Project management

With special attention to speculative and innovative projects

2021-03-22 — 2024-09-24

communicating
distributed
economics
faster pussycat
game theory
incentive mechanisms
innovation
institutions
mind
networks

Making projects happen via a combination of institutional affordances and teamwork. I am especially interested in innovative/research/invention, which by design have a different structure than something more reasonably routine and repeatable, such as building a house.

Figure 1: My experience of project management: when the client asks you to row them somewhere and you fail to manage scope creep

1 Estimating

Figure 2: ErrantScience: are one of the few charts that are entirely made from wishful thinking

The Planning Fallacy, project overruns, amelioration strategies, and pathologies of queueing theory

Erik Bernhardsson, Why software projects take longer than you think has a neat statistical essay with some basic statistics which nonetheless produce some non-intuitive results for time management. Segue into queueing theory.

David R. MacIver, How to think about task estimation

Ben Brostoff, in Strategies for Long Projects, proposes that a certain kind of “irrational” optimism is the rational attitude to doing big things.

The Planning Fallacy: Predicting Times and Costs

Hofstader’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law

There are some handy keywords to find citations for here: This Is Why Your Projects Always Take Longer Than You Expect.

2 Empirically informed

This field is full of MBAs citing anecdata. How much empirical statistically meaningful study is there of efficient organisations actually? I am sure there is some research here, behind the protective chaff of Business school glossy reports.

3 Solo

See time management.

4 Overruns

Related: Development hell.

Bert Hubert argues How Many Hours for Multithreading the Server?

WHY is someone asking you for such detailed estimates? Do they really care if it takes you 1 hour to do the ACLs and 120 hours to do the multi-threaded architecture or the other way around? Often the person asking you for estimates doesn’t even know what these things are!

No, a major reason why they are asking this stuff is to give you lots of rope to hang yourself with. For them, it is a big covering of asses exercise. Because if you go faster than you scheduled, it is your issue (‘this guy has been overbilling us!’). If you go slower, it is DEFINITELY your issue. If part of the project was easier, but another part was harder, it is still your problem (‘he missed the deadline for the layout demo but he mumbled something about the ACLs being ready!’).

Another major reason is that by having YOU be very detailed, it saves THEM from having to make any tough choices. You …

And this is where you turn the tables on the people with the spreadsheets.

Force THEM to commit to specific times and deliverables! If there are unanswered questions on the project (operating system? virtualised or not? database to use?), block on that. “I can’t plan unless I know what the work is!”. List ALL the things you need to know.

If they can’t answer that on the spot (and a project manager typically won’t be able to), ask them for an exact date when they CAN provide the answers.

To, appropriately enough, be continued later.

5 The simplest thing

Is hard.

Figure 3

6 Prioritisation

7 Tools

8 Incoming

9 References

Buehler, Griffin, and Ross. 1994. “Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy’: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Fisher, Donald L, and Goldstein. 1983. Stochastic PERT Networks as Models of Cognition: Derivation of the Mean, Variance, and Distribution of Reaction Time Using Order-of-Processing (OP) Diagrams.” Journal of Mathematical Psychology.
Fisher, Donald L., Saisi, and Goldstein. 1985. Stochastic PERT Networks: OP Diagrams, Critical Paths and the Project Completion Time.” Computers & Operations Research.
Klug, and Bagrow. 2016. Understanding the Group Dynamics and Success of Teams.” Royal Society Open Science.
Lenfle. 2014. Toward a Genealogy of Project Management: Sidewinder and the Management of Exploratory Projects.” International Journal of Project Management.
Moder, Phillips, and Davis. 1983. Project management with CPM, PERT, and precedence diagramming.
Sornette, Maillart, and Ghezzi. 2014. How Much Is the Whole Really More Than the Sum of Its Parts? 1 ⊞ 1 = 2.5: Superlinear Productivity in Collective Group Actions.” PLoS ONE.
Vázquez, Oliveira, Dezsö, et al. 2006. Modeling Bursts and Heavy Tails in Human Dynamics.” Physical Review E.