Recently, it has hit me, just how poor our project management world is. The ability to clearly communicate and understand what is occurring on a project appears completely lost. Planners have absolutely amazing schedules (I do believe this), cost engineers have incredible detail about the cost build ups sliced and diced every which way, our document management systems are full with every manner of communication – BUT we are still left sitting in meetings where everyone is confused with various key information either not available, or buried inside someone own excel file, bounced off 100 emails threads, or a million other permutations.
Issue – Visibility into our Projects Sucks
Why has this happened? In my view, our leadership teams have failed at pushing good practices of project management. Leadership teams have transitioned from “manage the work” to “manage the people” (thank you Edin M for this quote).
Solution – Get Back to Basics
Project Management is task management (you can argue, but even all the new people management issues – are still tasks and can be managed in the same way).
We are building something – lets focus on the activities required to build (and engineer, and contract and procure). All the activities that exist in our Primavera schedules! We need these activities front in center and OWNED by project management. Honestly, how can we even have a management discussion and NOT have the schedule front and center. The schedule says what we should be working on, the schedule says when we should finish something, the schedule says what comes next!
I believe that schedules have been forgotten in project management because they are too unwieldy, to abstract, can only be run by P6 jockeys and not the project at large. We need to get our schedules into the hands of those that actually manage the scope.
In the past, our leadership were more in-tuned to schedules and this synergy was easier. However i fear in today’s world, our leadership have lost the tools and dealing with our schedules (no thanks to our reliance on antiquated tools like P6 that perpetuate the need for designated planning teams to operate the software in pure isolation to the real PM teams).
Issue – We need better Project Management tools.
Answer – They exist everywhere!
Commercially built, off the shelf project management software has risen to be one of the dominant fields of software development. The construction world needs to embrace the tools and get back to basics. It is odd in that 20 years ago, the leaders in project management was the construction world. However, when the technology world sprung up, they didn’t have the knowledge we did, so they built their own tools and approaches. I now believe the tide has turned to the point construction project management now severely trails the rest of the business world.
So How Does This Work?
First, the corporate strategy teams need to decide on a platform (hint – USE JIRA).
JIRA Quick Demo
Here is an example of a JIRA typical managemetn page using JIRA.
This is a short quick example of some substation work. I have populated JIRA with a few activities that might mirror what you currently manage inside your existing schedule. The difference here is that these activities are not updated by a planner, they are activity managed.
This process to push the ownership of schedule tasks to those that actually manage and deliver the scope is where immense value can be gained. Additionally, each activity allows for commentary and discussion. The ability to insert comments and discuss an activity or its relationships with other activities also brings teams together an allows for a focus on touch points to be activity managed.
OpenProject.org Example
However, really the choice of software isn’t that critical, its the work processes you are going to change – the new online PM tools are structurally all the same. What we are pushing is simply “clarity in what we are doing”. We are pushing the management oversight of what we do, into the hands of those that actually manage the scope. Don’t hide your schedule, don’t hide weekly and daily reports inside your document control system – embed everything into what is effectively a social media platform.
In this example, I am using OpenProject.org , however, keep in mind there are a lot of systems that all work similar.
Add activities
The starting point for me would be to add you P6 activities to your tool. This is the natural place to begin. You schedule already has a structure and usually a very good balance of level of detail.
In the above, I have added a typical task that will exist in our P6 schedules. Immediately off the bat, we can see we are operating in a distributed web based environment. We have a nice detailed description for this activity and we have the ability to assign this task to a person.
Up to this point, we are a little overlapped with P6. However, what is lacking in P6 is the ability to really discuss and communicate and UPDATE information associated with a task. The ability to pull the task into a proper project management discussion.
The above example says more than you can find in any weekly or monthly report. A picture tells a 1000 stories! The picture is also properly assigned to the activity it represents. The activity has a clearly visible Finish date than can be live edited 24/7.
Our new tools are not meant to replace P6. They are meant to force our discussions into properly structured slices of the project. They are meant to clearly communicate the status of activities. They are meant to get everyone onto the same playing fields when discussing something so that 5 different people do not end up with 10 different dates.
An activity only has 1 start and finish date, an activity only has one percent complete. It is maddening when a project manager asks me to insert the contractual dates into a report. Honestly, when you are building something, the contract date is useless in helping you decide “when will this finish”. It was only the starting point. When you get people out of their office view, in into “I need to manage this scope” you quickly understand that the contract date, or even contractors weekly reports are useless. You have to make a determination of when an activity will finish based on what you know at that time – and be proactive in actively editing the dates when required
Empower people to update activities!
This is So Simple?
I sit and look at this capability of something I built in 30 minutes on a Sunday morning and really wonder why our Project Management is leading us down what may not be avenues of real improvement to projects. Does our Project Leadership have the vision to accept such simple solutions to improve our communication?
Digital Transformation?
I have discussed this before, digital transformation is all about Keywords – not project management. Real digital transformation is about altering the way we work – not building a dashboard or a database. This is why digital transformation is not working. Provide tools and process to manage the work, enable your staff to manage their own scope, and clearly communicate and update their tasks.
Really think about how you manage your scope and how implementing a more social platform to break down the walls of communication. Understand how this is disruptive to our old ways of working (not updating schedules). Get people talking off just one play-sheet!
Twitter in Construction
I’d like to end this with what I thought was the most amazing application of this new management approach.
I kid you not. During construction, these guys posted nearly daily pictures and updates.
While working on this project from the home office, I got better updates from the project twitter site, then I did from the project manager. Yes, are you finally able to see that solutions exist, creative solutions exist, that can bring construction in the new digital world!
Project Controls blog 