The analogy I like when thinking of project management methodologies is a mechanic standing in front of their tool chest. They have training on the different issues that can go wrong with your vehicle, know what to fix, and can choose the right tool for the job.
They don’t look at any tool as good or bad. For example, when changing the oil, they wouldn’t use a pair of plyers. It’s not to say that a pair of plyers is bad. It’s just not the right tool. So the first step in understanding the tools.
With Agile becoming more popular, have speak disparaging of the Traditional approach. But it’s important to understand it was an incredible discovery. The picture above is the Three Gorges Dam in China, currently the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. It took 18 years to build, required 27 million cubic yards of concrete, 463 thousand tons of steel, and digging out 102 million cubic yards of earth.
Think of all the people and coordination that came together to make that happen. While the Traditional approach may not be perfect, it allows large groups of people to take on complicated, unique tasks like the Three Gorges Dam, estimate the work, the resources, the time required, and be able to track the project as the work progresses.
The Traditional approach allows you to:
- Organize chaos – focus on an end goal, and then organize the million tasks that need to be done.
- Have an estimate of the project work and resources needed from the beginning.
- Consider what quality means and find the right way to test and deliver to the right level.
- Understand and plan for the complexity of communication on any project.
- Understand the different contracts and tools that are available when working with vendors.
- Consider the risk involved, both negative risks, but also positive risks provide opportunities to advantage of.
- Understand the different stakeholders, their needs, their roles, and how to work with them.
- Focus on efficiency. Traditional approaches are focused on finding ways to reduce cost, effort, and project duration wherever possible. They look at ways to compress project schedules by running tasks in parallel, reduce the amount of time spent in collaboration or meetings, and find the best resource possible to reduce the time needed to do the job.
When it comes to planning, the traditional approach is to take on the full aspect of the project at once. This works well when:
- You’re working with a known problem. Every bridge or house is unique, but we’ve built lots of bridges and houses, so there are good examples to use to understand the work.
- You’re working with a known solution. The bridge is a perfect example, there are clear measurements of success (we need this number of cars with this amount of weight to be able to cross at any given time).
While the Traditional approach has it’s strengths, there are some issues, including:
- It struggles when discovering the answer is an important part of the journey. For example, while we’ve built millions of houses, but finding the right marketing approach for a product can be much harder, requiring . It may take experimentation to find the best solution. This focus on needing to know everything early leads to:
- Customers are asked to know exactly what they need at the beginning.
- Changes to the plan are painful, so the project team works to limit them
- Since the project is delivered in stages, execution first, then testing, teams may not find problems till later when they are more expensive to correct.
- The customer doesn’t see the final project till it is delivered, meaning there’s no opportunity to adjust.
- Having a clear picture at the beginning in considered important to being able to plan the process, but trying to plan everything at once can cause issues:
- Teams end up planning out details months from now that will change and need replanned as the project progresses.
- These detailed plans can provide an illusion that the estimate is better than it really is.
- Because everything has to be planned at the beginning, teams can spend far too much time on possibilities that may never occur.
- Since there are no deliveries to the end of the project, teams by nature procrastinate, with a slower tempo at the beginning of the project and then frantic activity at the end leading to mistakes and burn out.
- The traditional approach focuses on efficiency command and control with leadership defining roadmaps, and project managers / architects building out project plans. This approach suffers since:
- The people doing the work are the best ones to find improvements to how it’s done, starting with where to improve.
- It’s management’s job to improve, and they don’t have the visibility to know where to start, they often try to push improvement by simply shortening time schedules. Creating pressure to do more with less, but no guidance on how to do it.
As we look at combine approaches, lean on the Traditional approach to think about all the details to include in the project, how to track a lot of different people, and what to focus on when you are building something that’s been built many times before. Weaknesses are that it’s difficult to change direction along the way, you can spend too much time planning details that may never be needed, and you don’t take advantage of the people doing the work to find improvements.
Remember, the core isn’t that one is better than the other, it’s about understanding the right tools and putting together the right mix.
Having a better understanding of the Traditional approach, our next post will look at Understanding Agile Strengths and Weaknesses.