Controlling deadlines for successful project management

According to a study conducted by the Standish Group, an independent international IT research consultancy, only one third of projects meet their cost, time and functionality objectives. For projects that do not reach their deadline objectives, the average overrun rate is close to 80%. Dominique Causse and Mikaël Carduner, expert consultants for Blue Soft Consulting - Daylight, tell us more about the factors impacting and the points of attention. All this with the aim of controlling deadlines for a successful project management.

Controlling deadlines for successful project management: 3 mistakes to avoid for a successful project

There are three causes that can significantly impact the timeframe of a project.

• At the level of the organization and the environment in which a project or program evolves

The factors of time control are mainly based on the managerial culture. In particular, the project management culture from which the policies, methodologies and maturity levels expected in terms of project management for the entire organization will be derived.

• At the project sponsorship level

This is cited "as one of the main causes of project failure or success by the Standish Group. Nevertheless, this role is still too rarely understood or communicated in organizations" underlines Mikaël Carduner, Expert consultant.

• At the operational project level

At this level, the key factors of success or failure concern the conditions of execution of the project initiative, the practices implemented or the skills mobilized.

Team organization, key points to control deadlines for a successful project management

Team organization is often one of the factors that is not looked at in detail when starting a project. However, this has a major impact on the team's performance. The points of attention to take into account:

• The size of the team

Several studies have been conducted on the subject in order to optimize the size of the team. On average, a successful team should include between 5 and 6 people

• The T-shaped team

Traditionally, a team is organized in silos. That is to say, it is organized by type of business (designers, developers, testers). This way of working will automatically lengthen the deadlines. A team in difficulty will make the other teams wait. This can have a serious impact on the overall progress of the project. To avoid this type of drift, a first possibility is to build a single team integrating the various trades. Then, you can encourage collaborative work. This is the approach adopted by agile approaches such as Scrum.

It is also possible to foster T-shaped skills. You need to be both a generalist and an expert in one or more specific areas.

Specific skills will provide added value and expertise in a particular field. Generalist or cross-functional competencies will allow for easier communication and collaboration with other teams. These cross-functional skills also allow you to strengthen the teams that need them, rather than remaining confined to your own specialty. For example, developers who come to help the test team during the acceptance phases. Bottlenecks, and therefore delays, can be greatly reduced by this type of organization.

• A team organization at the scale

Scaling refers to initiatives that require the coordination of multiple teams to produce a single product. In this case, similar questions may arise, and different practices can answer them. " It is not enough to add teams in parallel. You have to structure the teams so that the overall performance is not held back by one of the components or by communication failures," explains Dominique Causse, expert consultant at Blue Soft Consulting.

To calibrate the size of the team, two methods can be considered. Dunbar's number" defines the maximum number of people in a team to ensure good communication. This technique is used in particular by some scaling frameworks like SAFE.

We also find "Conway's Law" which explains that the system or product designed by the organization will reflect the communication structure within that organization. The structure of the teams in place, their specialization and the mode of inter-team communication will largely impact the final product. It is therefore necessary to think about the organization of the teams upstream of the project to ensure its success.

Critical chain, resource management and project dependencies

This planning method invented by the consultant and physicist E. M. Goldratt, creator of the theory of constraints, has enabled many industries to gain in fluidity and productivity. Goldratt applied this theory to the planning part, through what he called the critical chain, based on the following observation: "failure to achieve the deadline objective is due to ineffective management of uncertainty, particularly for resources and the allocation of resources to the various activities of a project", says Mikaël Carduner. Key causes:

1. Multitasking, when you are active on several projects at the same time, which can result in a loss of efficiency of up to 40%.
2. Parkinson's Law, when you have defined a margin against a deadline that you must meet, you tend to occupy the margin until you reach it
3. The student syndrome, when you have a deadline, such as an exam for students, you will, for the majority, always take it the day before

Based on this observation and his theory of constraints, Goldratt devised a number of principles:

• Identify the constraint in the planning logic. This includes resources that constrain or penalize the schedule when they are not used optimally (especially multitasking) and when they are not focused on the critical chain.
• Once this system constraint, its logic and resources have been identified, it is necessary to focus the use of these resources on this critical chain. This avoids multitasking and ensures that the people assigned to a mission are used exclusively on that mission.
• To avoid Parkinson's law or the student syndrome, it is necessary to control the variations due to these two phenomena by mutualizing margins. On the one hand, we will reduce the margins on each of the activities so that the margins are not consumed by these syndromes. On the other hand, we are going to combine them, reduce them and put them at the end of the project by having a continuous control on these margins.

According to a number of studies, this methodology can lead to a 40% reduction in lead times. This is the case for "Embraer", a Brazilian aircraft manufacturer, for its aircraft design. Voted best project of the year 2019, Embraer has gained nearly 2 years on its schedule.

Monitoring and control to be maintained on the critical chain

For optimal compliance with deadlines, the progress of the project must be controlled on this critical chain, which remains a planning logic. To do this, we define the margins of maneuver beyond which we must be vigilant. In particular, we monitor the consumption of the "buffer" (or buffer resources) made up of the accumulated leeway over the entire critical chain. If the alert threshold is exceeded, action plans will have to be put in place to return to the control zone. The advantage here is that any deviations can be controlled globally, much more effectively than with unitary task monitoring.

Managing risks and uncertainties

Every project or program is subject to risks and uncertainties because the project is projected into the future. The environment and the future are uncertain. Risk management therefore allows to anticipate and reduce the probability or the consequences of risks.

Unfortunately, this point is all too often neglected. Poorly understood, the risk review is often done with little or no conviction.

If we wish to strengthen risk analysis, we can quantify risk analyses, their impacts and their uncertainties with relative precision - notably with statistical tools based on the Monte Carlo simulation method - in order to have a more realistic vision of the impact of risks on projects. These techniques make it possible to study thousands of scenarios on projects, compared to only one with traditional methods.