OR/MS Today - April 2001 - Was It Something I Said?

OR/MS Today - April 2001

Was ItSomething I Said?

The Art of Project Management

By Vijay Mehrotra

About a year ago, I bought a charming old house. The place has lots of character, has survived a couple of major earthquakes and is in a quiet, eclectic urban neighborhood.

There is an awful lot of work to do on the house. It is definitely A Big Project. We have identified a long list of needs and wants for the house, and we are currently slogging our way through Phase I ("Stop the Damage").

I sort of understand what needs to be done. There are a whole lot of different gerunds to deal with: patching, painting, trimming, upgrading, caulking, refinishing and a whole lot more. Over the last few months, we have had a plumber, an electrician, a couple of painters, a locksmith and a plethora of others come through the house. There is visible progress.

There is just one problem.

It's our general contractor, who I will call "Rich." He returns calls slowly if at all, routinely misses appointments and often shows up late. You never really know how long things will take and only a vague understanding of the associated costs.

Then, every once in a while out of the blue, Rich will call to say that he and the crew are ready to roll. He asks what we want done next, throws out an estimate, and promises us they will be there tomorrow. Before you know it, they are here, working furiously, tackling challenges and rapidly getting the work done.

When Rich's crew is here working, all is right with our world. We joke with the carpenters, resolve small issues as they arise and revel in the improvements. We imagine the end of the "Stop the Damage" period and the beginning of Phase II ("A Better Life"). We dare to smile and hope.

You might ask why we put up with Rich. This is a fair question. The reality is that he and his team are very skilled at dealing with myriad issues associated with old houses, and they solve hard problems well. Combined with a serious shortage of good tradespeople in our area, these special capabilities are what hold our relationship together.

Yet I often wonder how much Rich could grow his business - and his customers' satisfaction! - if he could just master the black art of project management. There is also a cruel, amusing irony in my frustrations.

You see, project managers are high on my list of pet peeves. While the typical PM has little to do on the project - no models to build, no code to de-bug, no systems to integrate, no training to deliver, no data quality issues to grapple with - this person has a huge amount to do with the project.

The PM is supposed to be on top of things. This person creates and tracks the project schedule, manages resource assignments, communicates status out to senior management and controls the budget. Indeed, much of their job is to squeeze the variability out of a world of interrelated tasks that are loaded with both uncertainties and dependencies.

Consequently, this person is often in your face demanding things like "what percentage of this would you say is done?" and "how confident are you that this will be running by Friday?" These are tough questions, especially when the original time frames and assumptions may have had little to do with the specific complexities of what you are doing.

Practitioners, think about your last project. How were the scope, schedule and staffing defined? Did those decisions have anything to do with the tasks at hand, or were they driven by external factors such as budgeted dollars, executive sponsor's wishes or political horsetrading? Who created the initial project plan, and where did the time estimates come from? Just think about it.

To be fair, this PM gig has big downsides. The PM is on the hook for the overall outcome, regardless of the would-haves, could-haves and should-haves. It is terribly stressful to have your own success be determined by whether or not other people do their jobs correctly, cooperatively and on time. And making initial time estimates - which get negotiated to death along the way - is hard.

Good OR analysts who play a significant role on a larger project often have needs that overwhelm the PM. Why? Because our work almost always involves touching a lot of other points: data suppliers, customers of output, maintainers of constraints and business rules. As we interact with other parties, our models will almost always evolve, as will other parties' understanding of what we are doing.

I wouldn't want it any other way, because this is how we add huge value. But if the PM doesn't step up to enable us to succeed, then we often have no choice but to dive in to solving the project puzzle ourselves.

Consequently, you will often find yourself in a spot where you need to assert some PM skills. You'll learn a huge amount and you'll be well positioned to make sure things gets managed better the next time around. But be forewarned that if you show any aptitude at all you will soon face great pressure to put on the PM hat yourself - and this hat doesn't come off easily.

Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are good project managers. What's the secret? Check out "Born to Lead Projects," by Kathleen Melymuka [Computerworld, 3/27/2000]. In this excellent article, she cites several characteristics (courage and honesty, listening skills, ability to motivate, a collaborative mindset, a willingness to learn continuously) from my list of gotta-haves.

Anyway, I am going to have a tough time finding a contractor around here whose crew is as skilled as Rich's team. So it looks like I'm the PM on this one - and I'm going to have to develop some of those skills myself. Stay tuned.

Vijay Mehrotra (vijay@onward-net.com) is the CEO of Onward Inc., in Mountain View, Calif.

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