Archive for the 'Language Action Perspective' Category

It's that time of year again. I'm attending the Lean Construction Congress in San Francisco. This is the 9th annual event. As usual, the focus is on companies who have adopted lean approaches for delivering AEC projects. The morning presentations have been great. Company presenters are doing a fine job speaking about the benefits they are getting and how the lean approaches and principles cause that to happen.

Becoming lean and being evermore lean is fundamentally about learning, not about lean.

It's a little early in the two days to be saying this, but what the heck… Herrero Contractors, not yet three years into their lean transformation, is the most advanced lean contractor in the US.¹ Herrero understands that becoming lean and being evermore lean is fundamentally about learning, not about lean. They seem to be learning everywhere and everyday.

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1. Full disclosure, they used to be our client. A year ago they hired away one of our staff members to be their Director of Learning…not Director of Lean. [ ⇑ back ]

Bad concrete and wrong epoxy are just two of the problems with the Big Dig. ENR ran two stories in the August 5, 2007 issue detailing guilty pleas on criminal charges along with failure to act responsibly with structural design issues. Certainly, the whole project is not bad. But living in Boston, we worry not knowing which parts are bad. While money is always a possible motive, in this case people clearly were not exercising their responsibilities as custodians of public safety. In short, few were speaking up and fewer still were listening.

The Two Great Wastes contribute in significant, yet incalculable ways, to the failings on all projects.

I know first-hand how easy it is to just drive on by safety issues. It's easy to think, "Somebody must be taking care." Last Friday I drove by a police construction detail where a new home was being connected to a sewer line in the center of a state road. There were two police officers along with two flag persons and a 1/2 dozen workers. One man was neck deep in a straight-cut narrow trench shoveling loose gravel. In the situation I describe OSHA requires a trench box anytime a trench is 5 feet or more deep. From my passing view, this worker was just about at that limit. Was a trench box required? I don't know. There was no trench box present. I didn't stop. I should have stopped. But had I stopped, what conversation would I had and with whom? To my knowledge, no one was injured. No incident occurred. But it is really beside the point. I feel terrible for not stopping.

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Another great day of work. We got through the Daily Scrum in 13 minutes (without standing). I asked for a weekly retrospective to examine what we are learning and what needs our attention. In short, team members assessed they were learning and accomplishing far more than they expected. Let's see if we can keep this going. There's a lot for us to accomplish in the coming vacation week.

There's nothing like learning-in-action.¹. We just finished our planning session for our development project. I was surprised by how much time we spent defining what it meant to be done. In the LPS world we call that establishing conditions of satisfaction. But we struggle to get team members to stay in that conversation. "Just tell me what you want!" The ScrumMaster wouldn't let us move on 'til he confirmed that the whole team understood what would satisfy the Product Owner.

I'm looking forward to comprehending!

Towards the end of today's session, I noticed that our ScrumMaster frequently said, "We'll inspect and adapt." (He said it before we started the planning. I just hadn't noticed.) "Of course," I thought. The future is uncertain and unknowable. That's just what we do on (LPS) projects. But I also know it's not what is usually done on CPM-style projects. Conventional wisdom (and scheduling software) guides people to put a plan in place and stick to it. The result is project managers often try to get reality to match their plan. Doesn't work. Never did.

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1. Chris Argyris claims it's the primary way we learn. See his book Knowledge for Action. [ ⇑ back ]

Why would a lean projects guy hire a Scrum software development ScrumMaster? Short answer: it seemed like a good idea at the time. Seriously, I'm doing some work for an architectural engineering firm. The company focuses on designing technically sophisticated manufacturing facilities. We are developing for them a responsibility-based planning approach. It's starting out as a Scrum adaptation of the Last Planner System® (LPS). I thought…what better way to understand how Scrum can inform the changes to LPS than to perform our own development effort as a Scrum project.

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One of the reasons for trouble on projects is that people say Yes when asked to take on a task when they really should be saying No. This results in others who depend on the completion of that task to start their task failing to do so. Like dominoes toppling, the project schedule falls apart.

The Power of a Positive No, by William Ury is a primer in how to have a positive conversation where the result is No. In Ury's essay How I Got to No, he recounts his insight after meeting with Warren Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha said he says NO to a thousand investment opportunities before finding just the right one to say Yes to. Read the rest of this entry ¶

It's my pleasure to speak again at a meeting of the Puget Sound PMI Chapter. Two years ago I gave a rather long and complicated presentation on obsolete theory, Fayol, Flores, and what can be learned from construction project management. This time I'll be attempting a much shorter and less complicated talk. Originally I titled it "An Update on Obsolete Theory", but I've reconsidered. Read the rest of this entry ¶

Glen Alleman took me to task for yesterday's posting Misunderstanding Project Planning as Anticipation. He wrote a rather comprehensive rebuttal to my claim that the general understanding of planning is as anticipating a future. Glen makes a good case that best practice — at least in DoD projects — doesn't misunderstand planning. Since I've only worked at one defense contractor, I won't contradict him. I will say that my experience of the everyday practice of planning is as I described. Project managers/planners usually take an approach that limits alternatives concluding with "the plan". The plan is then represented as a CPM schedule. I don't argue with Glen that this is inadequate, nor am I saying that some people know better AND do something different. I am saying that the usual practice is to have a smart experienced person create a plan that is then represented as a schedule for others to follow. That is a practice that must change if we want better project performance. Read the rest of this entry ¶

Our everyday speaking gets in the way of better planning. This weekend I was listening to Tim Russert interview Presidential Spokesman Tony Snow on Meet the Press. Tim asked Tony about the plan for winning the war in Iraq. The question inferred that something went terribly wrong. Tony replied,

"I'm not sure anything went wrong. Battle plans don't live beyond the first encounter with the enemy."

Tony went on to say that like most of life we can't anticipate the future…no amount of planning can change that. Tony is right about that. The future is uncertain and unknowable. Grasping that fact is a key to better planning. Read the rest of this entry ¶

There's no independent study I'm quoting today. No, I'm just sharing what I've been observing. In yesterday's post on Silence Is a Project and Career Killer, the authors of the study emphasized that team members need to be speaking. My experience is that most team members, at one time or another, do speak about their concerns for the project. But others — team members, leaders, managers, and clients — are too distracted by their own concerns to pay attention to the speaking. I mean, really pay attention. The kind of attention that requires putting the laptop cover down. The kind of attention that keeps you from answering the telephone during the conversation. The kind of attention that the person speaking walks away knowing that s/he has been listened to by you. That kind of attention. Read the rest of this entry ¶

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Facts are in. Not speaking on projects is a key contributor to project failure. Worse, it's also leads to failed careers. Three years ago Greg Howell and I authored a paper Two Great Wastes™ which we presented at IGLC-12. The paper was somewhat speculative. We had observed teams that just weren't making the progress that knew was possible. After studying a number of teams we noticed a pattern. Many of the poor performing teams were composed of people who didn't speak up and/or leaders who weren't listening. We coupled those observations with some research into some big disasters. We concluded that project deterioration was a function of not listening and not speaking. We named those behaviors the Two Great Wastes.

Teams that can't or don't speak up are doomed to fail.

The Concours Group validated our conclusions with their study. Read the rest of this entry ¶

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The vast majority of projects involve a few people and take a few months. PMI and Prince seem to ignore that majority…but not Ron Rosenhead. Ron offers project management consulting and advice for accountants, attorney, librarians, and other professionals. He offers an approach based on a stripped-down version of Prince. Still, it may be more than these people need.

"Soft" is what makes projects successful.

Ron makes it easy for the motivated service professional to be successful with projects. He offers introductory material, a course-by-email, and an eBook, Deliver that Project. I've just finished reviewing the eBook. Attorneys and accountants will find it to be comprehensive. Most projects don't need more than Ron is advising.

I found one thing missing. Projects of all sizes and complexity depend on successful conversations for coordination. We act like conversations are the soft stuff of projects. For some reason "soft" is not important. Too bad. In my experience, "soft" is what makes projects successful. For those of you who are open to exploring the "soft" side of projects, have a look at these project meeting protocols. And, subscribe to Ron's email course while you're at it.

I read the following quote from Walter Bagehot in Time Magazine's end-of-year farewell to John Kenneth Galbraith.

"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea."

The quote reminds me of the theory-trap we are in with projects. So with this posting I am updating my Notes on the Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete.

While our tools are ever more sophisticated and there is more project management training, our project results languish. The new idea — projects are conducted in an unfolding network of commitments — challenges the very nature of what people do today in the project setting. The PMI is going to great lengths to teach people the old ideas.¹ In essence saying, "Just get good at doing what we've been telling you to do all along and your projects will come out just fine." Following that teaching with certification is producing a world-wide paradigm that is having the affect of blinding practitioners to alternative ideas (theories). In the face of that, the agilists are dealing with the pain of their new ideas; so are those adopting lean construction. Read the rest of this entry ¶

1. The PMI is succeeding. Membership has swelled from under 100,000 in 2002 to over 300,000 going into 2007. Attendance at conferences is at an all time high. And a cottage industry including top universities has grown to prepare project managers for the certification, CPM®. [ ⇑ back ]

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Progressive Project Delivery is the name of ENR's special report in the November 13, 2006 issue. They highlight a number of "leading practices" including an innovative approach to contracting for the 2012 London Olympics. But sandwiched between the story on the Olympics and another on a program to build or remodel 70 Greenville schools is the announcement of a service for "setting up and managing critical path method schedules and updating them monthly." The service is offered by Quality Planning Solutions, Inc. (QPS), a subsidiary of the construction powerhouse Turner Construction.

I don't know anyone who would say, "Thankfully we had a CPM schedule that we always kept up to date." Rather, the not-so-secret dirty little secret is that project teams ignore the CPM schedule. I've written extensively on CPM scheduling. Here's one of my favorites CPM: What Do You Prefer?

Good luck QPS and their clients. Let's hope they find real value.

Create the situation on your project where people will speak.

Project slippages happen on all types of projects. Johanna Rothman, writing for Projects @ Work, offers advice in her article You're Slipping. As usual, Johanna offers practical advice. While she is writing about software projects, projects of all types are more alike than they are not. There's plenty to learn from software and from Johanna. Have a look.

Here's my additional advice: create the situation on your project where people will speak. In most cases, someone on the project has at least had an inkling that something was not going right. Too often the environment is not right for raising the concern…for whatever reasons. When we create the situation for speaking and then we listen we will get the most advance notice that some action is required. In the end it results in less slippage.

Silence Fails, a research endeavor by David Maxwell, Vital Smarts, finds that projects suffer when team members fail to have the crucial conversations they need to have. Projects @ Work picked up the research writing about it in Crucial Conversations.

"One of the keys to successful project management is holding the right conversations on the right issues at the right times."

The article identifies five conversations that project teams need to have to be successful. The findings are the result of research Maxwell did starting with people standing in line. He first asked people what would they do if someone cut in front of them in line. 95% said they would speak up. Then Maxwell secretly watched the same people as someone cut them in line. Surprisingly, the majority didn't say anything. With further research Maxwell identified five crucial conversations that could make a difference on projects. Read the rest of this entry ¶

This month and next I will be speaking about the subject of my coming book. I start this week on a concall with project managers from Jones Lang LaSalle. Frankly, I'm a little intimidated. I've got so much I can speak about, but only one hour to do so. I really don't know what I'll do. Except, I had to submit slides last night. Won't they be surprised! I understand it will be taped. I'll share it if I'm able.

This is the year of the language action perspective for project management. IGLC researchers have been exploring underlying theory of projects seriously for the last 7 years. The discussion appeared to be reaching a conclusion earlier this year with Glenn Ballard's and Lauri Koskela's paper, "Should project management be based on theories of economics or production?" for Building Research and Information. Greg Howell and I concluded that project management (in general) shouldn't be based on either. We wrote our paper to answer what should it be based on. Then, I invited Fernando Flores to speak to the IGLC. As it turned out, Greg ceded our time for presenting our paper to Fernando so he could speak longer. Our paper was not presented. I'll do my best to pres