“Chunking Iraq” means looking at the Iraq war from a Project Manager’s perspective, and using the scope chunking technique to think about the project scope alternatives available to the war planners.

Last time we talked about different ways to Chunk a project into manageable bites. Some options were by geography; by interface; by user group; by benefits. Can we apply any of these to Iraq?

Limiting the scope of the effort geographically raises some interesting questions. Iraq has three distinct regions, with three distinct groups: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the middle, and Shiites in the south. The Kurds were already somewhat detached. The Shia in the south had risen in the aftermath of the first Gulf war. What if our invading forces stopped at, say, the Al Kut - Najaf line, and worked to consolidate the Shiite populace in the South into an independent state?

This goes against all military wisdom, leaving an enemy in the field in front of you. But it would give you a smaller, more homogenous “state” to pacify.

Could we have limited our scope by segment of Iraqi society? What if, upon toppling the organized military resistance, we removed the ruling elite that surrounded Saddam, but left as many institutions intact as possible? What if we didn’t disband the military and the police, and whatever was in place as local government? That would reduce scope by giving us less to rebuild, and more tools to do it with, particularly in the critical early going. It has been observed that organizations accustomed to taking orders will often continue to do so when the leadership changes.

What if we limited our scope by benefits or goals? The smallest stated goal was eliminating Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. We now know that that goal was already in place, as sanctions had worked, and he had no WMD. Have you worked on projects that had as stated goals the remediation of problems that were in fact not problems to many stakeholders? I have.

Our next goal in scope was deposing the bloody dictator, friend to terrorists, and freeing the Iraqi people. Could that goal have been accomplished while keeping more of Iraqi society intact, thus reducing the rebuilding effort? Would putting in place a dictator more aligned with our interests work? We have certainly done this in the past, with the Shah coming to mind.

Our ultimate goal, in terms of scope, is creating a free and democratic Iraqi society, as a beacon of hope and democracy in the Middle East. This requires three groups of people who have been in armed struggle for over a thousand years to live together peaceably. It requires them to accept an unfamiliar form of government from an enemy power, and to maintain the stability of the state in the middle of the most turbulent area on the globe.

As a PM, I’d want a trillion dollars over several generations to deliver that result. And I wouldn’t bid it fixed price.