"Helping You Accelerate Your High-Tech Development Projects"

Welcome to the ANGOTTI PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT e-mail newsletter!

The goal of this newsletter is to help you accelerate your development projects by sharing some of the many tips, techniques and strategies we’ve honed during our two decades of providing high-tech consulting services.

This issue is part one, of two, issues that discuss the need for methods to keep track of Project Progress by measuring the project plan against what is actually happening as the plan unfolds. This is one of the most tricky, and often underused part of the Project Manager’s tools.

THE STATE OF NPD PROJECT VISIBILITY

If ever there was a “Emperor’s New Clothes” phenomenon in New Product Development (NPD) Project Management it is the lack of the use of viable measurements to show project status in meaningful ways to both the team and upper management. We have seen this effect many times, as have many of our associates. Project status often turns out to be obscured in the presentation of actual scope, cost and schedule compared to the original plan during the often long implementation phase. This often leads to poor management and team decisions plus anger and frustration all around.

THE CAT AND MOUSE GAME

The upper management and the project team seem to play a “cat and mouse” game with each other when the major project variables are set and reviewed. At the beginning of the project, management sometimes doesn’t even allow the team to provide any input into the schedule or cost for a project. Or, if the team creates a plan for schedule and cost, then management sometimes ignores these estimates when setting project goals. Upper managers frequently have the tendency to require shorter schedules and lower costs than the team believes are possible, while the project team tends to overestimate these variables.

In addition, the management often has a hidden “fudge” factor for cost and schedule. They then require the team to meet a short (compared to the “fudge adjusted”), “very tight”, schedule, that the team knows full well is impractical. They both know the schedule will slip, but the desire for management is to get the most work out in the shortest time, and, at what they believe to be the lowest cost. This causes the team to react by “hiding” the actual progress from critical review. After all, who wants to constantly report “bad news”. Management then tries to get the “real” status, but it frequently seems elusive. Meanwhile, the Cat and Mouse game is underway. This approach could actually result in higher costs and longer schedules than those originally estimated by the team.

A NATURAL TENSION

There is a natural tension between the goals of both of management and the team. It would be ineffective for management to blindly accept the estimates of the team, and it is just as ineffective for the management to set the schedule and associated costs by fiat.

NEW PRODUCT PROJECTS HAVE LOTS OF RISKS

The real problem is that NPD projects have lots of risks associated with them, and to expect a project to be accurately predicted at the project beginning almost borders a belief in “Magic”. On the other hand, we believe that much more can be done to set project measurements, both direct and indirect to improve the management of projects.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Project Managers and management need to work together to stop the “Cat and Mouse” cycle. This requires the acceptance of the risks involved, and respect for each others’ position in the overall development function. This means creating an environment of working together with management as part of the team, not adversarial to it. We believe the best information should be presented to all of the parties, regardless of the fact that rigid goals are not being met. In our opinion, the best decisions are made when the best information is available.

In addition, effective, high quality, measurements need to be presented to both the management and the team, so they can focus on getting the project completed in scope, and with minimal budget and time used.

BEYOND MS PROJECT BASICS

Many project managers consider it sufficient to just “update” the schedule during implementation. This is used to show status via a new schedule, but the original, or baseline, schedule is not presented alongside. If this were done, it would show an almost constant schedule slip.

Measurements must move well beyond just using basic Microsoft Project Gantt charts and a Spreadsheet of project milestones, due dates, actual dates and percentage complete. These are helpful, but often not adequate for tracking real NPD projects effectively.

USE EARNED VALUE TO TRACK PROJECT PROGRESS

One straightforward method to track projects is to use the MS Project built in “Earned Value” feature. This can produce a data table that can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet. The data in the spreadsheet can then used to produce a plot of estimated versus actual accumulated project progress.

This feature is rarely used, but it can be very effective, since it is very visual. One could even use some fancy math in Excel to improve the ability to do a much more valid estimate to complete.

What it does is to allow the Project Manager to show the accumulated resource cost “earned” by the completion of tasks, as the project progresses. This is plotted along side what was originally estimated. As each task completes, it “earns” its value as the percentage completion increases to one hundred percent. Hence, both expended resources and completion are shown together. Such an approach produces the famous “S” curve of completion for a project, but in this case, the curve is weighted by the value of the resources used. This method shows progress in a way that no milestone chart or Gantt chart could ever do. It provides a “dead reckoning” look at where the project is, compared to where it was estimated to be.

In the next newsletter, we will discuss in more detail this method, and the Quasi-Critical Chain method to track projects. Some of the practical tips to make them work will also be discussed.

OTHER HELPFUL INDIRECT GRAPHS

To make projects still more visibly effective, a few other indirect charts are needed. If this isn’t done, it might be possible to “sub-optimize” the project by over focusing on the primary variables. Such graphs create a number of measures that report underlying problems that might not otherwise be detected. These could include measures such as:

  1. A plot of estimated versus actual accumulated project cost over time.
  2. A plot of Open, and Closed Action Items or “Bugs” versus time. This plot would have the Action Items weighted by priority, to give more emphasis to more critical items.
  3. The Risk Management List of Risks and Mitigations, with the number of Risks and Number of Mitigated Risks being plotted together over time. Again, the risks would be weighted by their impact as they are plotted. This would emphasize the status of the more impactful risks.
  4. Other Plots tuned to the special needs of individual projects.

A DRAMATIC IMPROVEMENT IN VISIBILITY

The approaches described here require somewhat more work than just producing a Gantt chart and milestone list, but the results can be astonishing. The combination of the graphical plots shows intuitively how the overall project is doing. It is then possible to see trends and estimate future milestones much more accurately.

QUESTIONS

The preceding description of tracking tools is a very short presentation of how these methods might work on a real project. If you want to have a more in depth understanding of the approaches presented, please give us a call at (408) 462-2189, and we will be happy to speak with you.