How Scheduling Programs Fail


In a lawyer's office, advertising agency, accountant's office, or any other consulting business, there is a large and unfilled need for a program that manages the allocation of people to projects over time. This three-sided structure is common to all consulting companies, yet amazingly no program exists to provide this service.

From the programmer's point of view, project management is a scheduling issue, with the possible added twist of critical-path analysis, in which the start of one task is dependent on the completion of a preceding task. All project-management programs available today are based on this academically pure assumption.[2] The problem is that this vision of project management has very little to do with reality.

[2] I'm as guilty as the next programmer. In 1984 I wrote Computer Associates' SuperProject, one of the first project-management programs. It ignored the interaction of multiple projects just as all of its successors have.

One fundamental assumption of project-management programs that people need help understanding how to perform their projects is wrong. Most people are pretty good at accomplishing their projects; after all, it's their job. What they really need help with is dovetailing multiple projects into the calendar. Resources generally meaning people work on multiple projects simultaneously. They start and finish projects in an unbroken, often overlapping, sequence, while other projects are temporarily waiting for their chance. It is not good enough to allocate people to projects one at a time. They have to be assigned to multiple projects at the same time.

To be useful, such resource-management programs must integrate the three dimensions of the problem: time, projects, and resources. Instead, we get programs that handle only two dimensions time and resources and their vendors insist that this is all we really need. Variously called "traffic," "project management," or "resource allocation," this critical application segment simply does not exist.

What's more, projects are constantly changing with respect to the plan. Any useful project-management program must be able to flow and adapt to changes as they spring up. A project-management system that doesn't incorporate robust and useful feedback mechanisms so that the actual people doing the work can tell the system the truth about what is happening now isn't very useful for real-world management.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net