There are many aspects of project management that are important and worthy of comment.\u00a0 In this post I will present my thoughts on the value of having a system perspective in managing projects and some tools and techniques that can be helpful.\u00a0 Keeping the big picture system perspective is harder than it sounds.\u00a0 There are so many details that must be handled in order for a project to be successfully completed that it is easy to lose the forest for worrying about all of those trees.\u00a0 To be able to handle the day to day details while still keeping your eye of the strategic whole is a demanding task but one that can be learned and improved.<\/p>\n
A project is a temporary, one-time endeavor undertaken to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.\u00a0 It usually has a customer or customers (either internal or external to the organization that is doing the project), a budget or a set of scarce resources that must be managed and some kind of timeframe\/constraint for completion or operation.\u00a0 Before one can undertake a project to solve a problem one must first understand the problem.\u00a0 Not only understand the details of the problem but also understand who has the problem and the context and environment that must be taken into consideration in addressing the problem. Another tool that can help is rapid prototyping.\u00a0 These prototypes are used not to prove out designs but instead are used to help define requirements and in particular user interface requirements.\u00a0 The key here is to only\u00a0 implement the key functionality, this keeps things simple and keeps the rapid in rapid prototyping.\u00a0 It is also important to get the users who will actually use the product or service to have a hands on experience and get their feedback in as near to real time as possible. One key to getting and keeping the system perspective is to make sure that you truly understand the problem before defining the solution.\u00a0 One way to get this system view is to take a hierarchical approach to system development.\u00a0 By breaking the project down into pieces in a tree structure such as a work breakdown structure (WBS) can be useful.\u00a0 Have a functional hierarchy where instead of hardware solutions you put in functions that the solution must perform independent of how it will actually be performed.\u00a0 This is called “what before how”; you must state what you want to do before you define how you are going to do it.\u00a0 This helps keep the engineers from “diving for the weeds” and getting systems designed before the goals and objectives are even defined.\u00a0 A good tool to use for developing these hierarchies is the Analytic Hierarch Process (AHP) developed by Tom Saaty from the University of Pittsburgh.\u00a0 He has also developed a software program to go along with this www.expertchoice.com<\/a> and there is a free trial version that you can download. \u00a0 This ability to keep from jumping to a point solution is a skill that must be developed with pratice.\u00a0 One technique for accomplishing this is called staking the trade space.\u00a0 This involves identifying several widely different possible solutions.\u00a0 By having several viable solutions in play and looking at the problem in terms of these solutions keeps us from getting fixated and only looking at the problem from one perspective (if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail).\u00a0 This could mean having both a hardware and software solution or a combination of both.\u00a0 This ability to know when not to make a decision is as important as knowing when a decision needs to be made.\u00a0 This is kind of counter intuitive in that as project managers we are taught to make decisions so that it would seem logical that if a decision needs to be made the sooner we can make it the better.\u00a0 But this can lead to the trap of the “point design” or reference configuration as it is sometimes called.\u00a0 The point design is a solution that we pick just so we can get more detail of the system solution to help define risks and do the costing and scheduling to make sure we are in the ballpark.\u00a0 The trap is that we soon know much more about this particular solution than we do about any of the other alternatives.\u00a0 When we are short on time and money them temptation to just forget the rest of the system trades and just pick this solution can become overwhelming.\u00a0 So use the point design as a tool but don’t forget to keep the other alternatives in play as well. These are some of the things that I have learned and found useful in my many years in project management and system engineering of complex systems.\u00a0 More to come soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are many aspects of project management that are important and worthy of comment.\u00a0 In this post I will present […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":217,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7,6,9],"tags":[158,195,126,130,118,38,153],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leadership","category-goals","category-communications","category-risk-management","tag-14-points","tag-accountability","tag-project-commitment","tag-project-estimates","tag-project-kick-off","tag-project-management","tag-secrets-of-project-management"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/217"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13806,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions\/13806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIn my experience the seeds of most project problems can be traced to sins of omission or commission in the early stages of the project even before it officially became a project.\u00a0 This portion of the life cycle is often called the “fuzzy front end” (FFE) of the project.\u00a0 A key practice in getting a handle on the “fuzzy front end” is to look at the problem from the customers and users perspectives.\u00a0 What is important to customer? How will the user actually be using the system.\u00a0 What does the world look like from their perspective?\u00a0 What do they value and what is the solution worth?\u00a0 Engineers tend to focus on features while customers are interested in benefits; how will this help them solve their problems.\u00a0 One way to get this perspective is to spend time with the customers and users and enter into a dialog with them.\u00a0 The key here is asking good open ended questions and then really listening (listening requires you to stop talking and telling the customer\/user how great you and your company are).\u00a0 Again, as technologists we often think that we know more than the customer and there is a tendency to be or at least appear to be arrogant.
\n\u00a0One tool I like a lot for dealing with the FFE is called quality function deployment (QFD) sometimes called the “house of quality”.\u00a0 This tool is useful in linking customer wants and needs to functions that the system solution must perform.\u00a0 There is a correlation matrix that links the two and there are three categories of correlation strong, medium and weak.\u00a0 Strong correlations mean that this particular function is very important to the customer in one or more areas.\u00a0 Correspondingly a weak correlation means that this function provides little benefit from the customer\/users perspective (althought there may be other reasons to have it such as regulatory, etc.).\u00a0 By have a graphical display it becomes easy to see what is important to the customer and why on a single page.\u00a0
\nFor more information on QFD take a look at http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quality_function_deployment<\/a>.
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