Knowing when to start finishing

To meet deadlines, we focus on accurate estimation and tracking. We often overlook the important skill of knowing when to start finishing.

How long does it take to do something?

In simple cases, like shovelling a heap of sand, there is a direct relationship between the size of the task, the number of people, and the time it will take. If one man can shovel a ton of sand in an hour, then two men can do it in half and hour, and six men could shovel twelve tons of sand in two hours. Managing this sort of task is easy - just size up the task, divide by the number of resources, and make sure they keep going.

We use this effort-driven model a lot, but it is often inappropriate. It only works when we know the size of the job, when the task has a definite point of completion, when we can determine a rate for the job, and when the only thing required to get the job done is suitably skilled resources.

Most tasks are not simply effort-driven.

Discovery tasks, like finding a bug in a program, are almost impossible to estimate. It might take 10 minutes, or 2 days, or 3 months. You might be able to define an average, but tracking individual tasks against this average is meaningless. If things are running late, it might be worth getting someone else involved, or maybe postponing the task until later.

Open-ended tasks, like report writing, are probably the most common. How long does it take to write a management report? You could write a two line summary in five minutes, or a one-pager in a day. In a week you could talk to a few people and perhaps produce a few sides. An in-depth report could take four weeks. You could take years to analyse the situation in detail.

I have often been asked to finish reports and design documents that other people have struggled to complete. Those originally responsible were failing because they did not know when to start finishing.

Consider a project architecture document. The document is not meant to be a definitive account of everything, but enough of what is known and key decisions to guide the detailed design as much as possible. The temptation is to keep investigating, keep looking for detail, until you are sure, and never to commit what you have to paper and never to finish the task.

To finish an open-ended task on time you need know when to start finishing. If you have to write a report, you have to know when to stop investigating and commit what you know to paper. If you have a week to write a report, spend three days finding out what you can and spend the morning of the fourth day writing this up. That gives you a day and half to find out the most important parts that you have missed, and to make the document as presentable as you can.

Instead of estimating open-ended tasks, you just need to set a reasonable budget of time, and stick to it. There is no need for contingency, and no excuse for late delivery. You just need to know when to start finishing.

© Copyright 2009 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.

Ryanair

We can learn a lot from the business practices of Ryanair, both bad and good.

I decided to take a short break and visit the Republic of Ireland. I booked flights with Ryanair.

Ryanair is a very successful budget airline. It offers very low prices, but when you come to book a ticket, you are presented with a number of notionally optional, but entirely necessary, extras.

For each person on each flight you have to pay a £5 card handling fee, unless you use the rather uncommon Visa Electron card (I later found how to avoid the Ryanair card handling fee). You usually have to pay a £5 online check-in fee for each person on each flight. So each return flight costs £20 more than the headline price. Checked-in baggage is an expensive extra.

As well as the disingenuous hidden charges, additional charges if things go wrong are downright predatory. If you forget to check-in online, it costs £40 per person per flight to check-in at the airport. Changing a name on a flight costs £100 to £150. Excess baggage costs £15 per kilogram.

I had not booked on Ryanair before, and I found the whole process bewildering and stressful. I felt that they were trying to rip me off to start with, and extort me later if I hit problems.

I was going to write about the parallels between Ryanair's practices and IT project management. How we sell projects on low headline prices, in the full knowledge that they will really be more expensive. How we are predatory if our business customers want changes later in the project.

I did some more research into Ryanair. Although I still think that Ryanair are disingenuous and predatory, I now partly admire them.

Ryanair does everything it can to keep costs down and pass this on to their customers. Where costs seem high (such as baggage costs, or in-airport fees), they are trying to show people where the true costs are, and encourage them to take cheaper options.

Like other low-cost airlines, Ryanair avoids the costs of traditional, full-service airlines. But Ryanair goes further than most. They constantly battle airports and public bodies over fees and taxes, and withdraw services from airports over seemingly small amounts. Rather than work within industry norms, Ryanair constantly pursues value for their customers.

We can learn a lot from Ryanair.

We should avoid disingenuous and predatory pricing, knowingly or negligently giving low project estimates and inflating costs later.

But there is a lot we should copy from Ryanair. We should be prepared to break out of the traditional, expensive full-service model of IT and show low-cost alternatives. We should show where the money goes. We should show the true costs of business decisions, indecision, lack of business ownership, last minute changes, underinvestment.

And we should constantly battle to lower costs. This means breaking away from industry norms, constantly exploring new ways to save money, and constantly challenging suppliers to reduce costs.

Love them or hate them, we have a lot to learn from Ryanair.

© Copyright 2009 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.

Ban project management!

Make a great leap forward in the management of change by banning projects and project management.

Project management is an obvious way of managing change: it allows you to set objectives, define responsibilities, organise and control the work. If project management never existed, we would have to invent it.

What if project management did not exist, but we were not allowed to invent it? What if projects and project management were banned?

This is not a serious proposition, but it is very thought-provoking.

If projects were banned, everyone would be less enthusiastic for change. You would have to take good care of the systems and infrastructure that you already have, making sure that they were always in good condition, and continued to meet evolving business needs.

Sometimes you would need more than just incremental change. You would have to do this as additional work within existing teams. You would have to put a lot of effort into explaining and discussing the benefits of the change, and into persuading different groups to work in the same direction.

You would not be able to publish a project plan, so you would just have to keep talking to everyone. You would need to understand what each team does, and what new things they would need to do to support a new business direction. If they did not agree then you would just have to negotiate or find another way.

Even if other teams did support your change, fresh priorities would come along and throw them off course. You would need to keep talking to them, and continually remind them of the benefits of your changes. Sometimes you would have to postpone your changes because other more important work takes over.

Resourcing would be a real pain. You could not just assign skills from a resource pool. You would have to find the individuals who were going to do the work. You would have to explain to each one of them what the change was about, and exactly how you wanted them to contribute. You would need to get their individual commitment for when the work could be delivered, and encourage them to be as realistic about this as possible. You would have to work out with them how they could balance the competing priorities of their current work and the additional work.

If you needed to modify your changes, then it would be chaos. You would have to go around and talk to everyone again, and understand all the impacts, and gain new commitments for when things could be delivered. Moving a few bars on a Gantt chart would be so much easier!

I am not seriously suggesting that we should ban project management. However, we often forget that project management has to boil down to practical realities. We hide behind the formalities of plans, budgets, sign-off, resourcing and change control. But these are only as good as they can be made to work for real. Imagining a world in which project management is banned shows us more clearly the behaviours we need to manage projects successfully.

© Copyright 2009 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.

Winnie The Pooh, writers block, and the problems of IT

IT is so mentally demanding that we do not get the opportunity to think how to improve.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

This opening paragraph from the Winnie The Pooh by A A Milne sum up so eloquently how we live. We are so busy bumping backwards down the stairs of life that we never get the chance to stop and think of a better way.

I have noticed this recently, writing these newsletters.

When I started, I had decided to take some time out to think through ideas that had been buzzing about in my head, and to gradually turn these into methods and tools that could form part of a business.

These newsletters have been a record of that journey, helping me to develop and articulate the ideas.

But in the past few months, writing these newsletters has got a lot harder. I am a more proficient writer (that just comes with practice), but I have not had such a good flow of ideas.

And I know the reason why: I have been busy.

Little by little, despite our inexperience, we have managed to generate more and more interest in what we do. Instead of having occasional contacts, we are talking to people all the time. And they want difficult things from us - like actual work - not just a chat about ideas.

You might think that all this activity would give me lots to write about. But you would be wrong.

I have found that my mind fills with the immediate demands of the situation: finding customers, creating plans, doing work, meeting deadlines, navigating politics.

This has crowded out the broad, general ideas that used to fill my mind, and contributed to writers block for this newsletter.

Having the time to think gave me insights that I would not have gained had I continued bumping backwards down the stairs of life. It let me critique the approaches and limitations that I had previously accepted, and find new ways through.

As I rejoin the real world, I am losing that perspective. Although I am more focussed, more "switched on", more professional, I have lost some of my free thinking. Inevitably, I have fallen back into accepting the common ways of working, and the problems and the limitations of those around me.

IT is hard and it fills our minds so much that we simply do not have enough mental bandwidth to critique how we work, and how to overcome the problems we face. In so many ways, we are, as an industry, bumping downstairs backwards. We need to find ways to stop bumping, and to free our minds.

I am going to do my bit. I am going on holiday.

© Copyright 2009 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.