Category: Project Management

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Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management

Agile Project ManagementHow do you adapt traditional project management into a rapidly changing environment? One that is characterised by shifting priorities and high uncertainty. Arguably, you don’t need to – project management has always had the tools for this. But, with the Agile Manifesto of 2001, software projects have a new paradigm. A modification of traditional approaches, called Agile Project Management.

And make no mistake… Agile has become a ‘Big Thing’. In fact, it bears some of the hallmarks of a fad, while also having a lot to offer an informed organisation with wise and pragmatic project leaders to call upon. But, as with all good ideas, it also attracts its converts and zealots.

Of course, here at Management Pocketbooks, we tend to eschew extreme and simplistic ‘right versus wrong’ arguments in management. We’re here to suck out the good stuff and brief you on what it is and how to benefit from it.

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Project Management

Project Management

Project ManagementWhen you want to create something big, new, and complex, how do you keep all your tasks, time, and resources under control? The answer is Project Management.

We’ll never have the documentary evidence to prove it, but my assertion is that the discipline of Project Management goes back thousands of years. But even today, practice is evolving. In a world that is changing faster than ever, Project Management is a profession and a toolset that is becoming ever more valuable.

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PRINCE2

PRINCE2
PRINCE2
PRINCE2

Project Management is an important skill, not just for professional project managers. Increasingly, managers of all sorts are called on to manage projects. And one big idea in project management is PRINCE2.

PRINCE2 was developed in the UK, for public sector projects. But there, some non-Governmental organisations have adopted it. Some have done so because they work with the public sector. Others because it offers a valuable framework for accountable projects.

The same reasons account for the uptake of PRINCE2 outside the UK. It is at its most popular in:

  • northern Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium) and
  • the English-speaking world (Australia, South Africa and the United States)

Continue reading PRINCE2

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The Black Swan Effect

The Black Swan Effect
The Black Swan Effect
The Black Swan Effect

Black Swan is a movie that follows the story of a ballerina in a New York ballet company. Her life is consumed with dance.

Oops. Wrong Black Swan.

The Black Swan is a book that sets out the nature and impact of rare, improbable events. The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, coined the metaphor of Black Swan to describe them.

Continue reading The Black Swan Effect

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Kanban

Kanban
Kanban
Kanban

Toyota is a powerhouse for developing ideas that you’ll find around the world. Take for example, Lean, Kaizen, Seven Wastes, Just in Time, Jidoka, Six Sigma and, indirectly, Scrum. And one more: I give you Kanban.

Pronounce Kanban as kaahnbaahn with long aah sounds. It started out as part of Toyota’s ‘Just in Time’ lean production system. The word refers to cards that visibly represented the flow of parts through the manufacturing process.

Now, we use Kanban tracking project work. It has risen in popularity over recent years with the rise of Agile project management. It is one of the more popular Agile methodologies. And it’s also often combined with the most popular approach: Scrum.

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Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikujiro Nonaka: Scrum Development

Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka have featured in an earlier Pocketblog, which was focused on Nonaka and the work  he led on how knowledge can transform organisations.

Arguably, it is how Nonaka and Takeuchi took some of their thinking forward that has led to a far bigger transformation. In 1985, they co-wrote an article for the January 1986 edition of Harvard Business Review. Called ‘The New New Product Development Game’, this article was instrumental in revolutionising the discipline of Project Management.

Takeuchi and Nonaka gave us a new way of thinking about how to develop products and deliver projects. And they coined an evocative sporting metaphor for their process, which has stuck: Scrum.

Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikujiro Nonaka
Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikujiro Nonaka

Ikujiro Nonaka

Born in 1935, Ikujiro Nonaka gained a BS in political science at Waseda University, then started work at Fuji Electric, where he created their management programme. Nonaka left Fuji in 1967, to study at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded his MBA in 1968, and his PhD in Business Administration, in 1972. He took posts at US universities, before returning to Japan, as a professor at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University.

Hirotaka Takeushi

Born in 1946, Hirotaka Takeuchi got his BA from the International Christian University, Tokyo. After a short spell working at McCann-Erickson, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he got his MBA in 1971, and his PhD in 1977. During his time at Berkeley, he also worked summers for McKinsey & Company in Tokyo and, more important, met Nonaka.

Takeushi took a lectureship at Harvard in 1976 until 1983, when he joined Hitotsubashi University School of Commerce, where he became a full professor and Dean of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy. He stayed until 2010, when he returned to Harvard, as Professor of Management Practice, where he is now.

The New New Product Development Game.

In January 1986, Harvard Business Review published ‘The New New Product Development Game‘ by Takeuchi and Nonaka. This was about a new way to do New Product Development, or NPD. They drew on the idea of ‘ba’ – a Japanese coinage of Nonaka’s, meaning a meeting place for minds and the energy that draws out knowledge and creates new ideas.

They also took a look at the Toyota idea of teams coming together to solve problems. They introduced a sporting metaphor from the game of Rugby; that of the scrum. They used scrum to denote the way teams work together intensively when the ball goes out of play. In a work environment that demands creativity and innovative problem solving, this is just what is needed.

They followed this article up with a 1995 book, ‘The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation‘. This looks at the way Japan became a major economic power, especially in the automotive and electronics industries. they argue that Japanese firms are successful because they create new knowledge to produce successful products and technologies.

Scrum Teams

The model they created for Scrum Teams is of a cross functional group that can work autonomously to resolve its own problems. Their organisation is ’emergent’ meaning there is no assigned leadership or structure; it just emerges from the effective collaboration of its members.

To work best, a Scrum Team needs to be co-located, and work together full-time. This allows a high level of cross-fertilisation of ideas, and a dedication to working on their shared problems, tasks, and initiatives.

Scrum as an Agile Project Management Methodology

Agile project management seeks to avoid the all-or-nothing approach to projects that used to characterise traditional approaches – especially when done in a way that slavishly follows a set of ‘rules’. Although good project managers have always incorporated a lot of plan-do-review (the Deming Cycle), the growth of software development projects demanded an increase focus on agility and incrementalism.

This was the basis of the Agile movement and today the single most widely used Agile methodology takes its name and guiding principles from Takeuchi and Nonaka’s metaphor: Scrum.

In Scrum projects, a Product Owner is responsible for detailing the business requirements and ensuring that the business gets a good return on its product development investment (RoI). The Scrum Team, led by a Scrum Master, selects one subset of functionality from a product backlog of undeveloped functions, divides it into tasks, and works intensively on developing the outputs for a fixed time, known as a Sprint, which is usually 30 days.

Each day, the team gets together for a daily Scrum Meeting to share learning, report progress, discuss challenges, and solve problems. At the end of the sprint, the team should produce a working product that is stable and useful. After a reflection and learning process, the team then works with the product owner to define the subset of functionality it will work on in the next sprint.

The team continues like this until the Product Owner concludes that the next sprint would not create enough additional value to justify the incremental cost.

The Scrum Project Management Lifecycle
The Scrum Project Management Lifecycle

 

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Karol Adamiecki: Management Harmony

We tend to think of leading management theorists as coming from the United States. This seems especially so of Scientific Management. But when the privilege of naming things for the world’s largest audience goes to those who write in English, history creates a bias. And because that audience largely reads only one language, that bias gets amplified.

One of many losers from the Anglo-centric nature of management and business thinking was Karol Adamiecki. He was a Polish engineer, turned economist and management thinker, who can claim to have invented the Gantt Chart before Henry Gantt, PERT before the US Navy, the Theory of Constraints before Eliyahu Goldratt, and much of Scientific Management before FW Taylor.

Karol Adamiecki 1866-1933
Karol Adamiecki 1866-1933

Short Biography

Karol Adamiecki was born in southern Poland, in 1866. He studied engineering at the Institute of Technology in St Petersburg, graduating in 1891. He then returned to his home town, where he took charge of a steel mill. He stayed for nearly 30 years, during which time, he formed his ideas about management.

In 1919, he left the mill, and became a lecturer at the Warsaw Polytechnic, becoming a professor in 1922. There, he further codified and published his ideas. In 1925, he founded the Institute of Scientific Management in Warsaw, becoming its Director and remaining until his death in 1933.

Adamiecki’s  Law of Harmony in Management

While running the steel rolling mill, Karol Adamiecki developed sophisticated thinking around management that was, from our perspective, ahead of its time. The three principal components were:

  1. Harmony of Choice
    Management should select and supply production tools that are mutually compatible. He went on to argue that this should be especially so in terms of their output production speed. This anticipated the Theory of Constraints, and the ideas of Eliyahu Goldratt by 75 years or more.
  2. Harmony of Doing
    Sequencing and scheduling of activities need to be fully co-ordinated to optimise production efficiency. Here, he not only developed a tool that looks very similar to the Gantt Chart, well before Gantt published. His approach also anticipated the US Navy’s Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and du Pont’s Critical Path Method (CPM) by over 50 years.
  3. Harmony of Spirit
    I imagine the Pharaohs’ overseers were constantly emphasising the importance of creating a good team. But this is another theme that feels very modern – perhaps even more so than the other two. Let’s not forget that Taylor’s view of Scientific Management was mechanistic and process-oriented. It took Mayo to bring humanism to the fore, and ideas of team working in management only started to dominate from the 1970s.

Adamiecki started to publish in 1898, several years before Taylor did so.

Harmony of Doing:
The Harmonograph or Harmonogram (or Harmonograf)

In 1896, Adamiecki solved the problem of sequencing and scheduling in production and published, in1903, his solution. He called it a Harmonograf. And it looks very much like what we now call a Gantt Chart. However, Henry Gantt did not publish until 1910. There is no evidence to suggest Gantt copied Adamiecki’s idea.

In constructing the Harmonograf, however, Adamiecki describes a process that is pretty similar to the PERT and CPM methods. He certainly is able to include critical path and float. These are two concepts Gantt did not consider at all.

As Adamiecki described his methods, he was able to optimise production schedules by sliding paper tabs and arranging paper strips. In a very real sense, he developed an analog scheduling computer.

Assessment

Without a doubt, Adamiecki’s thinking was of its time, but way ahead of its rediscovery. He possibly failed to realise just how valuable it was. But more likely, he simply suffered from an Anglophone bias in scholarship and manufacturing. Publishing in Polish simply did not get him recognition far beyond the borders of his home country. Even now, it is only in the Karol Adamiecki University of Economics in Katowice, that his name is celebrated.

And I have to ask, could this happen again? Yes. I think it can, will and probably is happening now. Last week, we met Vlatka Hlupic. Arguably, her work is known despite her Croatian origin, because she lives and works in London. With the US and the UK increasingly looking to close their borders for differing but related reasons, the next Karol Adamiecki’s work could well lay undiscovered for just as long as that of the first.

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Eddie Obeng: All Change!

Possibly the first business book I read as a new publication was an innovative take on project management. The book had a charismatic style, much like that of its author. Its title is emblematic of the focus of Eddie Obeng’s career.

Eddie Obeng

Short Biography

Eddie Obeng was born in Ghana in 1959, and grew up in Britain, attending a boarding school in Surrey. He  earned a BSc in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at University College London in 1980, and stayed on to take a PhD in Biochemical Engineering.

From there, he went to work as a scientist at Shell from 1983-5 and then to March as a consultant. During his time there, he took an MBA at the Cass Business School. This allowed him to move to the Ashridge Business School in 1987, first as an Assistant Director of Studies, and then, from 1990, as an Executive Director.

In 1994, he left to found Pentacle, an independent business school, which he still runs actively. He is also a visiting professor at Henley Business School and was awarded the prestigious Sir Monty Finniston Award by the Association for Project Management, in 2011, for his contributions to the study and practice of project management.

Obeng is the author of many books, most of which are self-published or out of print. However, All Change!: The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (1995) is still available and I highly recommend it

Obeng’s Ideas

At the core of Obeng’s thinking is change. He has articulated this simply, by comparing the ‘old world’ with the ‘new world’.

Old World
We learn faster than our environment changes, so our learning equips us well, to cope. Stores of knowledge and experience are applicable and the learned thrive. We can build stores of best practice and we can afford long cycle times in developing new products and services.

New World
Our environment changes faster than we can learn, so our knowledge and experience are always out of date. Constant learning and adaptation is our only way of maintaining success. We need to find ways to develop and test new ideas rapidly and be prepared to honour ‘smart failure’.

Does this remind you of the Growth Mindset ideas of Carol Dweck? It does me.

Consequently, Obeng’s teaching is based around five disciplines we need if we are to succeed in the New World:

  1. Inventing the Future – Innovation
  2. Delivering the Future – project management
  3. Delivering Today – operational management
  4. Leading Organised Talent – leadership and team management
  5. Ensuring Results – sustaining change

All of this tracks back well to the central idea that attracted me to Obeng’s writing in the mid-1990s: that there are different sorts of change, which require different styles of leadership and different balances of capabilities and styles among team members.

These he describes as:

Going on a Quest

Goals and objectives of the change are clear, but you’ll need to figure out how to achieve them. You will need to think carefully about your resources, lead with confidence and commitment, and sell the benefits effectively. You need to stack your team with problem solvers and sleeves-rolled-up doers.

Walking in a Fog

Neither where you are likely to end up, nor the route you will take are clear. You need to move forward carefully and deliberately, one step at a time. You’ll also need to constantly reassure team members with praise for their contributions. You’ll need plenty of problem solvers and also caring people who can create strong team cohesion in the face of uncertainty.

Making a Movie

You understand the processes of change, but are open to discovering where the changes will take you. Consequently, professionalism and expertise are your your tools to ensure that the outcome will be right for your organisation. You need plenty of experts around you, who can follow processes correctly and innovate when needed.

Painting by Numbers

The clearest form of change is where the end result is evident and the means to get there are familiar. Excellence will come from precision and accuracy so it is vital to avoid the threat of complacency. As well as knowledge and skill, your team needs people who can monitor, review, and evaluate well.

This framework is now familiar to many project managers. We often learn project management as if every project is like Painting by Numbers, but it isn’t. My experience was very much with Going on a Quest projects, for example. The rise in Agile Project Management, from the mid-1990s is very much a response to this dynamic – particularly to Making a Movie and Walking in a Fog type projects.

Obeng’s charismatic style is not to everyone’s taste (see the video below), but his ideas are often stimulating and easy to grasp. At their best, they are also valuable aids to thinking about the world of work in the twenty first century.

Eddie Obeng at TED: Smart failure for a fast-changing world

[ted id=1580]

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Henry Gantt: The Gantt Chart

Who invented the Gantt Chart? This is a question I ask in many of my project management seminars, and the commonest answer/guess is ‘Mr Gantt’. Why does nobody suggest Mrs Gantt? In fact, neither answer is properly correct. But nonetheless, the Gantt Chart is Henry Gantt’s enduring legacy. But there was more to him as a manager and thinker than that.

Henry Gantt

Short Biography

Henry Laurence Gantt was born in the southern US state of Maryland in 1861; the year the Civil War started. As one of my reference books puts it, the war ‘brought about changes to the family fortunes’. His parents were slave owners.

Gantt graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1880 and, after a few years of teaching, qualified as a Mechanical Engineer in 1984, with a master’s degree from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

After three years working as a draughtsman in Baltimore, he joined the Midvale Steel Works in 1887. This is where FW Taylor was Chief Engineer, and Taylor was to become a mentor and important intellectual influence on Gantt. The two worked well together, and Gantt followed Taylor first to Simmonds Rolling Company and then to Bethlehem Steel.

They went their separate ways in 1900, and in 1901, Taylor endorsed Gantt as the best person to have as a consultant for implementing their shared principles of scientific management. This led to a successful career for Gantt; working with many large corporations. From this point on, though, Gantt was clearly thinking for himself and diverging from some of Taylor’s more extreme ‘scientific principles’.

It was in 1917 that Gantt ‘invented’ the now famous Gantt Chart, as a way to speed the construction of naval vessels during World War 1.

Gantt wrote two books – both out of print – and there is also a set of lecture notes available. Beware print-on-demand reproductions – some get poor reviews. His 1911 book, ‘Work, Wages and Profits’, focused on incentivising workers and marked a shift from Taylor’s penal approach to piece rates. In 1919 – the year of his death – he published ‘Organising for Work’. This marked an early contribution to the field we would now refer to a Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR).

Gantt’s Ideas

We can summarise Gantt’s management thinking under three headings: incentivisation, task management, and corporate responsibility.

Workers’ Incentives

Taylor’s approach to incentivising workers was the piece rate system – getting paid only for the work you do. Gantt moved away from this idea, noting that motivation works best when you reward good work, rather than punishing poor work. So Gantt’s approach was to offer a base wage, with bonuses to workers who performed beyond a certain level. This meant that workers in the learning stages of their roles could earn a decent wage and led to a doubling of production levels.

He went on to provide additional incentives, most notably to foremen. This would recognise the collective efficiency of a work team and provided encouragement for on-the-job training. Gantt had clearly departed a long way from Taylor’s thinking, in the direction of humanistic management, when he wrote in ‘Work, Wages and Profits’:

‘the general policy of the past has been to drive; but the era of force must give way to that of knowledge, and the policy of the future will be to teach and lead, to the advantage of all concerned.’

Gantt was a close contemporary of Mary Parker Follett, with whose thinking this aligns, but I can find no reference suggesting that they knew one another. He was, however, a good friend of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.

Corporate Responsibility

In ‘Organising for Work’, Gantt set out an agenda for corporate responsibility to society. He argued that the cold ‘buy low: sell high’ approach to business would not meet the challenges of business leadership in the twentieth century. He placed far more emphasis on the role of executives in motivation and efficiency that did Taylor – who saw workers largely as automata.

As he distanced himself from Taylor, he held that businesses have a duty to serve their communities, using the phrase ‘social responsibility’.

Task Management

There is no doubt, however, that Gantt is best remembered (only remembered?) for the Gantt Chart. This is a representation of tasks as bars on a chart that plots a list of tasks down the left hand side and sets a time line from left to right. Each task is shown as a bar. The length of the bar represents the duration of the task, and the placing represents its scheduling. Shading of the bar can represent levels of completion.

This was one of many different charts that Gantt developed, to help make work easier to plan and manage. This was him at his most ‘scientific’.  In his early career, he said that scientific analysis is the only route to industrial effectiveness.

So, did Henry Gantt invent the Gantt Chart?

We will never know if he was aware or not (I suspect not) but the same chart had indeed been ‘invented’ in 1896 by Karol Adamiecki. Adamiecki was a Polish economist and engineer, whose misfortune, if you like, was to publish in Polish and Russian. So, his writings received little attention outside of those countries and we now have the Gantt Chart, rather than the Harmonograph (Adamiecki’s favoured name) or the Adamiecki Chart. It is not clear to me when Adamiecki’s work was available – references I can find suggest he only published in 1931.

Who cares?

Apart from pride of authorship (among two long dead men) or nationalistic pride (between Poland and the US), there is little value in worrying who invented it. I’d be prepared to bet that if we had marks in the sand preserved from the ancient builders of Egypt, Sumer, Meso-America, Cambodia… somewhere we’d find a bar chart scratched out hundreds or thousands of years ago. What matters is the phenomenally wide usage this chart has.

The Gantt Chart is seen as a cornerstone of modern project management, yet it is hard to imagine the impact it had in the 1920s and 1930s, on US industry and Soviet Union central planning. And it has barely changed in the last 100 years. The only real difference is the technology we use to produce the charts and the consequent ease we have in using them to drive calculations.

For this, Henry Gantt does deserve to be remembered. So to, though, does Karel Adamiecki.

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A Bigger Bite

What is management without vision and inspiration?

The sad news about Steve Jobs’ untimely death has spurred more blogs than anyone has the time to read, so a shorter than usual pocketblog and a simple observation.

A bigger bite out of Apple

Making the complex seem easy and the sophisticated, a doddle to use: this is more than talent, or skill: it’s art.

Last week, for the first time in my life, I heard a major news story first, not on the radio, not on the TV, not in the press, nor even from a colleague, friend, or acquaintance.  I heard it on Twitter.

… on an iPad.

The world is a better place for everyone who is bringing us new technology and more effective communication.  Yes there are compromises and a price to pay, but who would trade it?  Very few.

Steve Jobs brought us the Mac, Pixar, the iPod, iTunes and more.  But here’s the big one for me: without him, we may still think of a mouse only as a small mammal.  Without Steve Jobs, what would the move to touch screen mean?

This image is the landing page of the Apple website, as I write this blog. (c) Apple 2011

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