Project Management 101

Not too long ago, the boss of department asked my opinion of what's wrong with the projects going on in my team. I shrugged and tell him that there are different managers i work with and they are all not in sync when setting job priorities, which makes things quite chaotic.

To put it simply, there are some basic Project Management fundamentals that they are violating.

After that the question keep bugging me out of the corners of my mind from time to time. It's like staring at a bubble wrap trying to resist the urge and you finally couldn't help but start popping them for no reason at all. So my hands got itchy and i decided to write this piece here to ease this instinctive itch of mine.

Warning: This will be a lengthy one. Be prepared before you go on.

In whatever project management we do, there are always the 3 fundamental elements that we need to look at. Else we are probably managing projects as we go and hope that it works out or trying to manage without really understanding.

These 3 elements are known as the triple constraints plus a hidden q element.

See the illustration of the triangle consisting of schedule, resource & scope, quality being in the middle.

Imagine the triangle to be a flexible shape.
You increase the scope of project, the resources we need goes up - we have to pay for the extra things we wanted to add and usually more manpower is required. Our schedule will be affected since we now need to accommodate for new activities. These 3 elements are always interlinked and affect the quality of our project's outcome or deliverables.

Let's get a little example of McDees kitchen using the triple contraints of schedule, scope and resource.

In this project, the workers produce the deliverables which are McChickies. In laymen term, it's putting all the ingredients together between the buns after frying the chicken. The supervisor is Mary who manages the worker and monitors the output. Let's say we have only one worker, John. John can produce 10 McChickies per hour (i know this sounds quite ridiculous, but it simplifies the equation here).

Consider John's work hour per day as 9 hours. Take away 1.5 hours for break time, cleaning up and rest times in between to give a realistic work effort duration. That leaves 7.5 of work hour expected from John daily. We can estimate John to produce 7.5 hours x 10 = 75 McChickies comfortably.

Now let's make it abit more complicated.

Scope change or scope creep

Mary discovered that there is a new product that will be really hot in the fast food market at this time and would help to increase McDee's market share. It's the BeetMac ,appealing to our community which is becoming more and more health conscious.

John is given new training on how to prepare BeetMac and found that he can only produce 5 BeetMacs per hour. However, Mary is expecting to produce 75 McChickies and 10 BeetMacs from now onwards.

We see that the scope now increases, we call this scope creep. Originally we are suppose to produce 75McChickies to make our customers happy.

Mary have to ask for more budget to buy ingredients for the BeetMac and John will need more time to prepare the new demand from Mary.
75 McChickies requires 7.5 hours and 10 BeetMacs requires 2 hours to make. That sums up to 9.5 hours.

Now John needs to work without break daily and exceed half an hour of his daily work duration.
I wonder how he copes with having no time to answer nature's call or take a bite to stop his stomach from growling. Maybe Mary is willing to spend some budget to pay for John's overtime.

Now this little McDee's kitchen is seeing a major impact on its delivery schedule. Effectively, he will probably be working 2 extra hours per day to meet the new target of 75 McChickies and 10 BeetMacs daily.

We see that the resources here,being manpower is being stretched to meet the new daily demand of McDee's customers now and extra cost for new different ingredients, John's OT pay and his training cost. John's now thinking that his work days are getting busy, but oh well, he did get paid overtime for the extra 2 hours he worked.

Now hang on a while, aren't we missing something?

Yes, things don't stay this way for long. Mary's strategy to introduce the BeetMacs worked and now she estimated customers demand to increase. The new demand is to produce 75 McChickies and
double the amount of original BeetMacs giving a tally of 20 BeetMacs.

Now, John's OT hour has increased from 2 to 4 hours. How much can he do overtime and multitask at this point?

There's a serious problems now with customer A screaming at Mary to deliver McChickies while customer B wanted at least 2 BeetMacs per hour. Trying to meet customers demand since 'customers are always right', Mary ordered John to produce both McChickies and BeetMacs per customer's demand.

In the beginning, John tried to use minimum time to cook the ingredients. On customer's end, the products gets less tasty, but being loyal customers, tolerated this slacking in quality and continued to order more. The order increased again to 30 BeetMacs a day.

This gives John really high pressure to meet Mary and the customer's expectation. One day, John was not feeling well and in the haste, he mixed the wrong ingredient - chickens in BeetMacs and beetroots in McChickies. Uh oh, this is a serious quality issue yeah?

Result is quite predictable. McChickies customer was furious why there is beetroot instead of chicken meat and BeetMacs customers is very upset since they were looking for vegetarian diet but found meat in it. Mary would now have to answer to all the quality issues that McDee is having. So do we get a clear picture of how scope creeps impacts the other 2 elements of the triple constraint and eventually the quality of our product/deliverable.

Now imagine in the real world, to be really competitive in the market, there is also the fish-lovers, which might lead to McFishies product being introduced into the kitchen. Imagine the changes to the triple constraint if Mary kept having only John to work on producing the McDee products with increasing variety and demand volumes.

Let's add in a twist of economy impact to the business. As a result of economy downturn, the company slashes down on budget. With a budget constraint, Mary needs to stop paying overtime to John and give him replacement rest days. For the times John took his days off, she took in a casual worker Jack.

How about the training that Jack needs to undergo in order to be on par with John's productivity? Will Jack be willing to work casual on long term? How much is the cost-benefit of taking casual workers in the long run?
Would Mary finally decide to stop taking in extra customer orders? How much market share is she at risk of losing if she do?

Hope this writing is able give some insights on how the triple constraint impacts one another. The McDee's kitchen scenario above gives some examples of the disadvantages of not understanding how the 3 elements link to one another and lead to quality standard of our deliverables.

Keep in mind that the basics of project management is to understand how the 3 elements and their fundamentals and balance them to keep our deliverable quality up to our expectations while maintaining a sustainable system to deliver the product.

Excuse me for the long post. I will be untethered for at least the few days to come.
Hope you enjoy reading this!


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