Bulldozer00's Blog

In “The Politics Of Projects“, Robert Block states that orgs “don’t want projects, they want products“. Thus, the left side of the graph below shows the ideal project profile; zero cost and zero time. A twitch of Samantha Stevens’s nose and, voila, a marketable product appears out of thin air and the revenue stream starts flowin’ into the corpo coffers.

Based on a first order linear approximation, all earthly product development orgs get one of the performance lines on the right side of the figure. There are so many variables involved in the messy and chaotic process from viable idea to product that it’s often a crap shoot at predicting the slope and time-to-100-percent-complete end point of the performance line:

• Experience of the project team
• Cohesiveness of the project team
• Enthusiasm of the project team
• Clarity of roles and responsibilities of each team member
• Expertise in the product application domain
• Efficacy of the development tool set
• Quality of information available to, and exchanged between, project members
• Amount and frequency of meddling from external, non-project groups and individuals
• <Add your own performance influencing variable here>

To a second order approximation, the S-curve below shows real world project performance as a function of time. The slope of the performance trajectory (% progress per unit time) is not constant as the previous first order linear model implies. It starts out small during the chaotic phase, increases during the productive stage, then decreases during the closeout phase. The objective is to minimize the time spent in phases P1, P2, and P3 without sacrificing quality or burning out the project team via overwork.

Assume (and it’s a bad assumption) that there’s an objective and accurate way of measuring “% complete” at any given time for a project. Now, assume that you’ve diligently tracked and accumulated a set of performance curves for a variety of large and small projects and a variety of teams over the years. Armed with this data and given a new project with a specific assigned team, do you think you could accurately estimate the time-to-completion of the new project? Why or why not?