Deep Fried Project Management On A Stick

We made our annual family trek to the Iowa State Fair today.  You non-Iowan Philistines may scoff all you like, but the event is listed as one of the 1000 Places to See Before You Die.  It really provides a good cross section of central Americana, and celebrates the agricultural roots that has populated Iowa with great down-to-earth people.

The core of the fair is the food.  You can virtually get anything deep fried and/or on a stick (yes, including "beer on a stick"... just don't ask). And, like many other fairs, there is a robust midway with every ride imaginable that will thrust your body in every direction imaginable.  Now, for the "fair neophyte," one possible scenario might be to try the peppermint-ice-cream-hot-fudge-oreo sandwich (a Bauder's favorite), a corn dog (of course, this is Iowa after all), deep fried cheese curds, deep-fried Twinkies, and the foot-long polish sausage... then go to the midway and ride the Twist-a-Tilt-a-Whirl-a-Drop-a-Spin.

Urp.

Maybe not.  (But my, you're turning a lovely shade of green.)

We adults know better - or should know better - than to put our bodies through a culinary train wreck and then go ride on something gravity defying.  Full stomachs and centripetal force do not mix well (or is it centrifugal force?  Just don't tell my high school physics teacher I'm having this internal conflict).  Yes, project managers do that all too often.  We'll spend weeks or months defining a robust work breakdown structure, and we're proud that we have inventoried every task for our project.  But when it comes to sequencing, we just seem to throw up our hands and say, "Whatever..."

There are three primary types of task dependencies, the most common being finish-to-start.  We all know that one.  Finish Task A before you start Task B.  Simple enough.  More advanced project managers will venture into start-to-start and finish-to-finish task dependencies, where things must converge either at the beginning or the end of a set of tasks.  Again, not rocket science, yet still complex enough to befuddle beginners to project planning.  There are other types of dependencies, but I won't bore you with them here.  Suffice it to say that these three are the most commonly used in projects (when dependencies are used at all).

The tricky part comes in when you consider whether your dependencies among tasks are hard, resolute, etched-in-stone, cannot budge sequencing... or whether there's some "soft-and-squishy give-and-take" (the technical project term for "gee, I just wanted to put one task in front of the other but there was little logic behind it").  This is the important part where you pull in the project stakeholders who helped you identify the tasks in the first place and ask them to help you also sequence those same tasks.  Make the sequencing logical.  Add in date constraints (only as necessary).  Play with the lag and lead times.  But make sure everyone is nodding his or her head that you've sequenced the tasks in the right order.  Otherwise, you eventually will be grabbing for the project-barf-bag on the midway of accomplishment.

Comments

[Kevin Brady]

Thought I would better make a comment because I am a bit of a foodie. I know my arteries would hate a trip to the Iowa State Fair but I have to say the menu sounds great. I have to say from expereince many Project Managers, even those who should know better, get task sequencing wrong and frequently miss important dependencies so that crtical path analysis is an imposssiblity.

However, when Project Managers do get all this stuff right and in the bag and start feeling proud about the depth and quality of their project plans, they find the resource plan and budgetary aspects of the project driven via Microsoft project don't make sense. A confused and worried look comes over these guys and excel spreadsheets are back in fashion blaming Bill Gates for spoiling their day. If this is you ! please get the term resource LEVELING into your head. An easy term to understand and a PIG to make work in practice. Hopefully future posts will discuss LEVELING and how it is important if you want to get the best out of Microsoft Project.

[Lucia Mancuso]

Wow - am I glad that I don't have to work with Microsoft project anymore. I really loved the pretty ghant charts I made and looking at an overview of the project - however - the maintenance on it was more then it was worth - I put my own systems in place - however my project scopes are much samller now and my technical skills much larger that I can create my own little systems that work for my company.

On the task front - Logic is key & common sense & all that good stuff.

As for the fair - my stomach is flipping just at the thought of a deep fried twinkie - but beer on a stick - now that sounds yum.

[Timothy Johnson]

Kevin - couldn't agree with you more, leveling is really the key that brings order out of chaos. And there are so many things that MS Project can do if you know all the little tricks (sorry, Lucia - talk to me sometime... I'll give you some pointers if you want to give MS Project another shot). I've seen MSP get such a bad rep from those who "tried it" and decided it didn't work, but whose attempts were nothing short of software abuse. Still like it better than anything else on the market.