More on Managing Project Uncertainty
November 16th, 2002 by Hal
A few more thoughts on Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variability to Chaos…Earlier this week I participated in a workshop in Washington, DC titled How will homeland security shape tomorrow's capital projects?. The workshop was the second in a series for mapping the technology for automating the delivery of projects for the construction industry. I could only attend the first day due to other commitments (I'll write about that tomorrow.). The conference was sponsored by the Construction Industry Institute, the National Science Foundation, The White House National Science & Technology Council, and others.
The key note speakers were great. (Read more about the speakers and the agenda.) I'll just comment today on one of the talks: Vulnerability of Public Infrastructure: A Systems Perspective, by Robert Prieto, Chairman, Parsons Brinckerhoff. Mr. Prieto has been moving around the speakers' circuit, previously seen at the Polytechnic Institute's conference Engineering the Protection of Our Cities. Bob shared his views on homeland security and project management. He was a principal investigator of the tragedy at the World Trade Center. Bob gave good marks to the changes that had been made since the previous bombing in '93. What caught my attention were these remarks,
"We did well on September 11th because people exercised good judgement not because of good systems."
"Don't squeeze the person out of the loop."
Bob also spoke at length about projects. Here are two of the more relevant quotes:
"Look at preplanning for training operators with what they will encounter."
"The most successful projects are those that evolve with the owners' understanding of their needs."
Later in the day we were tasked with assessing how project planning and management could deal with the evolving homeland security issues and innovations. Bob Prieto's words couldn't have been more relevant. After quite the discussion of how building codes must evolve so they don't limit the adoption of innovations, we discussed how our style of project management would matter. Flexible, adaptive, multi-headed project management will be needed to deal with the increased level of uncertainty introduced by newly understood customer needs and emerging innovations. Call it scrum or call it lean; either way, the way we deliver capital projects will have to deal with an increased uncertainty in the project environment. As the authors of Managing Project Uncertainty put it we need a style that anticipates the unknown unknowns and responds appropriately.
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