My last article may have made it sound like no projects can be kept on budget and I want to correct that. The only projects this applies to are very large, generational projects that are developed over decades. They aim to move the state-of-the-art and our insight into the universe forward by leaps and bounds (at least in the case of astronomy). I also want to clarify that not every “generational project” is, or needs to be, in this category. Unfortunately, some projects end up, due to a confluence of circumstances, in this never-land of development purgatory. They have just enough support to stay alive but miss the critical mass to push them to completion. How your project can avoid this fate is a topic for another time. Let’s assume for now that you are lucky enough to have an executable project and a reasonable commitment of resources from the sponsor. How do you keep your project on track?

First of all, congratulations! Your situation is likely the result of a considerable amount of groundwork in engineering design, cost estimation, and advocacy efforts. The key is to keep these, classically known as business development activities, fully functioning so you have some idea what is just beyond the headlights of your project management tools. This means you keep your resource-loaded schedule current, keep developing engineering alternatives for any risk items, and maintain strong communication within your team and with your sponsor. Manage to do all that and you are already several steps ahead. 

Have your heard: Cost. Schedule. Scope. Pick two. This old saw falls short of what we would like to believe based on every-day transactions. Yes, I want the car at the price it was promised to me, on the day I showed up, and it better have all the features advertised. No buyer would take kindly to: “Well we didn’t get to the steering wheel. We should be done with it in a few weeks and as you already have 99.9% of the car by mass, please pay us now.” We do not want to settle for two out of three. We want it all.

The variables of cost and schedule are mostly intuitive, but there is more to say about it. Cost usually is not only associated with total cost, but also with an associated funding profile or how much money is available in any given project phase or year. Lucky and rare is the project manager who gets to manage solely to a total cost and does not have to worry about how much money is available at a given time. Same is true for schedule. If you “only” need to make a planetary launch window and can move around every other milestones you can make your project look good for a very long time. Naturally that is also the worry of every sponsor. They are concerned that they are led down the garden path by a series of progress reports that are all rosy…until they aren’t. Even sophisticated earned-value models can be manipulated by wishful thinking. Your project management task is to navigate the narrow straight between the Scylla of the unmovable project schedule that increasingly gets out of synch with reality and the Charybdis of the daily re-baselined schedule that only knows what is today.

Here is where I want to spend some time on the under-appreciated third variable. Scope. Scope is often described in terms of performance requirements. It also is commonly over-determined by authors of Level-1 requirements. 

Good Level-1 requirements define success as what the project will do or what we will discover at the end of the project. They are silent on how the team should go about  accomplishing them. A well-written requirement states that the six tons of bricks on one side of the river will have to be moved to a specific spot on the other side of the river. It is silent on how this is accomplished. Whether this is done by boats, bridges, or by re-routing the river. According to greek mythology, Hercules saw an opening when he was challenged to clean the Augean stables in a single day.  Instead of trying to get in there with a pitch fork, he redirected a river to do the work for him. This is a example of innovative project management accomplishing the goal without being stuck on a specific solution. For a more current, and less mythological, example I would like to point you to NASA’s Juno missions to Jupiter. In the early 2000s there was a strong desire to send a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere for study. The Juno team, however, made the argument that the same science can be better accomplished through remote sensing from an orbiter and was therefore able to significantly cut project costs. 

It isn’t often that we have the opportunity to redefine how to accomplish our goals radically, but many great technological breakthroughs follow this pattern. And we have many more everyday opportunities to accomplish our milestones. Does every requirement need to be verified through testing or will analysis suffice? Can we replace stand-up reviews with the associated formality and overhead with table-top discussions that often lead to deeper insights? Can we move faster by sharing information through technology instead of meetings? None of these challenge us to change what we are doing, but how we are accomplishing our goals. 

So I am leaving you with this question. What can you change in your daily routine that still gets you what you need but with less effort? What are you doing that does not contribute to the quality of your work product? I am confident that you a few items will come to mind.