quantmleap

Kailash (“On The Accuracy of Group Estimates“) followed by Craig (“Why You Guys Suck at Estimating“) wrote about the validity of group estimates. Kailash is taking a mathematical approach to this discussion and concludes, based on a series of mathematical equations, that “estimates provided by a group consisting of individuals of similar ability working independently are more likely to be right (compared to individual estimates) if the group consists of  competent estimators and more likely to be wrong (compared to individual estimates) if the group consists of  poor estimators“.

The conclusion seems to be mathematically sound but it contradicts well observed social experiments, the best known of which were conducted by James Surowiecki and documented in his best-selling book “The Wisdom of Crowds“, where he concludes that groups of people are much better at coming up with more accurate estimates than individuals, the reason being the some individuals will overestimate the true number while others will underestimate while the group’s average is likely to be close to the truth. This, however, as correctly observed by Kailash, is only correct if the observations are independent and their errors are uncorrelated.

Given what we already know about our innate biases (a long list of which is documented here)  I am not certain about Craig’s initial comments regarding the credibility of his own estimates. I was pleased to see that later in his post he admits to have asked others to aid in some aspects of the estimation process.

Given the precarious nature of estimates, great care should be taken when adopting an estimating method that is not ‘best practice’. After all there’s a reason (and hopefully a good one – based on empirical evidence) why a method is referred to as a ‘best practice’ method.

Think about it!

Received this from a friend. Not sure about the source.

When I wrote my initial post about the distinction between Accountability and Responsibility I didn’t imagine it will turn into one of my most read posts (my most read post is the one dealing with the question of good processes vs bad processes - an interesting and yet to be explained phenomena). Not sure why this is so and I can only speculate that many struggle with understanding the differences and what those differences actually mean to them in their work environment. 

I want to expand slightly on this theme and use for this purpose a couple of smart quotes I’ve come across recently.

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
— Dean Acheson

My take from this is: If you are one of these people who believe that by sending out an e-mail or an internal memo and expecting that by doing that you can wash your hands off the problem – YOU ARE WRONG. You need to manage Issues and problems even if they are not, strictly speaking, YOUR problem. It is YOUR responsibility to make sure someone has actually picked it up and declared it as being their responsibility. How often do you see people in or around your project defending their lack of action by using the excuse that they have had it escalated, or documented in this or other document. This is clearly not good enough. There is more to exhibiting responsibility than flagging it – a follow-up to make sure it has been recognised and taken up is an absolute must.

The above is nicely summarised by the following quote:

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
— Benjamin Franklin

Another flaw often seen in the corporate world is that people with authority use their strong personality to bully and intimidate people around them. The notion that people’s values are no longer in force while they enter their office is thought-provoking. Why do some play a personality role at work, different to the one they exhibit around their family and friends is definitely puzzling. And this takes me to the following quote:

…if a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.
— Claude McKay

And to close this discussion here’s the final quote:

Corporation: an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
— Ambrose Bierce

This last quote is about hiding behind the collective in an attempt to reduce personal responsibility. It touches also on the attitude of ‘we’ve always used to this that way’ which implies stagnation and fear of change. Projects normally run around the collective effort of teams. Teams are a collection of individuals, and it is the individual’s responsibility to take action – do not rely on the team to get the job done as this surely will lead to no action at all.

Think about it!

I mentioned in an earlier post Daniel Kahneman’s excellent book titled “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. As Daniel Engber from the Slate Magazine so eloquently describes, “In the course of 418 pages, Kahneman designates no fewer than three biases (confirmation, hindsight, outcome), 12 effects (halo, framing, Florida, Lady Macbeth, etc.), four fallacies (sunk-cost, narrative, planning, conjunction), six illusions (focusing, control, Moses, validity, skill, truth), two neglects (denominator, duration) and three heuristics (mood, affect, availability)”.

I was intending, initially, to devote some space to elaborating on these biases, effects, fallacies, neglects and heuristics. Having done dome further research I have identified other good resources that have already gone through the process of defining and elaborating on these terms. I would therefore list these links (though some are still WIP) to make it easier for you to do your own reading on the specific terms should you wish to explore this topic further:

The 3 Biases:

1. The Confirmation Bias
2. The Hindsight Bias
3. The Outcome Bias

The 12 Effects:

1. The Halo Effect
2. The Framing Effect
3. The Florida Effect
4. The Lady Macbeth Effect
5. The Endowment Effect
6. The Priming Effect
7. The ideomotor  Effect
8. The Mere Exposure Effect
9. The Anchoring Effect
10. The Regression Effect
11. The Above-Average Effect
12. The Possibility Effect
13. The Certainty Effect
14. The Disposition Effect
15. The Framing Effect

The 4 Fallacies:

1. The Sunk-Cost Fallacy
2. The Narrative Fallacy
3. The Planning Fallacy
4. The Conjunction Fallacy

The 6 Illusions:

1. The Focusing Illusion
2. The Control Illusion
3. The Moses Illusion
4. The Validity Illusion
5. The Skill Illusion
6. The Truth Illusion

The 2 Neglects:

1. The Denominator Neglect
2. The Duration Neglect

The key message for me from reading the book is that if you are a human (and given you’re reading this – you ARE) then you are affected by and subject to the impact of the above Biases, Effects, Fallacies, Illusions and Neglects. Recognising and accepting their existence is the first step in learning to address them both for yourself and more importantly in understanding how other around you behave.

Think about it!

I don’t wish to be a CIO in any large corporation. There is enough in project politics to get me going and I don’t really wish to up-skill myself and be able to deal with the REAL politics. But if, for what ever cosmic circumstances, I was to become one, I hope to have the wisdom and foresight to remember all the small things that make my life, and probably your life, difficult in the corporate setting.

One of the things that trouble me the most is lack of response to written or verbal requests. I don’t engage other parties in the organisation for either action or information unless I believe it is absolutely necessary. I appreciate the fact that in a matrix organization other people have many other responsibilities beyond those associated with my project. What bugs me, more even than other people’s mediocrity and stupidity, is their lack of response.

After chasing up people, a process that can takes days, and in some extreme cases even weeks, the comment I most often hear is that they are “very busy”. My response, usually, is: “Are you that busy that you can’t even hit the ‘reply’ button and type “Sorry but I am busy right now and will endeavour to get back to you next Thursday” – followed by hitting the ‘Send’ button?

Yes, it will take 15-30 seconds off your busy schedule but it will save me the hassle of chasing you up, it will allow me to manage my own expectations and communicate them to my relevant stakeholders and the Butterfly Effect will result in far more time saved around the organisation than your loss of 15-30 seconds.

So back to the hypothesis that I became a CIO I would attempt to address this troubling organizational cultural issue and train people to respond, and do it in a timely manner.

Until that happens though you’ll have to manage your frustrations on your own. I certainly do.

Think about it.

The Victorian State Ombudsman tabled his report titled “Investigation into ICT Enabled Projects – November 2011” in which he analysed the performance of 10 high-profile publicly financed projects. The findings of the Ombudsman’s report are fascinating and today I would like to focus, in a bullet point and short format, on his findings as relate to the Myki project.

• A 2004 Business Case by the Transport Ticketing Authority (TTA) forecasted total expenditure of $741.9 million over the life of the project (2004-17).
• Project costs revised up to $999 when a vendor was appointed to develop the system in 2005.
• In April 2008, the budget was increased to $1.35 billion (an increase of 35% in just under 3 years).
• Under the terms of the original contract, the system was to be fully operational by July 2007. Full implementation is yet to be achieved and the project is some four years behind schedule.
• Until two years into the project (when the project failed to meet its two years delivery deadline) the board of the TTA had a single board member with relevant ICT projects’ experience.
• In the initial evaluation of the six tenderers, only the successful bidder was unable to evidence a proven solution: all others nominated sites where their solutions were in place.

Corruption or stupidity? Either way the cost will be covered using my tax money.

For more information regarding the general trends associated with Transportation Infrastructure projects read my earlier post on Bent Flyvbjerg’s research on Cost Overruns in Transport Infrastructure Projects.

The Victorian State Ombudsman has tabled his report, titled “Own motion investigation into ICT-enabled projects” with scathing comments about incompetence and poor practices in the Victorian public sector.

 Key findings in the report include the following:

1.  Leadership, accountability and governance Issued

•  Roles and responsibilities for ICT-enabled projects were often not clearly defined, acknowledged and accepted.
• Senior officers appeared reluctant to make critical decisions about projects.
• Many of the project steering committees did not have the requisite expertise.
• DTF could have taken a more pro-active role in many of the projects.
• The effectiveness of DTF’s Gateway Review process was limited by its reliance on agencies engaging in and being supportive of the process, which often was not the case.
• The government announced its ’high-value and high-risk’ process in December 2010; however, there is limited publicly available information about the process and some witnesses from DTF and departments remained unclear about the process

 2. Planning Issues

•  Agencies failed to commit the necessary time and effort to develop business cases, which led to significant differences between the planned and actual time, cost and outcomes.
• In some cases, optimism bias led to costs and timelines being based upon hope, rather than evidence or comparisons with similar projects and despite advice from experts and vendors.
• Agencies often gave the government no choice other than to invest in the agency’s preferred option and failed to provide government with adequate advice to make an informed decision.
• Business cases for many of the projects were not updated throughout the life of the projects. In some cases, they were not read by key people.
• Insufficient attention was given to managing or mitigating risks.

 3. Funding Issues

•  Agencies felt the need to create ‘big vision’ projects to capture the government’s attention, which increased complexity and risk.
• In some cases the Cabinet budget committee only partially funded projects, but agencies failed to revise the scope of the projects to fit within the allocated budget.
• Public announcement of major project funding decisions prior to business case development resulted in business cases being rushed and projects being ‘shoe-horned’ into the published funding ceiling.
• The costs and timelines of comparative projects were sometimes ignored.
• Projects funded internally have not been subject to the same level of scrutiny as projects funded by the Cabinet budget committee.
• Agencies were unable to identify the cost of significant projects with any accuracy.

 4. Probity and procurement Issues

• Agencies appeared to pay limited regard and expanded minimal funds on probity advice and audit.
• Agency and probity practitioner responses to conflict of interest sometimes failed to recognise the importance of the perception of a conflict of interest.
• The tendency appeared to be to purchase an off-the-shelf system and then to customise the system to such a degree that the benefits were lost to government.
• The evidence suggests government should explore new procurement methods for ICT-enabled projects.
• Large vendors are well-versed and experienced in contract negotiations and government is generally at a disadvantage for that very reason.

 5. Project Management Issues

•  Several agencies failed to act with enough urgency to address potential problems and in doing so allowed the issue to escalate.
• There is a shortage of skilled senior project managers with relevant ICT experience in government. To compensate, agencies often appoint expensive contractors or inexperienced public sector staff.
• Managing vendor and user relationships can be a complex exercise and agencies have adopted differing approaches to this problem with varying success.
• Approaches to training staff were varied and not always effective.

 Call me pedantic and unreasonable person but few of the findings really annoyed the hell out of me, first and foremost the fact that the combined overruns of the 10 projects investigated was $1.44 billion. Then comes Myki, the disgraceful execution of a ticketing sysem was found to be at least $350 million over budget and at least four years behind schedule. But Myki is only one of 10 failed projects – all exhibiting the above ailing symptoms.

As a tax payer I am appalled and as a Project Manager I am embarrassed.

Think about it!

Two recent articled I’ve read have had some what complementing opinions about the role and contribution made by Social Media to organisations around the world.

The McKinsey Quarterly publishes the results of a world-wide survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies. The article is full of facts and figures and concludes that in 2011 companies have improved their utilisation of social technologies and are using them to better run their operations and identify and exploit new market opportunities.

Some of the key findings of the survey are that:

1.     % of respondents whose companies use Social Networking has increased by 25% (from 40% in the 2010 survey to 50% in the 2011 survey). The magnitude of this change is even higher if we take into account the fact that the number of actual responses has increased by almost 30% over the two surveys (from 3,249 in 2010 to 4,261 in 2011).

2.     Industries with the highest adoption level of social technologies include High Tech and Telecommunication (86%), Business, Legal and Professional Services (77%) and Public Administration and Pharmaceuticals (74% each).

3.     While the reported internal benefits from using social technologies remains flat over the last three years,those identifies for Partners and other External purposes have demonstrated an on-going increase.

4.     The survey identifies statistically significant correlations between self-reported corporate-performance metrics and certain business processes that networked enterprises use. For instance,a high correlation was found between companies who reported market share gains and those who used social tools to scan the external environment and use internal social tools to match employees to tasks.

5.     Maintaining the benefit associated with the use of Social Networking require constant effort and companies who do not maintain that effort lose previously achieved gains.

6.     Social Technology tools are used primarily to scan the external environment and find new ideas, with the most used tools include Social Networking and Blogs.

7.     19% of the respondents indicated that use Social Networking as a Project Management tool, with further 17% indicating the use of Wikis for that purpose.

In “Social Media versus Knowledge Management” (read here) the authors challenge the premise that Social Media and Knowledge Management (KM) are similar. On the surface they both involve people and technology to access information and both require individuals to create information that would ultimately be used for sharing and they both aimed to promote collaboration. So are they really the same?

The authors, Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald, suggest that there’s a big difference between the two, as outlined below:

• Knowledge managementis what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important
• Social mediais how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.

To obtain value from Social Media require the establishment of Mass Collaboration which consists of three things:

1.     Social Media Technology– theHOW;
2.     Purpose– theWHY, and
3.     KM Communities– theWHO

As the authors conclude“Creating mass collaboration involves more than building technology and telling people to participate. It necessitates a vision, a strategy and management actions…The point here is that while they may seem similar, social media and KM are not the same. Recognizing the differences is a crucial step toward getting value out of both and avoiding a struggle of one over the other”.

My take from these two references is that although there is an expansion of Social Media Technology (representing the‘HOW’), organizations are still lagging in determining the purpose and objectives behind  these technologies (the‘WHY’) and this result in various degrees of community participation (the‘WHO’), resulting in fluctuation in tangible business benefits.

Think about it.

I am in the middle of reading Daniel Kahneman’s book: “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and I find it hard to put down. It is a beautiful journey into understanding how our mind works with  the surprising conclusion that it is easier for us to recognise other people’s mistakes than our own.

The book is divided into five parts, three of which I will attempt to condense and summarise in (very near) future posts:

1. Part 1 presents the basic elements of the two-systems approach to judgment and choice (I will devote post to explaining the System 1 vs System 2 approach in the very near future).
2. Part 2 explores the reasons for why is it so difficult for us to think statistically?
3. Part 3 describes our excessive confidence in what we believe we know along our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance.

Understanding the mechanisms behind our behaviour will not necessarily turn you into a better project manager. If you don’t master the basic ingredients required for effective project management understanding your own personality will not make you one. If however you have what it takes, functionally, to be a good PM, controlling or at the very least understanding your behaviour and that of people around you will give you a competitive advantage and a set of priceless tools enhance your human interaction.

As project managers we often claim that the buck stops with us. I certainly do – at least when everything goes well. When the boat starts shaking we (OK, I) still agree that the buck stops with me but immediately attempt to pass the buck to someone else. It is always someone else’s fault that I couldn’t exercise my claim that the buck actually stops with me. Funny how despite all the volumes of project artefacts clarifying who is RACI for what, there is always (usually closer to the prescribed deadline) a campaign of finger-pointing, where various parties go out of their way to explain why a) it is not them and b) it is someone else’s fault that this or that deliverable has not been met.

Passing the buck occurs not just within the project but also in the fuzzy area where the project interacts with the world around it. Over the past few years I have operated in that contentious area where project life ends and business-as-usual support has had to take over. Transitioning to support (or Service Transition as it is called in the ITIL world) is a good example to a collaborative environment where opportunities for buck passing are abound.

 Incremental technology projects (i.e. projects whose scope is to incrementally update, uplift or just plain change existing technological infrastructure – be it hardware or software) usually result in a need to update relevant support documentation, reflecting the nature of the changes implemented as part of the project. What happens  often is that when these documents are put through wringer, going through their review and sign-off cycles, issues relating to past implementations and documentation deficiencies introduced in previous projects begin to rise to the surface.

The arguments usually take the following structure:
Reviewer: the design document you have asked me to review does not accurately reflect the nature of the system as it is currently in production
You: be that as it may, my project did not actually touch any of these areas where the discrepancy is found and your review of my artefact should only focus on the changes relevant to the changes I have introduced.
Reviewer: I cannot sign-off this document with clear omissions / mistakes / inaccuracies.

These sort of discussions are not fun as they represent a situation where both parties seem to be presenting a valid argument. The support team is not willing to sign-off a document that is incorrect. You, as the project manager, do not want to be held accountable for a problem you did not create.

The flip side to passing the buck is taking responsibility and demonstrating direct interest in getting things resolved. As a project manager you are required to operate within strict lines of accountability and responsibility as determined by your project’s scope. Alongside this you are still expected to be a good citizen and ensure that boundary issues arising from your project are properly and responsibly escalated and demonstrably taken over by someone else. Leaving issues in no man’s land is simply not, and should not, be an option.

Think about it!