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Some very thoughtful comments were made on some of the postings from last week's series on CPM. I urge you to read those comments. Just click on the "(#) Comments" link at the end of each posting wherever you see a number other than "Please Comment". I urge you to leave comments as well.

If what people were doing was working there'd be no reason to do something else!

A few people asked me what I was planning to do with the Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twiceseries. Based on the requests I've decided to compile the five postings as a single document that I'll link on the site. That document can be freely downloaded and distributed. I hope you find it valuable.

Now for those wondering what got me going on the series in the first place, I've been somewhat concerned about people who set out to adopt a new approach (to anything) while trying their hardest not to give up what they are doing. If what they were doing was working there'd be no reason to do something else! We know in the case of project planning and control that it routinely doesn't work.

Continuing to do the old has three negative effects on succeeding with the new:

1. It maintains the inertia of the current practice
2. It consumes scarce attention and capacity for adopting the unfamiliar and initially time-consuming practice
3. It reinforces the measurement and rewards associated with the old

Using the Critical Path Method for project planning and control is just one of those practices that seems like a good idea, but fails in execution. One issue I failed to stress last week is the lack of seriousness given to CPM as evidenced by not providing the resources to do a good job keeping the schedules always up-to-date. There is a trend seen in construction where people are preparing the CPM schedules yet they don't know how to build and don't know scheduling¹. Lack of seriousness and competence spells disaster for the project participants. Not doing CPM scheduling in many cases would be far better than doing it the current way. And certainly for those people who are dissatisfied enough to try a different approach they should give up trying to do both.

Stop the craziness of doing the old and the new.

1. As reported in ENR [ ⇑ back ]