Now that we have our smaller list of tasks, one of the first thing you will want to do is look at the critical path, that is, the longest set of tasks in your plan that all depend on each other and define the longest path from start to finish in your project.

Let’s consider the following project, where we have tasks A, B1, B2, and C. Note that B1 and B2 are both “successors” of A, i.e. A has to finish before they can begin. Also note the B1 and B2 are “predecessors” of C, that is both of them much complete before task C can begin. The final thing to note is that B1 takes twice as long to complete as B2.

So if B1 takes four weeks to complete, B2 only takes two weeks to complete. In this case the critical path of the project is A -> B1 -> C, which you can see as highlighted in blue in the above chart. Any delay in A, B1, or C will delay the completion of the project. On the other hand, if B2 takes a few days longer than planned, actually anywhere up to taking twice as long, and the project will remain on time.

The critical path is an important tool in project planning because it tells you the tasks you really need to monitor closely because they are the ones that determine the overall project lengh. Also, these are the tasks you need to focus on when trying to shorten a project. And who among us hasn’t been on a project where you’ve planned to do the work in X days and you’re asked, what would it take to get it done in X/2 days?

In the above example how much effort should you put into shortening task B2? Well, none, because even if you got B2 down to just a single day, that will not have any affect on when the project gets finished:

What you really want to focus on in this particular example is reducing the length of task A. It clearly makes up a large portion of the project timeline and reducing that task will have the largest impact on finishing the project sooner.

That’s the general idea of critical path analysis, find the critical path, then find the “long poles” on that critical path, that is, the longest duration tasks that appear on the critical path, and focus on shortening them to bring down the total project duration.

While simply calculating the critical path will certainly help you run your project, you must be aware of, and always on the lookout for, hidden critical paths. Let’s look again as our first example:

But now let’s assign a level of Uncertainty to each task. In this case we will use Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s multipliers for measuring uncertainty:

So what does a moderate level of uncertainty mean? If we presume a task has a duration of 6 days, then that task could be completed from anywhere from the low side of $$(6 / 1.5) = 4$$ days, or on the high side of $$(6 * 1.5) = 9$$ days.

If all the tasks in the project below have a low uncertainty except for ‘B2’ which has an extreme level of uncertainty then (totally depending on what the distribution of the uncertainty of B2 looks like), B2 may actually end up on the critical path just as often as B1.

That is, B2 will complete somewhere between $$[(1w / 5), (1w * 5)]$$ or somewhere in 3 to 35 days, and given that uncertainty in B2 there’s roughly a 50% chance it’s actually on the critical path.

While this might seem like a pretty academic exercise, looking for hidden on critical paths was instrumental on getting one very large profile project to finish on time: careful attention found a long pole task on a hidden critical path that could be accelerated, which we did accelerate, which was lucky because other parts of the project finished early and the hidden long pole did end up being on the critical path and our acceleration of that task turned into a huge win in getting the project done in time.

The Axioms of Project Management:

1. Starting is definite, finishing less so.
2. Divide and conquer to reduce uncertainty.

So now let’s apply that to an ambiguous task and see how we can break it down into more manageable chunks. Let’s start with the classic example of building a house:

Now that’s pretty ambiguous, we have really no idea how long that will take, maybe anything from 3 months to a couple of years. As a first step let’s split this task in two on the time axis.

Here we can split the task, first getting the permits needed to build the house, and then beginning construction.

Note the dependency between those two tasks and each one’s uncertainty.

We can’t start building the house until all the permits are secured. (Starting is definite, finished less so.)

The uncertainty around getting the permits is a subset of the uncertainty around the whole project and wil be much less than the original single task. (Divide and conquer to reduce uncertainty.)

And we can further subdivide the “Get Permits” task, because before you do that you need to know all about the lot you are building on. Again, we’ve take a task and broken it down into two tasks in the time dimension, one task coming before the other:

Let’s assume we’re building in an area without city water and sewer, so we’ll also need to plan and build out a septic system and know the dimensions of the lot we’re building on. Both of those can happen at the same time, in this case think of splitting the original “Survey” task into two parallel tasks with each task being done by separate people. The first “Survey” means getting a surveyor out to survey the land, and the second task is getting a soils person out to test the soils.

Finally, we can put together the final information we need for the permits once we have both the survey and the soils report, at which time we can layout the house envelope and the septic field. This is like a game of tetris as you try to fit these things on the same lot, but still being aware of the setbacks, i.e. the septic field should be at least 25 feet from the house, but also needs to be 100 feet from the water well, etc. But I digress, lets’ get back to our chart. All the work has to happen before the permit application, and after the survey and soils report:

Note that at each step we are sub-dividing a task either in time or in resources, specifying things that come before and after, or tasks that can take place in parallel. And as each task gets smaller, the more the uncertainty will shrink.

Now the diagrams you see above are called Gantt charts, and if you work in the software field you’ll know that a subset of people in the field will be begin shuddering, averting their eyes and muttering “waterfall”, “agile”, and “scrum” under their breath.

You see, somewhere in the distant misty past of software development people stopped looking at Gantt charts not as the output of a process to reduce ambiguity, but as a mandate from on high on how to exactly run a software project. Or maybe some weak and ineffective managers decided to use the Gantt chart as a command and control mechanism to manage software development. Either way the original use of such a chart got labelled as “waterfall” development and the word “waterfall” became vilified.

But that’s completely wrong, and not how these charts came about. They were invented to tackle large ambiguous projects, doing so from the bottom up, and I’ve got the receipts to prove it.

Let’s jump back to 1956, almost 70 years ago!, to the development of the Polaris Missle System.

The Polaris missile program’s complexity led to the development of new project management techniques, including the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) to replace the simpler Gantt chart methodology.

Here’s where we hit a little bit of complexity because language isn’t fixed and the meanings of words change over time. Back in 1956 a Gantt chart was just a horizontal bar chart that did not include dependency relationships between tasks. PERT came along and showed the importance and power of including the relationships betwen tasks, so then Gantt charts started including inter-task dependencies, and yet still retained the name “Gantt” chart.

A two part report was publishing on how the PERT process was computerized and applied to the project:

Program Evaluation Research Task (PERT) Summary Report - Phase 1

Let’s look at some key quotes from this document, stating on page one:

Three factors, however, set research and development programming apart. First, we are attempting to schedule intellectual activity as well as the more easily measurable physical activity. Second, by definition, research and development projects are of a pioneering nature. Therefore previous, parallel experience upon which to base schedules of a new project is relatively unavailable. Third, the unpredictability of specific research results inevitably requires frequent change in program detail. These points are acknowledged by all experienced research people. Yet, even though it be ridiculous to conceive of scheduling research and development with the split- second precision of an auto assembly line, it is clear that the farther reaching and more complex our projects become, the greater is the need for procedural tools to aid top managers to comprehend and control the project.

Would it be bad form to point out that the entire edifice of “Agile” software development is built on a bed of lies? Anyway, we can clearly see that the entire point of the enterprise is to reduce ambiguity around research and development work, the kind of work with the highest levels of uncertainty.

And this process is emphatically not a top-down process. Still on page one:

This last point introduces a most important matter in research administration. The people most qualified to speak on what they have done, are doing, can do, and might do in a development project are the development people themselves. To interpose a substantial layer of evaluation organization between top management and the development people stretches the time of progress reporting, risks distortion of reports through successive interpretation on the way to the top, and generally adds to the remoteness of top management to the tasks it is managing. 1 A system should be a close coupling between the laboratory and top management and should serve both the planning and evaluation interests of both, each at the proper level.

And flexibility was baked in from the beginning, on page 3:

Actual day-to-day happenings never follow the stated or “nominal” schedule exactly. They should bear a reasonable identity, but the “actual” schedule will continuously change and flex within the general limits of the nominal schedule.

Does it scale? Yes, yes it does, from page 4:

The development of the FBM incorporates a tremendously complex system of event achievement. It is estimated that there may be upwards of 5,000 events which should be portrayed in the evaluation process. The computations that must be undertaken for each event as well as the interactions between events require something more than unabetted human contemplation . For this reason, the PERT procedure has been laid out so as to be compatible with processing on modern electronic computers.

The amusing part is that this project took place so long ago and the computers were so slow that they spent a bunch of time and math speeding up the analysis by avoiding taking cube roots. The bonkers thing is that folks have just been copy and pasting the formulas on page 7 of the report to this very day as the right way to estimate task duration even though today we have computers powerful enough to, checks notes, take cube roots.

Anyway, you should absolutely go read Program Evaluation Research Task (PERT) Summary Report - Phase 1, it’s eye opening how forward looking the project was, and how much we’ve lost, and then poorly reinvented, since then.

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:

1. Starting is definite, finishing less so.
2. 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.

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff John Kelly. https://www.axios.com/2024/10/23/john-kelly-trump-hitler

When someone who was there during the first Trump administration tells you that Trump is a fascist, you should listen to them. I fully expect next four years to be an absolute shit show that will definitely warp, if not break, our democracy. But I want to talk about how we got here, because Democrats need to figure out what went wrong and come up with a strong appealing alternative to Trumpism before the mid-term elections if they want any chance to blunt the worst excesses of the Trump administration.

Stop otherizing

You may want to cast each and every Trump voter as a racist or white supremacist.

First, that’s otherizing, stop it. Sure, there are folks who fall into the racist, misogynist, or full on white supremacists camps, and yes, the FoxNews reality distortion field certainly has an effect, but I refuse to believe a majority of Americans are like that, and the data is on my side.

The same voters elected Barak Obama as President. Twice.

And look at this very election in my home state of NC. While Trump won the Presidential vote, NC also elected Democrats to a number of other statewide offices, starting with Josh Stein, a Democrat, the first Jewish Governor of North Carolina, who won by 14 points! We also elected Rachel Hunt, a woman for Lieutenant Governor, Jeff Jackson for Attorney General, and Mo Green, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Elaine Marshall for Secretary of State, and only one of those was an incumbent.

Also, Republicans lost their super-majority in the legislature so they can’t override the Governors veto.

If the voting was driven by racism and misogyny then the above results would have been very different.

What if?

The first thing to internalize is that Trump voter’s grievances are real.

In exit polls Trump voters picked “The economy” and “Immigration” as their top issues. What if we actually believed what they said? That the reason that they voted for Trump was because they thought he was better for the ecomony then yet another Democrat? If we suppose they are telling the truth, then what do they mean?

I’ve spent the last two years in Presidential-election-spin-room-hell having everyone tell me how good the economy is, exclaiming, “Just look at the stock market!”.

To quote Kai Ryssdal, “Also, the stock market is not the economy.”

These days, due to 40 years of non-existent anti-trust enforcement and the resulting consolidation in the US economy, the stock market is a measure of how efficiently corporations are strip-mining the US economy, and not how well things are going on main street.

The graph below shows how productivity has continued to rise, but hourly compensation has lagged further and further behind. Whether you call this the Productivity-Pay Gap, or a decline of workers’ relative income, it is real world trickle-down economics, where less and less of the friuts of labor trickles down to employees:

But what does this look like from the bottom? Here’s a chart of Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over, that is, inflation adjusted real earnings, which I’ve plotted here on a chart that starts at zero, like the math gods intended:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Now, I don’t want to get too technical, but I did get a degree in Mathematics from Dartmouth College and there’s a very precise term we use for the above graph, and that term is A FLAT FUCKING LINE!

And that flat line has had real world consequences.

Happy people with a future don’t kill themselves via drug overdoses.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_timeline._Opioid_deaths.jpg

May I remind you the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result. For 40 years America’s working class has been stuck, going back and forth over those 40 years voting Republicans and Democrats into office, both for President and Congress, and their lives have never improved.

I don’t believe these people aren’t stupid, I believe they know damn well that Trump isn’t a Republican. You’ll see articles where pundits will claim that America took a turn to the “Right” with the election of Donald Trump, which is utter horseshit. Trump, and the rest of the MAGA folks that have come into office in the past eight years should have an (M) next to their name, not an (R). The Republican party has gone the way of the Whigs and the Torries. I think they clearly see Trump and MAGA as a totally new entity that might actually affect change, or, at this point, burn it all to the ground, and they’d be happy with either result.

Obama

And now let’s go back to Obama, where I lay a good deal of the blame. I mean, the real blame for kicking off this slow descent into our modern Horatio Alger dystopia is Ronald Reagan, but Obama actually had a chance to turn the corner and reject the Neo-Liberal concensus draining the life from the US economy, and instead he doubled down on it.

There are two incidents from Obama’s presidency that have really stuck in my craw for the last decade, the first is his exchange with Steve Jobs.

During their meeting in 2010, Obama asked Jobs how to bring all the iPhone manufacturing jobs back to the United States, according to the New York Times.

“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs replied. https://money.cnn.com/2012/10/17/technology/apple-china-jobs/

And Obama just accepts that answer! Utterly appalling. Instead of asking Jobs if those jobs could come back to the US if a $500 per phone tariff was imposed on them, he just blithely accepts it as a fact of nature. This isn’t a singular event, watch this interaction with Obama and a United Steel Workers union member from Indiana.

Did you catch that? Eric’s already lost his job after it was moved out of the country and is asking Obama what he’s going to do about it, and President Obama’s response is to flail like a helpless child and pronounce, essentially, “I’m just a baby duck!”

The important takeaway here is that going against the neo-liberal concensus, putting the American worker first, putting up barriers to exporting jobs to the country with the cheapest pool of workers, stopping the strip-mining of the US economy is not even countenanced. Here is a President elected on a promise of change, and the actual change we needed is unthinkable, it is literally an unthinkable thought.

Now put yourself in Eric’s shoes, all the Eric’s who have had their jobs moved overseas for the past 40 years as corporations strip-mined the US economy for ever larger short term gains, and ask yourself if you’d be happy with Obama’s answer.

And not only did Obama do nothing on that front, the same obsequiousness to American corporations has continued in the Biden administration, to the point that the Biden Whitehouse would never talk about their anti-trust work. I will give Biden credit for actually appointing Lena Khan, but then to never talk about her work shows the true depth of the fault line in the Democratic party, supposedly the party of the working class, yet afraid to speak, or even think, anything that might upset their corporate donors. Let’s not even talk about pro-union Biden throwing railroad workers under the proverbial bus.

Reckoning

Despite the protestations of Nancy Pelosi, I believe Democrats need to think long and hard and come back to the American people with a solid plan that actually addresses working class families, and I’m not alone. And please don’t try to tell me the party shouldn’t do anything too radical, the voters just put a convicted felon back in the White House.

I’m also posting this because it needs to be seen, Bernie is right.

Bernie Sander’s Statement on Democrats losing the 2024 Presidential election:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is the Latino and Black workers as well.

While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.

Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.

Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.

Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from his disaster campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.

In the coming weeks and months those of concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.

Stay tuned.