The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance

Agile, Waterfall and Beyond

Mark Phillips, Mark Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351974882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Practitioners operate in a necessary reality. We work in a space where project performance is above theory or methodology. In the best environments, delivery and an affirmative culture are what matter most. In the worst, it is politics and survival. In any environment we are challenged to adopt best practices and adapt our style to the environment in which the project is occurring. This is a book about those best practices and practitioner experiences. It is a must have reference and guide book for project managers, general managers, business leaders and project management researchers.

This book is the result of the hard work and dedication of more than 35 authors from more than 15 countries across four continents. It brings a diversity of experience, professional and personal. It includes practitioners, leading academics, renowned theorists and many who straddle those roles. The chapters cover experiences in software, large scale infrastructure projects, finance and health care, to name a few. The chapters themselves take many forms. Check out the table of contents to get a deeper sense of the topics included. All provide real-world guidance on delivering high performing projects and show you how to build, lead and manage high performing teams.

The Practitioners Handbook of Project Performance is complete in itself. It can also be an enticing start to an ongoing dialogue with the authors and a pleasurable path to get deeper into the subject of project performance. Find your favorite place to begin learning from these chapters, to begin taking notes and taking away nuggets to use in your everyday. But don't stop there. Contact information and further resources for this diverse team of experts authors are found throughout. The Practitioners Handbook is a modern guide to the leading edge of project performance management and a path to the future of project delivery.

Section II

Processes, tools and techniques

Chapter 6

Performance

A combined project and portfolio perspective

Jamal Moustafaev

Case study: The new Ashgabat airport

On September 17th, 2016, the president of Turkmenistan Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov officially opened a new US 2.3 billion-dollar ultra-modern Ashgabat International Airport shaped in a form of a falcon. The entire complex is comprised of 190 buildings spread on a 1,200-hectare site. The airport is designed to handle up to 17 million passengers (remember that number!) combined with 200,000 tons of cargo every year.

At the opening ceremony, the president claimed that Turkmenistan has “all the opportunities to become a transport bridge facilitating economic cooperation between Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and South Asia”. He also added that the new airport was needed to accommodate a massive influx of tourists eager to visit Turkmenistan.

The official position of Turkmenistan is understandable since the country’s income has heavily depended on the export of natural gas. As a result of plunging energy prices and foreign currency shortages, the government is now forced to develop the tourism and transportation sectors of the economy.

There is, however, an array of problems associated with the new Turkmen initiative. For starters, due to very restrictive visa regulations the country has been visited by anywhere between 7,000 (if you choose to believe World Bank) and 100,000 tourists (if you prefer to rely on official Turkmen government reports). For comparison, neighboring Kazakhstan had 4.5 million visitors, while Kyrgyzstan saw more than 2.8 million tourists in 2014.

Here is an additional compilation of facts about Turkmenistan if you are planning to visit that country anytime soon:

• Turkmenistan Airlines’ air tickets for flights are not sold over the Internet. They promised to initiate that program by 2015 but failed to do so.
• Turkmen entry visa is one of the most expensive ones in the world, and it is almost impossible to obtain.
• You can’t rent a car in Ashgabat.
• You can’t walk with a camera around the city and, God forbid, you decide to take pictures of the government buildings.
• Internet access is limited and all of the popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Viber and others are blocked.
• Democracy index – 162nd place out of 167.
• Press Freedom – 178th place out of 180.

On the bright side, Ashgabat holds a Guinness World Record for the highest density of white marble-clad buildings as well as the largest indoor Ferris wheel.

So far, the official Ashgabat has not undertaken any steps to either address the tourism-related problems outlined above or initiate any trade deals to attract any transportation companies.

Was this project a success or a failure? On one hand it was completed (to the best of our knowledge) on-time and on-budget while delivering the entire planned scope. So, there should be no complaints to the project manager. However, on the other hand it completely failed to deliver the value it was expected to realize. This project is unlikely to assist in any way to bring more tourists into the country due to the above-mentioned reasons. Also, its capacity exceeds the potential demand by a wide margin. As a result, we will have to agree that while this project was a resounding success from a project management point of view, it was a failure from the project portfolio management perspective. In other words, it was a very bad idea, albeit implemented on-time and on-budget. Formulaically this phenomenon can be expressed in the following manner:

$$Succes{s}_{PM}+Failur{e}_{PPM}=Failure$$

Keeping this particular story in mind, let us now try to define a project, study industry statistics, examine the opinions of industry’s thought leaders on the subject and try to define our own understanding of project success and failure.

What is a project?

This is a seemingly simple question, at least, for a certified project manager. After all, we all know that a project is an “endeavor that has a definite start and an end, undertaken to deliver a unique product a service”. Usually this definition is followed by a couple of illustrative examples:

• Creation of the first prototype of the Formula One car is a project since it does have a defined start, an end and produces a unique product.
• Mass production of, say, canned soup is not a project, since while it has a defined start it does not have a defined end. Also, thousands of cans can’t be considered a unique product since all of them are identical.

Another aspect of the project definition that started to be mentioned fairly recently is “value”. It is now implied that any temporary endeavor undertaken by a company must inherently strive to deliver some type of value to the organization. As a result of that the definition of project can be summed up as:

“An endeavor that has a definite start and an end, undertaken to create a unique product or service and to deliver value to the organization”.

Having defined the essence of the project, let us now discuss the next set of questions:

• What are the domains of project vs portfolio management?
• What is project performance?
• How do we measure project performance?
• What is a successful project?
• What is a troubled project?
• What is a failed project?

Project vs portfolio management

Before we proceed further in this chapter, let us try to define the domains of both project management and project portfolio management. My purpose here is to provide the readers with a brief overview of both fields without going too deep in either subjects. First, I assume that the readers of this handbook already know the answers to these questions and second, plenty of reading materials can be found on the web including a recent book by yours truly titled Project Portfolio Management in Theory and Practice: Thirty Case Studies from around the World.

What is project management?

Project management is the practice of delivering projects on-time and on-budget by initiating, planning, monitoring, controlling and closing them. A project manager achieves that by focusing on the following knowledge areas (see Table 6.1):

Table 6.1 Overview of project management

• Project integration management
• Project scope management
• Project time management
• Project quality management
• Project cost management
• Project risk management
• Project human resources management
• Project communications management
• Project stakeholder management and
• Project procurement management

The idea here is that in general a project manager attempts to deliver the project product or service while trying to respect all of the above-mentioned constraints. He or she, as a rule, does not question the value of the project at hand or does not get involved in its selection, prioritization and approval. Those three functions fall into the domain of project portfolio management.

What is project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management is defined as a methodology for analyzing, selecting and collectively managing a group of current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics, while honoring constraints imposed by management or external real-world factors.

The three key requirements that portfolio management professionals impose on every candidate are:

• Each project, as well as the portfolio of projects, should maximize th...