Staying on Plan Means Closed Loop Control

For most projects, showing up on or near the planned need date, at or near the planned cost, and more or less with the planned capabilities is a good measure of success. Delivering capabilities late and over budget is usually unacceptable to those paying for our work.

So how do we do this? Simple actually.

We start with a Plan. Here's the approach to Planning and the resulting Plan.

Planning constantly peers into the future to indicate where a solution may emerge. A Plan is a complex situation, adapting to an emerging solution.? -?Mike Dwyer

The Plan tells us when we need the capabilities to produce business value or accomplish the mission. The Plan is a strategy. This strategy?involves setting goals, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. The strategy describes how the ends (goals) will be achieved by the means (resources) in units of measure meaningful to the decision-makers.

Strategy creates fit among a firm's activities. For Enterprise IT, this fit is defined by the relationships between the needed capabilities and those the project delivers. A strategy's success depends on doing many things well—not just a few.

The things that are done well must operate within a close-knit system. If there is no fit among the activities, there is no distinctive strategy and little to sustain the strategic deployment process. Management then reverts to the more straightforward task of overseeing independent functions.

When this occurs, operational effectiveness determines the organization's relative performance. ["What is Strategy," M. E. Porter, Harvard Business Review, Volume 74, Number 6, pp. 61–78.]

A successful Plan describes the order of value delivery in exchange for a cost, the inter-dependencies between these value-producing items, and the synergistic outcomes from these value-producing items working together to meet the strategy.

With the Plan in hand, we can ask and answer the following questions:

• Do we know what Done looks like in meaningful units of measure to the decision-makers?
• Do you know if we have a strategy for getting done on or near the need date, at or near the budget?
• Do we have the resources we need to execute that strategy?
• Do we know what impediments we'll encounter along the way and how we will handle them?
• Do we have some means of measuring our progress to provide the confidence that we'll reach done when we expect to??

This Post Answers the Last Question

The example below is from our cycling group. The principles are the same for projects. We have a desired outcome regarding date, cost, and technical performance. These desired outcomes have some end goal. A budget, a?go-live?date, and a set of features or capabilities are needed to fulfill the business case.?

Along the way, we need to take corrective actions when we see that we are falling behind.?

How did we know we were falling behind? Because we have a desired performance at points along the way, that we compare our actual performance to. The difference between our actual performance and the desired performance, creates an "error signal" we can use to make adjustments.

Our thermostat, car's speed control, and the Close Loop Control systems used for managing our project do this. So, replace the cycling example with writing software for money—the Pelaton for the desired performance of our work. In the presentation below, you can ignore the guy in the Yellow Jersey at the end. It turns out he's a dopper and an all-around bad person to his fellow riders and fans.

So, let's look at a project example using the analogy of our cycling group, ignoring Lance.

• We aim to ride a distance at a specific time. This can be a training ride, a century, or a Grand Fondo (a timed distance for the record).
• We have instruments on the bike: Strava on the smartphone and Gamin on the bars. Both keep track of instantaneous speed, time moving, total time, and average time over the distance.
• We know because we've done this route A 100 times before, or we know because we looked at the route map, or we know because we have talked about the planned distance for the day—about how many miles we need to ride—on average—to get back to the drive on a planned time.
• Say we're out for our Saturday ride, which is usually a 50- to 65-mile loop from the driveway in Niwot, Colorado, to Carter Lake, south of Fort Collins.
• We agreed that our average pace would be 20 MPH as a group. Everyone has some way of measuring their average and instantaneous speed.
• Over the course of the course, it's never flat; some climbs and descents change the flat land speed, but the average must stay at 20 MPH.?
• I'm usually one of those when one or more?drop off the back. We know what the average is. And instinctively, we know how much faster we must ride to catch up—pick up the pace.
• But if we were actual racers riding solo -?time trial or Triathlon, we'd look at our Garmin to see if we're going fast enough to?get back on pace and come in under our target time.

This example can be related to a project.?

• We have a target for the end—a target set of capabilities, a need date, and a target budget.
• We have targets for all the intermediary points along the way — capabilities over time and budget over time.
• We know our pace—how fast we have to go and how much cost we can absorb to achieve our goal of delivering the needed capabilities on the date required for the needed budget.
• We know the gap between our?pace and our?needed pace?to stay on track — with an intermediate desired performance, budget, number of features delivered, stated capabilities ready to be used, and the actual measures of these, we can develop a?variance that is used to product an error signal that is used to steer to the project. This is the feedback loop. We need to keep the project on Plan for the closed-loop control system.
• From that?variance, we know how much faster we need to go to arrive on time.

This is Close Loop Control

• We have a target for the end and intermediate targets along the way. These intermediate targets are the feedback points we use to assess progress.
• Measure the actual value of whatever variables we need to provide visibility to the project's performance. These can be cost, schedule, or performance. However, they can also be another attribute of the project: customer acceptance, marketplace feedback, or incremental?savings.
• Could you determine the variance between the Plan and the actual?
• Could you take corrective action to close the gap and get back on target or within the variance tolerance?
• Please wait until the project ends.

Your cruise control does this about every 10 milliseconds. Your Nest thermostat does this slower, but still less than a minute. To know how often you need to sample your progress against the Plan, answer this question.

How long are you willing to wait before you find out you're late? Sample at ? that time.

This is called the Nyquist Rate, for flying and swimming machines I worked on in my younger days. But it's a good question to ask on all projects as well.