went through the set of rapid motions two more times, stopping for breath each time.

       Then, covered in sweat, he handed his scimitar to Bleddyn, took his younger boys’ hands in his and walked back to the village. The boys were full of questions and they talked over each other, not waiting for the answers.

       “Where did you get the scimitar?”

       “Were you ever in a war?”

       “How did you learn those moves?”

       “Have you ever killed anyone?”

       “Did you take the scimitar from a fallen enemy?”

       When the questioning stopped and the boys paused to get answers, Gwilym sat down on one of the dunes and gathered his boys around him. “Boys, I want you to listen to me. War is a horrible thing. Killing a man takes something from you. The only thing worse than killing a man, is seeing that man kill your friends. There is nothing honorable about a battle. While a war may have honorable intentions, like protecting your family from invaders, battles are a terrible thing to behold. With arrows and rocks raining down on you it is a random mess. Your friends are killed right next to you and you don’t know who did it.”

       “Then one of the enemies comes close. At first you hate him because he killed your friend. But he wasn’t the one. And you see his face and he is human, just like you. And he’s scared. But then he tries to kill you, and you realize that you can’t act human. It’s kill or be killed and keep doing that until you win the field or run from the field or die or get injured and dragged from the field or be left there moaning in agony until someone comes to rescue you or finish you off. There’s no humanity on the field of battle.”

       “I was in the Holy Land during times of war. I was pulled into the army and taught the ways of war. I was given weapons and armor and joined in battles. I was on the winning side and the losing side. I was injured. I killed men. I saw many good friends die or become horribly wounded. I took this scimitar off an enemy chieftain that I had just killed. His scimitar was better than mine and I needed it. Mine had a big nick in it from his spine as I beheaded him. I was soaked in his blood and had to wipe my eyes clear of it to find his weapon. I needed it to protect me from his men. It is made of better iron and showed no damage as I killed three more men with it. We won the field that day and gathered much loot. But I also lost my best friend in that battle, and I gave all but the scimitar to his widow.”

       “I will be practicing with this scimitar because I fear that Palomides will come again and I need to be ready for him. I’ll tell you no more about war until you are about to enter one so please don’t ask me any more questions. Can you abide by that?”

       The boys all nodded and they walked together back to their lodgings. Every night, after supper, Gwilym practiced with his scimitar. Before long he had attracted the notice of the villagers and many started to line the dunes to watch his performance.

To read the entire first draft in one shot, click here:

New Solar Battery Method

 As Solar Power becomes more prevalent, there is a push to store this energy for night-time use. I've posted before about storing wind energy in people's water heaters and electric cars. Here is a new method that stores heat in salt which melts until it is needed again. The system is small now but can be expanded. Currently the Arizona utility buys all the energy produced by this method.