IT project managers: The quick and the dead

It’s going to come down to project management.

Forget what you thought you knew about the subject. Thanks to the maneuver warfare that modern business has become, it’s now the single most important discipline in the enterprise. And it’s been stood on its head. Cost and quality are no longer your priorities; nowadays it’s all about flexibility and speed.

The cost-conscious approach to IT

Once upon a time in the subset of business known as IT, we thought there was such a thing as an IT project. We were wrong, of course, but we had a lot of company.

Just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing: A project is a collection of tasks involving multiple individuals and organized to deliver tangible products within a specified time period. Responsibilities that are undertaken by one person, deliver nothing tangible, or have no deadline may exhibit projectlike properties, but they aren’t projects.

To improve any business function, including project management, you have to know what “improve” means. You have to rank the following six parameters in order of importance: fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality (absence of defects), and excellence (in this context, flexibility and adaptability). As a practical matter, once you’ve ranked the top three, you’re done. Do what you can to improve those, and let the others take care of themselves.

Traditionally, so-called IT projects emphasized incremental cost, fixed cost, and quality. In other words, keep the cost per unit of work low (however you measured a unit of work), keep project management overhead low, and by the way, keep the bug count down if you can. Cycle time, throughput, and excellence were left to their own devices — at least until now.

Projects: Agents of change

Putting project management into its proper context is essential, given the new IT mandate.

In any business, work falls into four broad categories:

• Operations, which takes care of what makes the company money right now.
• Support, which includes everything needed so that operations can do its job.
• Incremental change (aka enhancements), which enables the company to improve at what it does.
• Projects, which enable the organization to do something it wasn’t capable of before.

If we lived in a world where nothing ever changed, projects wouldn’t merely be unnecessary — they would be illegal. After all, at the end of every successful project, something new has been created, and the world isn’t quite the same.

But as you might have heard, here on Earth change happens all around us. If a business can’t keep up — if it can’t change at least as fast as its competitors do — the outcome is inevitable.

OODA loops: The maneuver warfare of business

This brings us to Colonel John Boyd and his signature invention, the OODA loop, which is the key to success in maneuver warfare, including the version we call business competition.

For the uninitiated, OODA stands for “observe, orient, decide, act.” It’s a loop because after you act, it’s time to observe again, for two reasons: First, to see if you got the expected results from your actions; if you didn’t, you just learned something that should improve future decisions. Two, if you don’t observe, you can’t orient and will have no knowledge of your current circumstances to use for your next decision.

In most competitions, the contestant with the fastest OODA loop wins because by the time the slower contestant acts, the situation isn’t what it was when it observed, oriented, and decided what actions to take. As a result, the contestant’s decision won’t fit current circumstances, and its actions will be misguided.

When the “act” portion of the OODA loop takes the form of a project, it’s always the slowest step — not just by increments, but by orders of magnitude. Even in the most evidence-driven, analytics-intensive organization, projects that come out of the decision-making effort take much longer than the other three steps combined.

Thus, to speed up your OODA loop, you have to finish projects faster. Cycle time just moved to the top of the priority list for project management optimization.

Next: In our OODA loop, “act” isn’t always simple enough to be satisfied by a single project. The implication: In addition to finishing individual projects quickly, IT — and the rest of the business — has to increase its total capacity for projects. In other words, we need more throughput.

Given that the whole point of undertaking projects is to increase the business’s flexibility and adaptability, excellence joins cycle time and throughput as the third parameter project management should be optimizing.

Next-generation project management

It’s a remarkable conclusion when you get right down to it. When it comes to managing the kinds of projects that keep the business competitive, the criteria that define “good” have been stood on their collective head. We’ve moved from a world in which cost and quality were what mattered most to one in which they’re relegated to afterthoughts.

Not that they’re unimportant — they still matter. They simply don’t matter as much as speed, capacity, and flexibility.

The question: Do your project managers understand just how radically their priorities have changed? If you have a project management office or program management office (PMO, either way), do the practices they recommend take this sea change into account?

Most haven’t. They’re what we might call “Fiddler on the Roof” organizations, trapped in Tradition, capital “T.” Only a relative few have figured out that while “Tradition” might make for a wonderful opening number, it has no place in the business top 10 list.

So if your company has a Fiddler PMO, you might want to send them a link to this column, suggesting they watch this space. Because next week we’ll start to talk about how project management has to change to adapt to its new priorities.

This story, “IT project managers: The quick and the dead,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.