I've been following Ken for several years with his series of One Page Magic. Ken has other materials on this topic. Enterprise One-Page-Magic and Infographics in High-Res Format is an overview of the series of topics.
Here's a list of Ken's One Page Magic topics
This book arrived today and is the next level up from the individual One Page topics.
While the One-Pagers and the book are focused on Business Transformation, the topics are also applicable to managing Complex System of Systems and speaks to frameworks to address how to avoid the causes of projects and programs going bad and how to avoid the causes of those failures.
As Ken says at the end of the book ...after an extensive successful career working for some of the best organizations in the world in various countries. I was disheartened to see how many times programs and projects failed from not paying heed to lessons learned and best practices.
This book provides actionable steps to address...
Unrealistic Cost and Schedule Estimates
There's always whining and gnashing of teeth about estimates. Blaming the process of estimating as the problem that caused the project to fail.?This is the classic #NoEstimates argument and behavior. Where they confuse symptoms with causes. Let's have some facts here:
- Unrealistic means the precision and accuracy of the estimate is not sufficient to make a credible and informed decision.
- Unrealistic Cost and Schedule estimates are very common, but rarely are the root causes sought. Without the Root Cause, they cannot be improved.
- Any business that will stay in business needs to know something about the cost of developing its products and when that cost will turn into revenue.
- This is the very core of business decision-making. Poor estimating is a Root Cause of many project failures.
Inadequate Assessment of Risk and Unmitigated Exposures to Risks Without Proper Handling Plans
- Inadequate means the risk-handling strategies are not adequate to reduce or provide the needed margin.
- Inadequate risk assessment many times means ZERO risk assessment.
- What could possibly go wrong? Let's just get started.
- Agile is billed as a risk management process. It is Not. It provides information to the risk management process, but it alone is not risk management.
- Start with “Continuous Risk Management Guidebook”, Carnegie Mellon, Software Engineering Institute, or your agency’s or customer's equivalent guidance.
Unanticipated Technical Issues Without Alternative Plans And Solutions
- Unanticipated means the Risk Management process failed to identify reducible or irreducible uncertainties that create risk.
- Unanticipated technical issues are part of all projects.
- Managing in the presence of uncertainty deals with both programmatic and technical uncertainty.
- Both are present in the Top 4 Root Causes.
- As a result of risk management, these technical issues may or may not be revealed.
- The uncertainties found on projects are reducible and irreducible. For reducible uncertainty, we must spend money to reduce the resulting risk. For irreducible uncertainty, we need margin.
- Both these require that we make estimates because they are both about outcomes in the future.
Ten More Reasons Projects Fail ?
- Unmanaged scope creep - not scoop creep, but unmanaged scope creep
- Overall local technical and managerial resources
- Poor communication between participants
- Poor stakeholder management
- Unreliable estimates
- Poor risk management
- Unsupportive project culture
- An accidental project manager
- Lack of Team Planning Sessions
- Poor monitoring and control of performance
Six More Project Failure Modes in the Agile Domain
1. Expecting Agile Project Management to be Easy
- Starting the Agile journey after reading a book or airline magazine article.
- No Plan for the deployment of Agile processes.
- No Plan for the transformation of the Culture is needed to support the Agile processes.
- Real Agile Project Management exposes existing corporate and cultural problems that must be dealt with Communications, Accountability. and Distrust.
2. Expecting Agile methods to solve problems that are endemic to the organizational behaviors
- Organizations are about people, their interactions, and their culture.
- Agile methods are based on people and their interactions.
- For Agile to succeed, the organizational processes need to become Agile.
- Failure to decentralize control of the deployment and execution of Agile methods
- This starts with the lack of executive sponsorship.
3. Starting with Practices without first establishing Principles
- Practices are easy. Agile practices meetings (Scrum, DSDM, XP, SAFe). Agile roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master), and Scrum artifacts
- Agile principles are what make the practice's work and sustainable.
- Principles are much harder to incorporate into practice. This is the primary failure mode of an Agile deployment.
- Agile is about the People, their interactions, and the culture ? not the processes, practices, and tools.
4. Leading the Agile Team Like a Traditional Project Manager
- Agile Project Management is not the same as Traditional Project Management.
- Agile Project Management is a Team-based development process: Product Owner, Scrum Master – a facilitator, not a Project Manager, The TEAM ? self-organizing and empowered to make decisions in conjunction with the Product Owner about the direction of the work that matches the Product Roadmap and Release Plan.
5. Failure to manage the Team
- People matrixed across multiple teams.
- Low coupling between teams for the shared outcome.
- Teams with many external dependencies.
- Without visibility of those dependencies, low cohesion results in the shared outcome.
- Teams with missing subject matter expertise.
- The notion of a generalist is useful but difficult to scale on software intensive system of systems.
- Software Development is a systems engineering paradigm. Specialties are a natural part of this paradigm.
5. Failure to actively manage risk created by reducible (Epistemic) and irreducible (Aleatory) uncertainties?
- Risk is created by uncertainty, which comes in two forms: Reducible (Epistemic) is handled with risk buy down work activities. Irreducible (Aleatory) that is handled with cost, schedule, and technical margin
- Risk Management is the Critical Success Factor of all project work
- Applying Agile does not remove the need to manage risk
To Make the Needed Changes To Identify, Correct, and Prevent the Root Causes of Project Failure, We Need to Start with the Organization
There are Five Components Needed for Any Change to Succeed. All Five Plus an Action Plan Needed ?
? Research at Performance Assessment and Root Cause Analyses, Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L), Mr. Gary Bliss Director.
