Welcome to On a Back of an Envelope – an alternative view on Project Management. Here you will find a mix of humour, commentary and project management information that will both inform and entertain.
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Fred Brooks was a distinguished American computer architect, software engineer and computer scientist whose major career achievement was managing the development of IBM’s System/360 family of computers and its OS/360 system software. The experiences gained inspired him to write The Mythical Man-Month – an essential read for every aspiring project manager. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. He goes on to say that the hypothetical unit of work done by one person in one month is a myth and this is often quoted as Brooks’ Law.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
He pointed out that complex software programming projects often cannot be divided into smaller discrete tasks that can be worked on by individuals without establishing complex communication between them. Indeed, some tasks cannot be subdivided at all and have an inherent duration that cannot be significantly reduced by increasing the number of people working on them. He summed this up thus:
Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.
In his book he also posed the question, How does a large software project get to be one year late? The answer is “One day at a time!”. Incremental slippages eventually accumulate to produce large overall delays and so attention to meeting small individual milestones is needed during all aspects of any project.
Whilst many of his other observations are more applicable to the specialist tasks around IT systems development the takeaways for us are:
Throwing resources at a project that is falling behind will not always deliver the outcomes you desire. Onboarding and training new resources takes time and managing larger teams generates its own complexities.
Some tasks cannot be completed more quickly however much effort is applied.
There should be no surprises when someone announces that a project is significantly behind schedule. A project that is a year late has had 365 opportunities for remedial actions to be taken.
Sir Robert Watson-Watt was a British scientist and a pioneer of radar technology in the lead up to the Second World War. Often mistakenly referred to as the inventor of radar he took what was an embryo technology to create a practical system to detect aircraft. This became the Chain Home network of radar stations which ran along the length of Britain’s east coast and was an important part of the country’s air defence contributing to the RAF’s 1940 victory in the Battle of Britain.
A notable aspect of his character was his pragmatism – he was a realist and he rejoiced in what he termed ‘the cult of the imperfect’. His view when delivering to his government and military masters was:
Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late; the best never comes
These days we might use the more succinct aphorism, ‘Perfect is the enemy of good’.
The adoption of Agile development within project management is often thought of as a modern invention following the publishing of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 but Watson-Watt’s approach shows us that he fully understood Agile principles even if he wouldn’t have labelled them as such.
He and his team would create a prototype to produce what we would describe as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – a version of the product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future development. An MVP will create a product with minimal resources quickly to gain early feedback reducing wasted effort, accelerate learning and gain customer/user engagement. The first successful demonstration of aircraft detection by radio waves bouncing off them was on the 26th February 1935 by Watson-Watt and Arnold Wilkins in a remote field in rural Northamptonshire using a very ‘Heath Robinson’ setup and where there is now a memorial plaque.
At the end of the war, Professor E.V. Appleton made a submission to the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors and said of Watson-Watt’s contribution to the development of radar, ‘…the biggest effort of all was being made by Watson-Watt in pleading, advocating, getting stores, masts and buildings. It was above all due to his drive and powerful advocacy that we had radar stations around our coast when war broke out… He had the vision of what it all implied, he just burned with it. [He] deserves a very substantial reward for his work in turning scientific radar into practical radar…
Today, we would recognise these qualities in every successful project manager.
An old lady walked into the bank, handed her bank card to the teller and said “I would like to withdraw £10”.
The teller told her “For withdrawals less than £100, please use the ATM”.
The old lady wanted to know why… The teller returned her bank card and irritably told her “These are the rules, please leave if there is no further matter. There is a line of customers behind you.”
The old lady remained silent for a few seconds and handed her card back to the teller and said “Please help me withdraw all the money I have”. The teller was astonished when she checked the account balance. She nodded her head, leaned down and respectfully told her “You have £1,300,000 in your account but the bank doesn’t have that much cash currently. Could you make an appointment and come back again tomorrow?”
The old lady then asked how much she could withdraw immediately. The teller told her any amount up to £3000. “Well please let me have £3000 now.” The teller kindly handed £3000 to her with a polite smile.
The old lady put £10 in her purse and asked the teller to deposit £2,990 back into her account.
Project Managers should never underestimate how users of the services we implement are wedded to familiar ways and see change as an inconvenience to be circumvented rather than an improvement. A poorly sited path which gets ignored in favour of walking a more direct across a grass lawn would be another simple example. Trialling a service or process with real users prior to implementation, the use of prototypes and encouraging opportunities for fast feedback (all part of an Agile mindset) will prevent many of these ‘own goals’.
Donald Rumsfeld was an American politician and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense in the Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations. Although not the originator of the concepts – known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – he brought this to popular attention.
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
The ideas are based on the Johari window. The Johari Window model is a simple and useful tool for illustrating and improving self-awareness, and mutual understanding between individuals within a group. The model is based on a 2 x 2 matrix that compares self and others versus known and unknown knowledge. Created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955. Luft and Ingham called their Johari Window model ‘Johari’ after combining their first names, Joe and Harry.
For us as project managers, known unknowns refers to risks that we can identify and need to track, and unknown unknowns are those risks which are unforeseeable and which have a habit of blind-siding even the most experienced of us.
Despite being the butt of much humour over the years, Rumsfeld named his autobiography Known and Unknown: A Memoir and in 2013 Errol Morris produced a biographical documentary about Rumsfeld entitled The Unknown Known.
