“The passage of the calendar is the one irreplaceable resource”
I source Consultancy projects from Clients and watch as they produce amazing results.
I am transcribing some of our teaching materials to assist in providing credibility to our approach.
This one, Calendar time, is also relevant to Project Management in general?
Thank you Professor Syd Howell and Dr Mike Arundale for your insights and to DreamscopeTV for capturing.
“The passage of the calendar is the one irreplaceable resource”
Mike: When students are designing their research and planning the project I find often that they have a nice plan that all seems fine but then when it gets halfway through the project they seem to run out of time for some key interviews.
Why do you think this might be?
Syd: The interesting thing is that in a student consulting project you've got a lot of resources.
You've got money, you've got work hours by the group members, and you've got calendar time.
If you look at those three resources, money is not usually a constraint.
Groups. almost never overspend their budgets accidentally and if there's a payback, clients are very receptive to saying: “OK I'll pay for two more nights in Shanghai for another 10 interviews or another three interviews.”
So clients usually don't make budget constraint.
Likewise, the student the student group is not constrained in terms of person weeks.
A group of five for 10 weeks, that's 50 weeks that's more than a year of a salary employees time, so the student group isn't short of grunt, human grunt.
What is short is calendar time! The passage of the calendar is the one irreplaceable resource and time and time again students do not apply for visas early enough, do not begin to telephone early enough and discover that only one person in 20 will even speak to them.
It may take three days to get through to a human being. When you get through to a person, 10% only are willing to speak to you.
When you get through to person who is willing to speak to you and willing to have an interview with you afterwards, it's still three weeks to arrange that interview and by the way.the Chinese New Year is in between, so you can't in fact how the interview when you want it!
All of this is burning calendar time and I know Mike that you’ve got some pretty good insights and tips into how to manage that kind of time resource?
Mike: To be honest I think it is difficult and a lot of what you said is what people need to be aware of.
That it just does take three weeks to get a face to face interviews, or for that matter if you want to have a questionnaire approved by your supervisor, it may well go through two or three iterations and you can't assume that your supervisor will respond within 24 hours, so you might need to factor in a week to get a questionnaire approved and then it may have to go to the client for approval as well!
So I think I guess for me the main advice is to work back from milestones to work out what you need to have in place at a certain date and then subtract 3 weeks and then subtract another week and then good grief that's now often the case when you do that exercise particularly arranged around your fieldwork, you will early in the project notice that everything needs doing right now on the practical front, so don't spend too much time up front getting your project scope perfect or even your project plan document perfect.
Just get on with the practical logistical stuff around arranging field work interviews which may be around visas but almost certainly that would be around making contacts.
Something that can be helpful early on is speaking to people.
There is a student temptation I think, we all have a temptation to want to understand everything first before we then venture out asking questions of people, but there isn't really time for that.
We need to pick up the phone and try and get the initial interviews arranged right at the start and use them as a first stage to calibrate to inform the next stage of fieldwork.
Another piece of advice I guess is around not thinking in a linear fashion.
So again, a lot of project plans I see have a Gantt chart which starts over here and then comes down to here and then to there and then to there in a nice linear sequence where all the tasks follow on from each other.
Some advice I got very on in my consultancy career when you were stuck for something to do, just pull tasks forward.
A lot of the tasks that you think you might want to do you, can do now or you can start on them now.
Although you might want a bit of logical information that would help you do it better, you can actually still do quite a lot now, so all the time look for task to pull forward so that you will never be sat around thinking or waiting on people.
Clearly that there's a lot of tips about how to arrange interviews and how to trying to keep control of a conversation by email rather than just leaving it to someone to get back to you and that's a whole lot of other detail that individual supervisors I'm sure can help explain.
Another thing is cold calling and some groups may have to cold call and market research perhaps in a different country and want to set up interviews with people who have absolutely no knowledge of the project and that can be particularly hard.
I was supervising a group last year who I think made something like 500 or 600 calls to set up their interviews and even then didn't get as many as they wanted.
You have comments I believe on the process of how to get the most out of that situation?
Syd: you’ve got to manage it as an actual business operation, that is to say, take your 500 or 600 call activity ,because calendar time is short, you got to almost run it as if it was a professional production process.
The product is going to be interview appointments that are realisable.
So what you need to do is to say, per calendar day, how many times am I trying to make a telephone call, how many times does any member of the group trying to make a telephone call, what's our attempted call rate, what's our success rate in getting, what's a success rate within that that actually getting somebody to talk to and say anything to us, within that how many people are willing to be interviewed on some date yet to be decided.
If you look at those rates per calendar day you can calculate whether or not you are making enough attempts to call, to get enough connected calls, to get enough interviews within the calendar times.
So what you need to understand is your hit rates and if the hit rates aren't working right you need to do more work, so would need up the rate at which are making telephone calls but whatever the hit rate is if you're running out of calendar time then what you're going to see is your required hit rate for the rest of the project is rising, in other words if you're making 100 calls a day and you're only getting 11 interviews a day but you look at your work plan and you need to get to more interviews fixed today then you clearly need to increase the work rate and the longer you leave it the faster that required work rate grows, so that can explode towards the later stages of the project.
Mike; It’s a bit like the run rate graphs in one day international cricket?
Syd: For those students who understand international cricket, yes if the required scoring rate is rising you are not going to do it, you're probably need to change your game but you're not going to win this match.
More concretely, you need to actually look at the rate of success.
We had one failure in a project for a major global company a few years ago and this happened when I was absent from the School and I came back five weeks into the project and I got some very unhappy messages from the client, it was a senior manager and as it happened an alumnus of the University, and by sheer instinct I knew that something was pretty serious, and I began to suspect, even within hours that maybe this project should have been cancelled.
That's a long story and it probably should have been, but the interesting thing was that right at the end of that project, I went back and checked my gut feel and I realised that the group had made such slow progress by week 5 in even getting interviews inside the client company and that's borrowing the client’s watch to tell him the time.
Anything the client tells you, is by definition, not data for clients.
That's zero value for client, even all of those had not yet been programmed by week five, when I actually looked at the run rate for the hit rate that was required, it was already impossible to execute the project effectively at all, so in a way my instinct was right, but I could have acted with hard numbers retrospectively.
This is one area we want to encourage teams, student workgroups and indeed the school to invest more effort in really learning how to manage Calendar time and really looking forward to say, is the required work rate and achievement rate growing explosively?
If so, we are out of control and we're not going to deliver the project as it was first conceived.