Zweig Letter

10-20-2003 Project Management: Claptrap or Messy Work

The question, "What is project management?" is like other on-the-mark unanswerable questions, "Where does the sun go at night?" and "What is reality? And why?" The questions are interesting in themselves. The answers, at one time or another, spawn fanatical arguments. That we don’t have a concise answer may explain why so many projects fail and project managers want to change careers.

The paper explores the interest in new PM definitions along with six issues PMs struggle against and five recommendations to prepare a project for messy work.

10-20-2003 Head-Banging in the A/E Industry

We’ve been multi-tasking for so long, it’s just what we do. We don’t know any other way. Many of us even think we know how to make it work! I equate multi-tasking with banging one’s head against the wall.

The architecture studio was not like this, nor was the engineer’s lab. Our professors had us do one project at a time. How did we end up in the current situation?

Ask any manager in a professional services firm, “How do you make money?” You will get one common answer, “Take all work as it comes and keep your staff busy on billable work.” The result is multi-tasking. I’m not referring to the professional who has a few tasks to be managed across a few projects. I’m talking about frequent shifting from one task to another, based on the urgencies of the moment.

09-08-2003 Strangers, Friends, and Partners

AEC projects are different from projects everywhere else in life. When we do a project at home, we do it with people we know and trust. When we do a project with members of our church, club, or neighborhood, we are doing it with people we know. When a company brings together a group of people to design or launch a new product, chances are most participants know each other. The same is usually the case in the software development world. Not so in the AEC industry.

In the AEC world, a group of strangers is thrown together by the selection and contracting process. Even when clients hand-pick us, rather than going through a blind bid process, we still come together as strangers. Why does it matter that we come together as strangers?

Various Papers

08-03-2004 Leadership and Project Management: Time for a Shift from Fayol to Flores  

Co-authored with Greg Howell, Lauri Koskela, and John Draper.
Presented at IGLC-12, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 3, 2004.

Henri Fayol's definition of management establishes the "common sense" of current project management practice. That common sense is challenged by a new definition of work and management put forward by Fernando Flores. This paper explores both definitions of management and their implications for leadership. When management of work in a lean project delivery is understood as "making and keeping commitments", the nature and focus of leadership and common sense changes. Producing trust is the essential role of leaders.

08-03-2004 Two Great Wastes in Organizations and Teams  

Co-authored with Greg Howell.
Presented at IGLC-12, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 3, 2004.

The Toyota Production System is so successful that people look for ways to apply the lean production ideas and methods in organization settings. One of those ways is the force-fitting of Engineer Taiichi Ohno's seven wastes to organizations and projects. While organizations and projects manipulate materiel, they are better characterized by their actions of accomplishing something together -- coordinating action, learning, and innovating. The seven wastes don't address those actions. Attempts to add to the seven wastes have to date broken the Ohno taxonomy. The authors propose a novel set of distinctions on the principal sources of waste in organizational settings.

07-22-2003 Linguistic Action: Contributing to the Theory of Lean Construction

Co-authored with Greg Howell.
Presented at IGLC-11, Blacksburg, Virginia, July 22, 2003.

Lean Construction springs from the failure of current project management and opens the door to significant reform. Lauri Koskela has identified the inadequate conceptual foundations of current practices in terms of both management and the project, and the resulting calls for reform offer new hope for a stagnant discipline. Lean Construction, inspired by the Toyota Production System, has applied principles drawn from production management to the design of project-based production systems. This paper argues that linguistic action contributes an essential addition to the theory of the project and management. The theory of linguistic action describes the very human processes, the purposeful ways people communicate, by which projects are conceived and delivered. This theory provides a coherent conceptual foundation for the design of the lean project delivery system and its management.

10-08-2002 CPM: Fool Me Once, Fool Me Twice

This paper was compiled from weblog postings

I’ve been somewhat concerned about people who set out to adopt a new approach (to anything) while trying their hardest not to give up what they are doing. If what they were doing was working there'd be no reason to do something else! We know in the case of project planning and control that it routinely doesn’t work.

Continuing to do the old has three negative effects on succeeding with the new:

1. It maintains the inertia of the current practice
2. It consumes scarce attention and capacity for adopting the unfamiliar and initially time-consuming practice
3. It reinforces the measurement and rewards associated with the old

Using the Critical Path Method for project planning and control is just one of those practices that seems like a good idea, but fails in execution. One issue I failed to stress last week is the lack of seriousness given to CPM as evidenced by not providing the resources to do a good job keeping the schedules always up-to-date. There is a trend seen in construction where people are preparing the CPM schedules yet they don’t know how to build and don’t know scheduling (as reported in ENR). Lack of seriousness and competence spells disaster for the project participants. Not doing CPM scheduling in many cases would be far better than doing it the current way. And certainly for those people who are dissatisfied enough to try a different approach should give up trying to do both.

08-30-2004 Securing Reliable Promises on Projects  

Routinely, projects are late, over-budget, or fail in some way to satisfy the client. And all this in spite of the training and tools deployed on projects. However, there is a practice for increasing the reliability of completion of project tasks. This practice is the securing of reliable promises. Why do we say "to secure a promise" rather than "to make a promise"? First, it is a practical matter. There is a much better chance of training the few who manage projects than the many who perform on projects. Second, the requestor is the one more interested in having his or her request completed.

Most of us are so interested in getting our requests satisfied that we latch on to the first utterances of a would-be performer, thinking we got the promise we were looking for. All too often we receive just the opposite. The individual is trying not to promise, but doing a very bad job even of that. Learning to secure reliable promises is strictly an act of self-interest. This guide will take you through an approach for securing reliable promises on your project.