Comments on: Don’t Give Up on Gantt Charts Yet http://www.reformingprojectmanagement.com/2007/01/10/735/ The magazine for the project age Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:31:31 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.5 by: Glen B. Alleman http://www.reformingprojectmanagement.com/2007/01/10/735/#comment-12402 Sat, 13 Jan 2007 07:12:59 +0000 http://www.reformingprojectmanagement.com/2007/01/10/735/#comment-12402 David, Add to the bottom of the Gantt the Earned Value numbers as described in any EIA-748-B and DOD Earned Value training guide and you'll have solved this problem in the way $100B of development projects do every year in the defense industry. All those performance problems you've described above are domain independent and occur everywhere I've managed projects - software, hardware, environmental, operations... Defining accountability, identifying personal and team performance and identifying the deliverables, capabilities and outcomes in the Plan is the starting point. The schedule is NOT the Plan though. The Plan is the strategy for delivering the value to the stakeholder. The current approach in many industries is to employee the IMP/IMS (Integrated Master Plan / Integrated Master Schedule) paradigm, along with Capabilities Based Planning to discover what is it we'd like the participants to be accountable for other than spending money and passing time Links to this approach available on request... David,

Add to the bottom of the Gantt the Earned Value numbers as described in any EIA-748-B and DOD Earned Value training guide and you’ll have solved this problem in the way $100B of development projects do every year in the defense industry.

All those performance problems you’ve described above are domain independent and occur everywhere I’ve managed projects - software, hardware, environmental, operations… Defining accountability, identifying personal and team performance and identifying the deliverables, capabilities and outcomes in the Plan is the starting point. The schedule is NOT the Plan though. The Plan is the strategy for delivering the value to the stakeholder. The current approach in many industries is to employee the IMP/IMS (Integrated Master Plan / Integrated Master Schedule) paradigm, along with Capabilities Based Planning to discover what is it we’d like the participants to be accountable for other than spending money and passing time

Links to this approach available on request…

]]> by: David Geren http://www.reformingprojectmanagement.com/2007/01/10/735/#comment-12388 Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:15:13 +0000 http://www.reformingprojectmanagement.com/2007/01/10/735/#comment-12388 My experience is that Gantt charts (or network charts) give the impression of communiciation, but do not provide useful management content or enable decision making; so they appear to inform, but in fact provide no real report. I think that meaningful project reports are about the target and predicted dates of milestones. For our projects we set up milestones: important project events, such as completing a deliverable, or a major work component leading to a deliverable, and set target dates for them. Then we ask project managers to provide 'predicted' dates for each milestone. The predicted date is the date they really think the milestone event will occur on. The prediction must flow on to subsequent milestones and the completion date: negotiation takes place then on resources, or obtaining agreement to date changes. PMs are tracked on their milestone delivery performance, acknowledging that slippage is usually an organisational problem, not an individual's under-performance. My experience is that Gantt charts (or network charts) give the impression of communiciation, but do not provide useful management content or enable decision making; so they appear to inform, but in fact provide no real report.
I think that meaningful project reports are about the target and predicted dates of milestones. For our projects we set up milestones: important project events, such as completing a deliverable, or a major work component leading to a deliverable, and set target dates for them. Then we ask project managers to provide ‘predicted’ dates for each milestone. The predicted date is the date they really think the milestone event will occur on. The prediction must flow on to subsequent milestones and the completion date: negotiation takes place then on resources, or obtaining agreement to date changes. PMs are tracked on their milestone delivery performance, acknowledging that slippage is usually an organisational problem, not an individual’s under-performance.

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