Archive for Juli 7th, 2008

IJPM vs. JPM

Montag, Juli 7th, 2008

After I read the paper
Crawford, Lynn; Pollack, Julien; England, David: How Standards are Standards – An Examination of Language Emphasis in Project Management Standards; in: Journal of Project Management, Vol. 38 (2007), No. 3, pp. 6-21.

I thought about visualising the different foci of the European International Journal of Project Management and the American Journal of Project Management [besides the more than obvious ‚International‘ in the title].

I compiled a list of all keywords which have been submitted by authors between 2003 and 2008. Afterwards I ran this list through the CloudTag Generator at tagcrowd.com which I set to generate 100 Meta-Keywords. This is the result for the International Journal of Project Management:

IJPM Keywords 2003-2008 (100 Tags)

And this is the result for the Journal of Project Management:

JPM 100 Tags Cloud of all Keywords 2003-2008

It’s quite interesting to spot the differences, the easiest difference to make out are the mentions of construction projects. However this also nicely shows the JPM’s focus on ‚Best Practice Research‘.

Posted in Literature Review, Tag Cloud | 2 Comments »

Project management: cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon, its time to accept other success criteria (Atkinson, R. 1999)

Montag, Juli 7th, 2008

SCC-Thumb

Atkinson, Roger: Project management – cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon, its time to accept other success criterin; in: International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 17 (1999), No. 6, pp. 337-342.

Once I spent some hours discussing with colleagues what the magic triangle might be. PMI says it is Time-Cost-Scope and Quality is a product of these three. My colleague argued it should be Time-Cost-Quality since Quality is defined as meeting or exceeding the expectations of the customer, which includes that the customer gets what he asked for, aka the scope.

Similarly Atkinson argues that this is only asking the question of the project is ‚Doing it right‘, which automatically focuses mainly on the delivery system. Thus leaving huge gaps in the ‚Getting it right‘ part unanswered. Which leads, as many IT project examples show, to a nice but unusable/unwanted/unaccepted piece of software. In order to get it right by doing it right Atkinson proposes the ‚Square Route‘ of success criteria – (1) The Time-Cost-Quality-Triangle, (2) The Information System itself, (3) Organisational benefits, and (4) Stakeholder/community benefits.

Posted in Success Criteria | 1 Comment »

Fundamental Uncertainties in Projects and the Scope of Project Mangement (Atkinson et al. 2006)

Montag, Juli 7th, 2008

Uncertainty(1-Thumb) Uncertainty(2-Thumb)

Atkinson, Roger; Crawford, Lynn; Ward, Stephen: Fundamental Uncertainties in Projects and the Scope of Project Management, in: International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 24 (2008), pp. 687-698.

Very interesting article, clearly in the normative/positivist’s tradition of how to do Risk Management better. Firstly the authors dissect uncertainties typically found in projects into (1) Uncertainty in estimates, (2) Uncertainty with project parties, and (3) Uncertainty with project life cycle. What does it matter? The authors argue that not all uncertainties are typically the scope of classic risk management. Therefore the project objective should be the ultima ratio, especially if trade-off decisions are needed. Furthermore crystal clear decision making needs one decision-maker, therefore project uncertainties need an owner.

In the second part (on my page 2) Atkinson et al. outline the difference between hard and soft projects. They do outline some characteristics of hard vs. soft projects, e.g. degree of external influences, tangibility of artefacts. Secondly they outline two modes of problem-solving sense-making, and data collecting. They put forward, that a problem rooted in a difference in information required vs. information at hand, calls for a data collection effort to solve; whereas a problem caused by different interpretion of the same data requires sense-making as a problem-solving technique. Moreover they locate the typical soft projects in a high ambiguity and high uncertainty quadrant, thus needing sense-making, and value analysis for problem solving.

Lastly they call for trust (especially on soft projects) instead of controls. And outline a Trust Audit as a project management tool, instead of auditing controls.

Posted in Hard and soft projects, Organisational capabilities, Trust, Uncertainty management | 2 Comments »