Joe Gregorio
Over the years I have run many projects, everything from small software projects of just a couple people, to new product development projects in the material testing space, include both hardware and software, to large projects involving work that effects the daily routines of thousands of software engineers. In that time I’ve honed down how I think about project management into just two axioms, which, if you know the field of project management is quite short.
If you were to search across the web today you’d find a slew of randomly enumerated fundamentals of project management, including, but certainly not limited to:
- 5 C’s of project management
- 5 P’s of project management
- The 5 principles of project management
- The 12 principles of project management
- 50+ Axioms on the Art and Science of Managing Projects
Being a trained mathematician I can tell you for certain that if you’ve got 50+ axioms, you clearly don’t know the meaning of “axiom”.
Anyway, for you dear reader, I am going to break down project management into just two axioms.
The first axiom of project planning:
Starting is definite, finishing less so.
So what does that mean? Well maybe let’s start with a more colloquial saying, which is:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
See how we know when the journey begins, when we take that first step, and we can definitely say when we are going to start. But when, exactly, will we finish that journey of 1,000 miles? Presuming we’re going to walk, that’s going to take quite a while and the exact finish date of our journey is going to be highly variable. Consider hiking the Appalachian Trail:
Completing the entire 2,190+ miles of the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) in one trip is a mammoth undertaking. Each year, thousands of hikers attempt a thru-hike; only about one in four makes it all the way.
A typical thru-hiker takes 5 to 7 months to hike the entire A.T.
–The Appalachian Trail Conservancy
If only 1/4 of the hikers actually finish hiking the trail in any year, the remaining 3/4 don’t finish it, the average time to finish the project is infinity. Infinity! I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that [5 months, ∞) is a huge amount of uncertainty.
Just the list of failed and overbudget custom software projects is worth an entire Wikipedia entry.
And there are projects that have gone on so long that they’ve become legendary, like Duke Nukem Forever which took 14 years to ship.
The longer a task takes, the higher the uncertainty of when it will finish.
Think of a simple task, like vacuuming the house. This has a short time, and you can probably predict with pretty good accuracy how long it will take you to complete the task. And yes, leave it to your kids and it might never get done, but let’s not go there.
Compare that to taking on a larger project, like building a skyscraper, a sub-division, or something never accomplished before, like a fusion reactor, and the uncertainty rises dramatically.
But what to we do in the face of such uncertainty?
The second axiom of project planning:
Divide and conquer to reduce uncertainty.
Yeah, really, it’s that simple. If you have a large, complex, or ambiguous task, then break it down into smaller more manageable tasks. For example we could divide up our Appalachian Trail hiking into first figuring out how many days of food and water we can carry, along with preliminary test hikes to see how many miles a day we can cover on similar terrain.
And this loops back around to our first axoim, the shorter the sub-task the less the ambiguity.
So now we have our two axioms:
The Axioms of Project Management:
- Starting is definite, finishing less so.
- Divide and conquer to reduce uncertainty.
In my next installment I’ll talk about how to apply these axioms to a project to reduce uncertainty, and how everything you’ve learned about project management is probably wrong.