Anti-Patterns in Project Management
Glen Alleman MSSM
Veteran, Applying Systems Engineering Principles, Processes & Practices to Increase the Probability of Program Success for Complex Systems in Aerospace & Defense, Enterprise IT, and Process and Safety Industries
The cause of many project failures can be traced to the passivity of management and participants in the face of the forces attempting to undermine a project's success. This characterization may seem too general, but this book lays the groundwork for understanding the repeated bad behaviors of projects and addressing their solutions.
This is a useful background for the current book Anti Patterns in Project Management, by William Brown, Hays “Skip” McCormick, and Scott Thomas, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, but it is sometimes redundant since many of the antipatterns developed in the previous books are repeated in the current publication.
The same authors developed the concept of repeated bad behavior—described as an antipattern—in two previous books.
The current book is a valuable addition to a project manager's bookshelf, even if the other two volumes are not of interest to non-software development project managers.
What is a Pattern and an Antipattern
The foundation for using and writing Patterns—and therefore antipatterns—began in the 1980s and continued to grow in the software community in the 1990s. Christopher Alexander conceived the phrase pattern language in his book A Pattern Language [1]. Alexander defines a pattern as a three-part construct.
Patterns and Pattern Languages describe best practices and good designs and capture the experience in a way that allows others to reuse this experience. The software community adopted Alexander's ideas by publishing several books on patterns and their use in software development. [2]
Antipatterns are negative solutions that present more problems than they address.?
Where have we come from?
It has become fashionable to criticize the project management approaches built around a structured project management model. These methods range from the familiar Waterfall method to procedures described in the PMBOK. [3] It may seem to any modern project manager that attacking the dinosaur with too much structure wastes time. While the traditional requirements–design–code–test process has long been discredited as inappropriate for the development of modern software systems, the waterfall is still the basis of many rigid, top-down, front-loaded processes and methodologies used in large organizations today.
One of the reasons sizeable structured project management methods flourished a decade ago was the pace of change in the software requirements. Therefore, changes to the software itself occurred at a leisurely pace.
Today's project managers face rapidly changing requirements, ill-defined and conflicting requirements, and time-to-market pressures unheard of five years ago. This Internet-time approach to product development and the associated project management activities have outstripped the abilities of all but the most skilled managers to control the resulting chaos.
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The concept of master planning in traditional project management methods is no longer appropriate for most software development projects. This differs from saying that some project domains don't require extensive pre-planning or rigid control processes. But they are rare in the software development domain. The prominent failures of the past, such as the IRS and FAA, are too complex to attribute to simple project management failures. However, the shortcomings of many commercial development projects can be attributed to the misapplication of rigid methods to a problem domain that requires flexibility, agility, and adaptability.
The Problem Is Not Change, It's Uncontrolled Change
The fundamental problem with any structured top-down project management method is that real-world requirements are moving targets. Antipatterns describe how the project manager doesn't hope to manage the project in a fixed and predictable manner, with a single–all-encompassing schedule, because, by the time the schedule and tasks are fully defined, the problem will have changed. The concept of planning must be replaced with the idea of continually adapting the plan. If the project manager and stakeholders can't fully anticipate what will happen, they must be prepared to be nimble.
"If you can't plan well, plan often," is a famous Watts Humphries quote applicable here.
In the absence of this nimbleness – agility is the current buzzword – antipatterns begin to appear. This book is about those antipatterns, how to recognize them, address the problems they produce, and most importantly, how to avoid them.
Project Management Antipatterns
Project management antipatterns are familiar to anyone practicing the art of project management in a modern organization. This book pulls together patterns of behavior typical to troubled projects. Some are obvious, some are subtle, and some are new observations highlighting the complexities of managing projects in our modern times.
Like the two previous books, Antipatterns is a compendium of experiences and observations of how managers and participants – in this case, Project Managers and their stakeholders – can create the foundations of failure by not understanding the consequences of their behavior.
The antipatterns presented in the book are divided into categories
This division is logical in that it represents the problems encountered in the typical software development project. Of course, this partitioning is software project-centric, but other domains may find it familiar if the details of a software project are ignored and a broader project management perspective is taken.
[1] A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press,? 1977 and The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, 1979.
[2] Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides, Addison Wesley, 1995. The PLoP series Pattern Languages of Software Design, 1, 2, 3, and 4.
[3] PMBOK, ANSI/PMI 99–001–2000 is available at the PMI site, www.pmi.org.