John is trying to convey to senior management the actual extent of the Project managers duties
and valuable post controls are. With the iterative nature of this project, it is key to manage the
backlog and ensure that problems are resolved regularly before they compound into future
releases. This technical debt needs to be resolved before the new project can start. Senior
management needs to appreciate that specialized resources are not interchangeable and often
have limited availability. He goes on to debunk myths such as the mythical man month in trying
to bring more resources to initiate or scale the project. The PMs are more expensive resources
but they deliver significant value to the organization, especially when it comes to project
monitoring and controls. This is exemplified by how John worries that the new PM will have to
do a lot of coordinating and micromanaging, indicating that this project relies heavily on
monitoring and controls in order to be successful.
Initially this case deals with the issues of the roles of Project Managers being poorly defined. We
see them picking up more functional and operational roles. This inefficient use of the Project
Manager’s time has caused an issue within the organization as PM’s actual extent duties going
beyond the substantial project completion leaving them subject to projectitis. This was
compounded by the ineffective architecture of communication channels which was creating a
bottleneck at the PM. Without the reorganization, properly defining these communication
channels would alleviate some the issues with regards to use of PM’s time.
The business needs to scale in order to deliver value and add capabilities, however to quote
Fundamental Law of Scaling “Scaling up amplifies the bad and makes the good more difficult”.
In this case we the PM being stuck in a support feedback loop preventing him from performing
actual PM duties of applying best PMI practices to the projects. As the business scales these
issues will be propagated as communication channels and integration points increase.
With regards to the reorganization, the addition of the Help Desk aided with the increase in
managerial and technical resources to free some of the PM’s time spent during his role as a
communicator, however they still bear the burden of coordinating the communication channels.
Prioritization of resolving the issues related to support was a major benefit with the
reorganization as seen with the addition of the bug support team and help desk as well as
outsourced engineering. This allowed resources to be dedicated to a known issue and can be
view as efficient resource allocation. However, whilst outsourcing brought in additional
resources it did not eliminate the risk associated with knowledge transfer as there still bottleneck
between the Help Desk and the Project Managers. There organization needs to come up with a
comprehensive risk management plan which allows for mitigation of risk when the PM is not
available to provide reference for support tasks. This mitigation action is often more effective
than trying to repair the damage after the threat has occurred.
The use of agile controls could have greatly assisted the project without reorganizing. Clearly
defined release boundaries with the use of tools such as Kanban boards, WIP limits and cross
training teams would have been effective at limiting the PMs usage in a support role and provide
better backlog management. Activities such as Retrospective sprint among the teams could have
assisted with knowledge retention which is crucial to this project.
We thought it was crucial that the Bluedogs develop a maturity model that retains knowledge
without outsourcing as this would limit the number of communication channels and integration
point that would develop as the business scales. Ensuring continuous improvement as well as
developing roles such as program and portfolio managers would assist when adding future
capabilities.