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How to Fail in Project
Management
(Without Really Trying)
Jeffrey Pinto and Om Kharbanda
Business Horizons, July-Aug 96
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How to fail in project mgmt (1)
 1. Ignore the project environment (including stakeholders)
 2. Push a new technology to market too quickly

3. Don’t bother building in fallback options
 4. When problems occur, shoot the one most visible
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How to fail in project mgmt (2)
 5. Let new ideas starve to death from inertia

6. Don’t bother conducting feasibility studies
 7. Never admit a project is a failure
 8. Over manage project managers and their teams
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How to fail in project mgmt (3)
 9. Never, never conduct post failure reviews
 10. Never bother to understand project trade-off
 11. Allow political expediency and infighting to dictate crucial project decisions
 12. Make sure the project is run by a weak leader
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Class Discussion
 Which rule is the best?
 Which rule is ignored most often?
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Industrial-Strength
Management Strategies
Norm Brown
IEEE Software July 96
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SPMN
 Http://spmn.com
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Software Management
Framework
 Identify and correct defects and potential problems early
 Plan and estimate
 Minimize rework caused by uncontrolled change
 Make effective use of your people
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Nine Principal
Best Practices (1)
 Formal Risk Management
 Agreement on Interfaces
 Formal Inspections
 Metric-based scheduling and management
 Binary quality gates at the inch-pebble level
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Nine Principal
Best Practices (2)
 Program-wide visibility of progress vs plan
 Defect tracking against quality targets
 Configuration management
 People-aware management accountability
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Project Control Panel
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Conclusions

“Most people know that productivity must be increased”
 authentic commitment
 risk in breakthrough projects gives high possible payback
 online “group memory”
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L7bS13 - Group Discussion
 Which approach or advice is most important? – from CMM, “How to fail …”, or SPMN
 Justify your position
 Answers due Wed, 6/27
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The Mythical Man-Month
Fred Brooks, Jr, classic paper and book
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Why disaster? (1)

“techniques of estimating are poorly developed”

“estimating techniques .. confuse effort with progress”
 managers don’t make people wait for quality
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Why disaster? (2)

“schedule progress is poorly monitored”

“when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manapower. … this makes matters worse”
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