Delivering complex projects: Is planning a waste of time?

In his latest blog, company director Martin Paver looks into the role of planning in delivering complex resources and why this is important for project delivery and performance.

Author: Martin Paver Director at i3Works

I’ve been associated with the development of strategies and delivery of projects for the majority of my career. We work in a complex world that is forever evolving. The impact of external factors, the evolution of internal dependencies and continual realignment of business priorities build a climate of uncertainty that creates a number of challenges for project delivery. 

I wrote a blog on managing complexity in December last year, which helps to frame an approach, However, despite reading extensively about project, programme and portfolio management, I’m convinced that our industry significantly underplays how to manage uncertainty. Whilst I agree that an agile approach helps us to time box delivery, agile tends to lead to an over simplification of the management of complex dependencies. 

Many practitioners tend to jump straight into planning a project by working through the steps of product breakdown, work breakdown and schedule. There is a raft of blogs on the subject. However, this ignores the lack of certainty inherent in the foundations of a lot of projects. Teams can spend an inordinate amount of time planning, only to find that the foundation of the plan is built on imprecise assumptions; built on sand. Detailed plans can often give the illusion that the project manager is in control, but how many projects have you worked on where this isn’t the case? 

As project managers we attempt to manage uncertainty through the use of risk and issue logs, where we try and predict the things in the future that will trip us up. We tend to start with a blank sheet of paper and build outwards, ignoring the rich seam of experience inherent within the organisation’s corporate knowledge bank. Many projects also struggle to differentiate between the uncertainty associated with project options (major decisions and option points) and the risk of execution not going to plan. They are different things, but a lot of organisations manage them as one. 

If we are to lift the industry we need to think differently and work with uncertainty, rather than trying to constrain delivery within predefined boundaries. In my experience these boundaries tend to be artificial, using stated assumptions within an assumption log, which often result in an explosive reaction when the assumptions are breached. 

The key to success lies in a few key principles:

1. Identify uncertainty and work with it. It’s important to identify the questions that the project is seeking to answer, or the benefits/value that project is striving to realise. We can then plot how we answer these questions against a timeline, charting our way through the cone of uncertainty.
2. We need to characterise the implications of uncertainty, understanding its trajectory/vector, proximity, impact and the influence that we have over it. We can then schedule in key milestones or interventions to help drive in certainty, or as a minimum, consciously agree how we manage it rather than unconsciously stumbling through it. 
3. We consider the volatility (the nature, speed, volume and magnitude of change), uncertainty (the extent to which we can predict an outcome), the complexity (the lack of clarity in cause and effect) and ambiguity (the lack of clarity about what an event means for the project.) Capturing these, running high level scenario analysis and running analytics helps us to understand where we are and the potential direction of travel for both the project and the portfolio. However, I would caution against excessive modelling because project environments are often adaptive, emergent and non-linear, i.e. it’s difficult to 2^nd guess the impact of a change.
4. Live with the uncertainty. It’s often very difficult to nail everything down at the start. You may convince yourself that all the foundations are sound, but how often have you proceeded on the basis of assumptions that haven’t been adequately validated? Emergence within the project environment can undermine some of the basic foundations for the investment or for project success.   
5. Ensure that the schedule reflects where we are in the cone of uncertainty. Developing a schedule helps to unite a team, achieve consensus and enable people to work to one plan. But putting in too much detail can result in nugatory effort. The balance is something that comes from experience, rather than a predefined formula. 
6. We also need to learn from the past. This may range from benchmarking performance against similar projects, utilising modular based planning which encapsulates good practice, identifying the historical influence of uncertainty, risks and issues on process success, applying corporate knowledge and also taking advantage of peer assists. 

So what do we do with all this information? For me, it all feeds into project controls and provides a rich picture to support key decisions and identify key opportunities for intervention. The key is to work at a level of abstraction in the first instance to identify areas of focus and outliers, then drilling down into detail when appropriate. This enables agility in decision making within the project, portfolio and executive level.

I’m not advocating using this approach on all projects because it needs to be proportional. We invest a huge amount of energy into planning, almost irrespective of stability in the baseline, however, I’m not convinced that we invest enough resources in identifying, characterising and managing uncertainty.

I am working on a current assignment that is hugely complex and getting to grips with uncertainty is critical to success. As a portfolio manager I continually wrestle with the temptation to forge ahead with delivery and the need to ensure that the direction of travel is the right one. The pressure from the technical staff to ‘crack on’ is often severe and they can sometimes have an aversion to what can be perceived as P3M bureaucracy. I accept that it’s not easy but we do need to do more to ensure that we understand the nature of our project foundations and the uncertain factors that influence a successful outcome.