The Power of the Pen(cil)
Every PM has to have a pencil – if for no other reason than he/she has to take lunch orders sometimes. My pencil is one of those big carpenter pencils with an equally big eraser on the end. Point is: no matter what you write down, chances are good it will need to change. This may surprise some folks, especially business managers who want to make funding decisions using pens with indelible ink . . .
Early in my career I was exposed to the idea that software can be developed in an orderly and sequential step-wise fashion – kind of like a river inevitably making it’s way down to the sea. Oh, mis-spent youth! Few development projects actually work that way. Roller coaster is probably a better model than a “waterfall” to characterize the ups and downs of real and complex projects.
The reasons cover the map (and the track): business needs change; team members change; our understanding and appreciation of the technology challenges change; and so on. Trouble is: we have to justify the project to get priority and funding and that requires something that at least appears more predictable.
Hence, the need for the pencil and especially the eraser: by using a pencil I seek to reinforce the idea and the expectation that we don’t know what we don’t know and until we do (at the end of a phase we call Elaboration) everything is just a projection. This actually raises an interesting point: the word Project. Literally, it means “throw forward”. What we throw around varies by project manager of course but it illustrates the very uncertain nature of projects.
To learn what it is we don’t know and to reduce the risk of projecting in error we must elaborate our understanding of both the functional requirements as well as the technology and architectural capabilities. Furthermore, we must come to know what this project team using this technology and building this application is capable of. And, the only way to learn these things is to do them in small, carefully scoped subsets of activity designed to expose the unknowns and turn them into relative knowns. This produces the estimating factors based on real experience in a specific context that are then used to project (more accurately) the full development costs for the project.
But, keep the eraser handy – its still just a project-ion after all!
(guest post by my friend and pm Bob Cimprich - Thanks, Bob!)
Posted on Thursday, December 29, 2005 at 05:41PM
by
Larry Cone
in Project Manager Tools
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Larry Cone
in Project Manager Tools
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