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her book on the NASA Challenger Disaster, Diane Vaughan explored how unsafe and deviant
24 Ascian planner has been successfully trialed by Airbus and Rolls-Royce.
Why Projects Fail
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behaviour at NASA had become normalised. 25 Arguably, in some organisations, project failure has
become accepted as a “normal” state of affairs. UK government IT projects and certain types of
defence procurement contracts appear to fall into this category.
Re-use of Data and Knowledge Management
In terms of knowledge management and the “lessons learned” process we were surprised to find that
data inputted into existing tools used in large engineering projects is rarely re-used from project to
project. This is because the project model produced by current tools is merely a manually interpreted
time-line “drawing” based on the tacit judgement, intuition and the experience of the project managers
using a “top-down” approach. On the other hand what is needed is a bottom-up generation of the
timescale representation (Gantt chart) using objective, repeatable logic. This greatly facilitates the reuse
of network components, which capture fundamental project knowledge and business logic. These
can be stored in libraries of standard networks for re-use either directly or as templates. If unrestricted
levels of complexity can be handled by the planning tool the construction of dependency networks can
be devolved widely within the organisation. The network no longer needs to be policed by a project
manager to artificially interpret levels of abstraction and prune iterative loops.
Clear Objectives and Deliverables via Lean Thinking
Most existing project management tools allow users to adopt sloppy practices such as the direct entry
of activity data into a Gantt chart using a “push” mentality. This leads to lack of clarity of objectives
and understanding of dependencies. Our research shows that a Planner is needed that embraces the
principles of “lean-thinking” by focussing on the project deliverables. Interestingly, the “pull”
approach, where the final deliverable “pulls” the required actions from the project, has been the
dominant philosophy in manufacturing for three decades or so. The methodology that underpins the
Planner we have developed via our research brings this approach to project planning and management;
it encourages the project manager/modeller to identify clear project deliverables and work backwards
from these by showing the “information-pull” of the network. Project deliverables can then be
prominently highlighted and project metrics, used in optimising project performance, can be driven by
these deliverables.
Detailed Understanding of Dependencies
The lack of a clear understanding of project dependencies is a key cause of project failure in complex,
highly distributed engineering projects, where engineering judgement or intelligent guesswork is just
not sufficient. Based on our observations of more than 10 major projects we contend that a Planner
must be utilised, which encourages users to create a fully connected network. A diagnostic tool would
assist by indicating, in real-time, unconnected areas of the network as it is being constructed. This
should be further facilitated by a diversity of user-friendly navigation and layout tools that allow the
network to be explored from any context or orientation. Activities should be classified using a number
of hierarchical trees to represent, for example, work breakdown structures, resources, systems, phases
or themes. With modern technology these can be viewed using sophisticated layout algorithms to
ensure that a user can understand and navigate large, complex networks.
We have argued above that large projects are now problematic because they have become opaque to
those managing them. In very large business organisations the problem is exacerbated because the
operational logic of the firm itself may also be opaque, especially to recent recruits. We therefore
advocate a planning process and tools that can capture and re-use knowledge of how specific
organisations undertake projects. An effective planning tool should capture the dependency logic of
the organisation and its projects. This represents the high value, reusable knowledge that is central to
25 Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA.
(University of Chicage Press, Chicago, 1996).
Why Projects Fail
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the methodology advocated here and good planning in general. With the full and accurate
representation of the workflow and its dependency network the right tool can literally capture the
“thinking-patterns” of the organisation in tackling a project.
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