Systemic and Systematic Project Management

Joseph Eli Kasser

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429664748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Gestione di progetti in ingegneria

This book applies systems thinking to treat project management in a systemic and systematic manner from a problem-solving perspective. Considering the project as a system, the book discusses traditional project planning and organizing, as well as some neglected aspects of the project, namely how to prevent cost and schedule escalation, how to deal with change, recognize problems in time to prevent project failure and what to do when things go wrong during the implementation states of a project.

This book provides you with a better understanding of the systems approach to problem-solving and project management that will enable you to be more successful at managing projects.

Features

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• Treats projects as systems
• Presents project management as a problem-solving paradigm
• Discusses how to incorporate prevention into planning and how to show the value
• Describes what to do and how to cope with unanticipated problems that arise during the project implementation state
• Introduces new tools and techniques

1 Introduction

The best book on the current process-based management paradigm that I’ve read is one that I purchased for $0.50 about 20 years ago in the Montgomery County, Maryland, library used book sale. The book was published in 1917 and reprinted in 1920 and it was Volume 6 of a factory management course. The title of the book does not contain the word management; the title is Executive Statistical Control (Farnham 1920) and it deals with management from the following perspectives:

1. Financial.
2. Making decisions based on facts instead of hunches or opinions.
3. Treating employees fairly and decently.
4. The efficient use of labour.

About the only major change to management that came after the book was published was the Gantt chart that showed project timelines and how the timelines changed during the reporting period on a single chart (Clark 1922).

The current project management paradigm does not seem to work too well because in spite of all the textbooks¹ and courses, projects still tend to fail. The reasons for these failures are well known, yet continue to manifest themselves; an instance of Cobb’s Paradox (VOYAGES 1996). Cobb’s Paradox states, ‘We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure; so why do they still fail?’ Now a paradox is a symptom of a flaw in understanding the underlying paradigm. Perhaps Juran and Deming provided the remedy:

• 80%–85% of all organizational problems (Juran quoted by Harrington (1995)).
• 94% of the problems belong to the system, i.e. were the responsibility of management (Deming 1993).

Peter Drucker wrote that management in the 21st century would be different (Drucker 2011). This book discusses a different project management paradigm; project management as a problem-solving methodology using the systems approach.

The systems approach is a technique for the application of a scientific approach to complex problems. It concentrates on the analysis and design of the whole, as distinct from the components or the parts. It insists upon looking at a problem in its entirety, taking into account all the facets and all the variables, and relating the social to the technological aspects

Ramo (1973)

This book:

• Provides you with a better understanding of the systems approach to problem-solving and project management, which will enable you to be more successful at managing projects.
• Treats project management as a problem-solving paradigm.
• Shows how to incorporate prevention into planning and show the value of prevention.
• Shows how the tools described in The Systems Thinker’s Toolbox (Kasser 2018) can be applied to project management.²
• Shows how to cope with unanticipated problems that arise during the project implementation state.
• Is based on more than 40 years of research and experience.
• Integrates many published and invented tools and techniques into a practical methodology.
• Applies systems thinking to treat project management in a systemic and systematic manner from a problem-solving perspective.
• Considers a project as a system.
• Divides project management into pure project management, applied project management and domain project management which identifies the reasons for the opinion that a project manager can manage any type of project, and identifies the situational fallacy in that opinion.
• Picks up where the Systems Thinker’s Toolbox (Kasser 2018) ended for project managers.
• Incorporates new project monitoring tools including categorized requirements in process (CRIP) charts and enhanced traffic light (ETL) charts from the book The Systems Thinker’s Toolbox (Kasser 2018).
• Provides examples of how the tools are used.
• Provides examples of good and bad resumes in the section on staffing a project to show what to look for when considering candidates for staffing a project.
• Provides a list of acronyms in Table 1.1 to help you read the book.

1.1 The Contents of This Book

This book discusses systemic and systematic project management. The systemic aspects in Chapters 2, 3, 4, 12 and 13 help you conceptualize and understand project management. The systematic aspects in the middle chapters help you to become a better project manager.

Chapter 2 explains the seven P’s of project management: people, politics, prevention, problems, processes and products which must be managed (or juggled) to achieve the objectives of a project.

TABLE 1.1
Acronyms Used in the Book

Chapter 3 deals with problems and problem-solving. If a problem didn’t need solving there wouldn’t be any need for management. The chapter discusses perceptions of problem-solving process from a number of perspectives, explains the structure of problems and the levels of difficulty posed by problems and the need to evolve solutions using an iterative approach. After showing that problem-solving is really an iterative causal loop rather than a linear process, the chapter then explains complexity, and how to use the systems approach to manage complexity. The chapter then shows how to remedy well-structured problems and how to deal with ill-structured, wicked and complex problems using iterations of a sequential two-stage problem-solving process. Reflecting on this chapter, it seems that iteration is a common element in remedying any kind of problem other than easy well-structured problems irrespective of their structure.

The purpose of management is to accomplish a goal by getting other people to do the work. Chapter 4 discusses management, general management and project management, and how to accomplish that goal. After a brief discussion on general management, the chapter focuses on the attributes of projects and project management as a problem-solving activity.

Successful projects are planned. Chapter 5 focuses on product-based planning, the project and system lifecycles and planning methodologies. The chapter discusses plans, the difference between generic and project-specific planning, explains how to incorporate prevention into the planning process to lower the completion risk and shows how to apply work packages (WPs) instead of work breakdown structures (WBS). The chapter also explains why planning should iterate from project start to finish at the conceptual level and project finish back to start at the detailed level.

Because projects are staffed by people, Chapter 6 discusses aspects of staffing projects, teams and distributing assignments to members of the project team. The chapter explains:

1. The need for high-performance teams.
2. That people are not interchangeable; namely, one engineer does not necessarily equal another.
3. How to staff a project.

Chapter 7 explains planning and adhering to schedules, an important function of project management since exceeding schedule is one of the characteristics of failed projects. Consequently, it is important to get the right schedule for the project. Accordingly, Chapter 7 explains:

1. How to create the project network.
2. How to create a project schedule.
3. The critical path and its importance.
4. The fallacy in slack time in fixed resource situations.

Chapter 8 explains that project managers need to estimate ...