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© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 1
Complexity, Systems and Project Management:Reconnecting PM to its Living Roots.
Dr Terry Cooke-DaviesExecutive ChairmanHuman Systems International
Used with Permission
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved
Today’s Presentation
2
PM’s birth in systems
Complexity theory’s birth in
systems
Evolution of PM
Evolution of artificial systems
Complexity & PM
Viewing PM thru complexity
theoryImplications & conclusions
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 3
Project Management Was Born In A World Of Systems
Atlas Program: 1954. Under leadership of General B. A. Schriever implemented management system to oversee and manage the development of the complete missile system. Specified concepts fundamental to all future project management.
Polaris Program: 1956/57. Under Admiral Raborn, the program developed Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) –one of the two sources (with Critical Path Method) of modern Critical Path Analysis.
Cleland and King’s 1968 Classic made the link explicit between the system (or product) being developed and the (management) system for controlling its development.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 4
General Systems Theory Promised Much... …
1. Frameworks Anatomy of universe, patterns of electrons in atom etc.
2. Clockworks Solar system, simple machines, railway locomotives etc.
3. Thermostats Control Mechanisms or Cybernetic Systems
4. Cells Open systems or self-maintaining structures.
5. Plants Differentiated and mutually dependent parts (roots, leaves, seeds, etc.); genotype and phenotype.
6. Animals Increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness.
7. Human Beings As (6) + self-consciousness.
8. Social Organizations Families, tribes, businesses, political systems etc.
9. Trascendental Systems The ultimates and absolutes and the inescapable unknowables.
Kenneth Boulding (1956) General Systems Theory: The Skeleton of Science.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 5
…But Theory And Practice Followed 3 Very Different Trajectories
Aligned during the 1950s and
1960s
General Systems Theory
Cybernetics
Project Management
Through Chaos to Complexity and…
Through Management Science & OR to…
Through Process & Credentials to …
Complex Adaptive Systems
“Soft” Systems Thinking
Current PM Practice
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 6
Different Types of System
A Systems Map of the Universe:
Adapted from Checkland P (1981). Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. Wiley, Chichester
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 7
Natural Systems Have Been Studied In Numerous Contexts in Different Branches of Science … … …
Source: René Doursat: LSE Seminar 26th June 2009
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved
Insights Relevant to PM.Non-Linearity• Sensitive dependence on original conditions (Lorenz 1961)• Catastrophe theory, Chaos theory, non-linear mathematics
Emergence• Flows through many strands of chaos and complexity theories.• Evolution leads to novelty
Evolution Leads to Increasing Complexity• Higher organisms more complex than lower ones.• Different environments support different adaptations – Co-opetition
Radical Uncertainty• Prigogine and “dissipative structures” (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1977)• Open systems: non-linear, dynamic, self-transforming
8
Source: Cooke-Davies et al (2007) “You’re not in Kansas Anymore, Toto”. Project Management Journal
99
0
50,000
100,000
150,000
200,000
250,000
300,000
1975 1985 1995 2005
Forty Years of Growth
302,167
1,000 5,27217,059
100,000(2002)
• Members in 171 countries• 250+ chapters• 30 SIGs, two colleges
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 11
Emphasis is Linear, Rational, Deterministic… … …
Finish
A B C
A B C
Start
Figure 6-2. Network Logic Diagram Using the Precedence Diagramming Method
Software ProductRelease 5.0
ProjectManagement
ProductRequirements
DetailDesign Construction Integration
and Test
Planning
Meetings
Administration
Software
UserDocumentation
Training ProgramMaterials
Software
UserDocumentation
Training ProgramMaterials
Software
UserDocumentation
Training ProgramMaterials
Software
UserDocumentation
Training ProgramMaterials
Figure 5-3. Sample Work Breakdown Structure Organized by Phase
This WBS is illustrative only. It is not intended to represent the full project scope of any specific project, nor to imply that this is the only way to organize a WBS on this type of project
InitiatingProcesses
PlanningProcesses
ControllingProcesses
ExecutingProcesses
ClosingProcesses
(Arrows represent flow of documents and documentable items
Figure 3-1. Links Among Process Groups in a Phase
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 13
Diverse Developments in Management Systems
Structured discussion(questions based on the models)
Find accommodations(not consensus)
Problematical situation(messy & complex)
Models of purposeful activity(modelling to learn)
12
3
4
Action to improve(not solutions)
Peter Checkland and others have been developing Soft Systems Methodology since the 1970s.
Jay Forrester and others have been developing System Dynamics since the 1960s, and it was popularised by Peter Senge in the 5th Discipline in the 1990s
Cybernetics and Operations Research has given rise to concepts such as Stafford Beer’s “Viable Systems Model”, and similar concepts employed in Systems Engineering.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 14
There Have Been Interesting Studies Relating “Hard” to “Soft” Approaches … …
Both in terms of the relationships between the two perspectives … …
… … and in terms of the underpinning philosophical positions.
Source of both diagrams: Michael Pidd (2004) Systems Modelling: Theory and Practice. London. John Wiley & Son.
INCISM: Interdisciplinary Research Network into Complimentarity in Systems Modelling.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 15
… And Each Has its Uses … …
Source of both diagrams: Michael Pidd (2004) Systems Modelling: Theory and Practice. London. John Wiley & Son.
… … depending upon the circumstances in which it is used … …
… … and its purpose at the time.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved
“Complexity” Enters PM Literature, e.g.
• Implies “Woven together” - Interdependence• Are “complex projects” a different “kind”?• This matters – Hacking’s “interactive kinds”
Differs from “Complicated”
• Structural uncertainty (number and relation of elements etc.)• Uncertainty (goals, methods)Williams (1999)
• Technical uncertainty• Array of people involved in decision-makingShenhar (2001)
• Dynamical systems complexity• Behavioural complexityHancock (2004)
• Social and behavioural complexity• Decision-making with differing interests, cultures, knowledge
Cicmil (2005 to 2009)
16
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 17
Categorizing for Complexity
Crawford, Hobbs & Turner, 2005
Attribute Count %1 Project scope 45 16.0%2 Technical complexity 39 13.8%3 Number of functions and skills 30 10.6%4 Organisational involvement 30 10.6%5 Level of ambiguity / uncertainty 27 9.6%6 Number of sites, locations, countries 26 9.2%7 Organisational impact 24 8.5%8 Clarity of goals / objectives 22 7.8%9 Risk source and location 15 5.3%
10 Familiarity 13 4.6%11 Standalone or component of larger project 11 3.9%
N = 282 100.0%
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 18
Management complexity (GAPPS)
Stability of the overall project context
Number of distinct disciplines, methods, or approaches involved
Magnitude of legal, social, or environmental implications
Overall expected financial impact on project stakeholders
Strategic importance of the project to the organisation or organisations involved
Number and variety of interfaces between the project and other organisational entities
For report on application of this categorization across projects globally, see Aitken, A. and Crawford, L.H. (2007) A study of project categorisation based on project management complexity. In: Proceedings of IRNOP VIII Conference, University of Sussex ,19-21 September 2007,
Brighton, UK: University of Sussex
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 19
Arguably all projects are complex
…if people are involved“Consider what happens in an
organisation when a rumour of reorganisation surfaces: the complex human system starts to mutate and change in unknowable ways; new patterns form in anticipation of the event.
On the other hand, if you walk up to an aircraft with a box of tools in your hand, nothing changes”
Snowdon, 2002
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 20
Viewing project management practice through a “complexity theory” lensMultiple participants in 30+ projects
USA, UK, Australia, FinlandEngineering, construction, IT & pharmaceutical R&D
Interested in illuminating:How project participants (PMs, team members, senior executives/sponsors; other stakeholders) perceive and experience ‘complexity’: unpredictability, power relations, ambiguity and change of plans over time, risk,.How is ‘project control’ enacted in practice? And what are the challenges? How do project practitioners understand planning in an indeterminate world?What is their experience with achieving a shared understanding of the project goal within a project coalition? What kind of ambiguity and equivocality practitioners face regarding criteria for qualifying projects as success or failure, and how do they cope with it?What do they do when they find themselves not being in control of projects?What are their experiences with integrating the project team: communication, cooperation, confidence and learning among project parties over the project’s life time?
Svetlana Cicmil et. al (2009) Exploring the Complexity of Projects: Implications of Complexity Theory for Project Management Practice. Project Management Institute..
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 21
Goals are equivocal, with multiple agendas.
“Did (the company) achieve a positive financial outcome? Yes. Was it was what they’d originally thought? No. Did the customer achieve their outcomes? Yes. Was it in the timeframe they’d hoped for? No. Overall the project will have been a success. It will probably cost a little more than it should have and probably taken a little more than it should.’ [PS-02: Project Sponsor]
There are gaps between what we communicated and the customer expectations. Although I find you can always cover more in the scope, in pre-sales, there are many implicit requirements and commitments that don’t necessarily get communicated in the scope documentation. This is where trust between companies comes in. There is not always enough time to clarify gaps, so the gaps stay there. Sometimes you never need to address those grey areas, but sometimes you do and if necessary you go into escalation. If we promise something and don’t deliver, everyone suffers. Expectations versus what is in writing is a problem. [PS – 01: Project manager]
Svetlana Cicmil et. al (2009) Exploring the Complexity of Projects: Implications of Complexity Theory for Project Management Practice. Project Management Institute..
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 22
Conversations take place with multiple agencies against a background of uncertainty
I know I cannot be in total control [of the project] and I have to renegotiate the original plan on a regular basis…being in charge of a project is not about control it is about how you engage with senior executives to shift the power relations through conversations … you want to use your CPM diagram and Gantt, to make your argument factual, believable, grounded in some, to them, distant but convincing project management technique…to trigger their confidence that you know what you are doing…[RR-BB-2]
Most people knew that this project was growing, some of the people from distribution began to understand the significance of this project. So it’s real hard to point to any one moment when somehow a light went off. If things happened, it’s a growing body of evidence, and growing insight and understanding that builds up to this, at these critical moments that you decide you need to do something. At that point a decision was made that we needed to do a [fundamental review of the project]. [PS – 31: Project sponsor]
Svetlana Cicmil et. al (2009) Exploring the Complexity of Projects: Implications of Complexity Theory for Project Management Practice. Project Management Institute..
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 23
Progress is maintained in the face of radical uncertainty & the anxiety that it creates
Everything evolves around the paradox of the golden project triangle: in time, to cost and with agreed quality or spec– if you ignore the paradox by setting up a tool-based control model, you get trapped in the iron cage of promises, unmanaged expectations, contractual clauses…80% of my time as PM I spend figuring out, negotiating, persuading, or prioritizing multiple agendas and interests against KPIs [key performance indicators] and 20% fire-fighting …managing change to plans on the ground…that is project management for you. [RR-AB-2]
It’s one of those things that from the beginning was going to be an almost impossible project because of the resources and timeframe and what needed to be done. [PS-23: Project manager]
You never know about the successes before the work is done, it’s then when you see it. But, when a schedule starts clicking, it depends a lot on who is eventually doing the work. It’s always cooperation. No matter how perfect you try to make, if you really look for problems you will always find something. Of course, you could always find excuses:” I haven’t got the right information”, but as much as possible we, on this project, try to stick to the schedule that has been agreed together, we won’t be throwing stones at some other party.[NH-1-IK, leader of electrical works]
Svetlana Cicmil et. al (2009) Exploring the Complexity of Projects: Implications of Complexity Theory for Project Management Practice. Project Management Institute..
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 24
Conclusions From The StudyProjects involve patterned conversation and power relating between people – tools help to form the conversations and relationships.
Project work can be seen as self-organizing capacity emerging from these complex processes.
Power is located in the processes of conversing and relating, rather than in any one individual.
People experience feelings aroused by these processes, and how they deal with these under conditions of uncertainty will vary from person to person and culture to culture. Complexity is unavoidable.
Transformation and novelty are possible because of the intrinsic diversity of the people interacting on projects.
The effective Project Manager is a participant in these processes of relating, continuously engaged in emergent enquiry into what they are doing and what steps they should take next and reflexive in thinking about the quality of their own participation in complex processes of relating in their local project situation.
A Project Manager cannot stand outside organizational processes and control them or direct them in an intentionally chosen direction.
Svetlana Cicmil et. al (2009) Exploring the Complexity of Projects: Implications of Complexity Theory for Project Management Practice. Project Management Institute..
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 25
People Are Themselves Complex Systems… …
Weighs ~2% of body weight, yet uses 25% to 40% of energy.
Limits energy usage utilising habit and reflex.
Is itself a source of complexity: 1 signal at periphery could become 100,000 impulses at centre.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 26
PARALLEL-CONVERGENT-DIVERGENT CIRCUITRY OF MAJOR FUNCTIONAL BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE BRAIN
HIERARCHICAL-HETERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION
Source: Gerhard Roth: Brain
Research Unit: University of
Bremen
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 27
… … Prone to Optimism Bias and Strategic Misrepresentation … …At PMI Research Conference in Montreal, Flyvbjerg identified 3 causes of risk
Technical: Inadequate data and modelsPsychological: Optimism biasPolitical-economic: Strategic misrepresentation, rent-seeking behavior, misaligned incentives
He Quoted Kahneman & Tversky’s Nobel Prize Winning “Prospect Theory”
People underestimate costs, completion times, and risks of planned actionsPeople overestimate the benefits of the same actionsUnderestimation + overestimation = planning fallacy = optimism bias
He contrasted
the “Inside view” focusing on the constituents of the specific planned action, seeing this action as unique, withThe “Outside view” focusing on the outcomes of similar actions that have already been completedAnd advocated “Reference Class Forecasting”, which removes both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 28
… Among Many Irrationalities. (Design Limitations of HOS?)Self-serving Bias: The tendency to take the credit for success, and blame external factors for failure.
Self-centred Bias: The tendency for an individual contributor to take a disproportionate amount of credit for the outcome of group effort.
Egocentricity Bias: The tendency to exaggerate the importance of one’s role in past events.
False Consensus Effect: The tendency to believe that most people share one’s opinions and values.
Assumption of Uniqueness: The tendency to overestimate one’s uniqueness.
Illusion of Control: The tendency to exaggerate the degree of one’s control over external events.
Hindsight Bias: The tendency to retrospectively overestimate the probability of past events occurring.
Self-righteous Bias: The tendency to regard oneself as having higher moral standards or greater moral consistency than others have.
In-group/out-group Bias: The tendency to view members of the group to which one belongs in a more positive light than members of groups of which one is not a member.
Base-rate Fallacy: The tendency to neglect population characteristics and prior probabilities when making probabilistic inferences.
Conjunction Fallacy: The tendency to regard the conjunction of two events as more probable than either of them occurring singly.
David Livingstone Smith (2004) “Why we Lie” New York. St. Martin’s Griffin.
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 29
From SSM and Vickers, There is the Idea of a “Flux of Events”.
Twin strands of “ideas” and “events”.– Mutually interlinked.
Management interventions aimed at “improving the situation” (NOT solving the problem)
Concept reflected in “Rethinking Project Management” Programme funded by EPSRC from 2004 to 2006. (See IJPM Special Issue, November 2007)
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 30
Reconnecting PM to Its Living Roots.PM was born in the world of systems of the 1950s and 1960s.
Since then, the worlds of systems in the natural sciences (and artifical sciences), as well as in management has moved on theoretically and developed many new insights and understandings.
Project management has followed a different trajectory, and faces significant problems of credibility when dealing with complexity.
Empirical results from applying the new insights to project and programme management have suggested alternative approaches to that followed by “mainstream” project management.
Is it not time to reconnect project management to its living roots in the current understanding of complex systems?
© Human Systems International 1987-2009 All Rights Reserved 31
Thank You for Listening