Sorry everyone, on this wonderful Thanksgiving day this Blog has been flooded with Spam in the comments section. I don’t know why it should be that Thanksgiving increases the need for medication for back pains, restless leg syndrom, or the old-time classic e.d.
Archive for November, 2008
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Donnerstag, November 27th, 2008Decision Making Within Distributed Project Teams (Bourgault et al., 2008)
Montag, November 3rd, 2008
Bourgault, Mario; Drouin, Nathalie; Hamel, Émilie: Decision Making Within Distributed Project Teams – An Exploration of Formalization and Autonomy as Determinants of Success; in: Project Management Journal, Vol. 39 (2008), Supplement, pp. S97S110.
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20063
Bourgault et al. analyse group decision making in virtual teams. Their article is based on the principles of limited rationality, i.e. deciding is choosing from different alternatives, and responsible choice, i.e. deciding is anticipating outcomes of the decision.
Existing literature controversially discusses the effects of virtualising teams. Some authors argue that virtual teams lack social pressure and thus smaler likelihood of showing escalation of committment behaviour, whilst making more objective and faster decisions. Other authors find no difference in working style between virtual and non-virtual teams. Generally literature explains that decision-errors are mostly attributed to break-downs in rationality, which are caused by power and group dynamics. Social pressure in groups also prevents efficiency. In any team with distributed knowledge the leader must coordinate and channel the information flow.
Bourgault et al. conceptualise that Formalisation and Autonomy impact the quality of decision-making, which then influences the team work effectiveness. All this is moderated by the geographic dispersion of the team.
They argue that formalisation, which structures and controls the decision making activities, helps distributed teams to share information. Autonomy is a source of conflict, for example with higher management due to a lack of understanding and trust, ultimately it weakesn a project decision-making because it diverts horizontal information flow within the team to vertical information flow between project and management.
Quality of decision-making process – the authors argue that groups have more information resources and therefore can make better decisions, but this comes at an increased cost for decision-making. Geographical distributed teams lack signals and have difficulties in sharing information. Thus high quality teamwork benefits from more dispersed knowledge but low quality teamwork suffers from a lack of hands-on leadership.
Teamwork effectiveness – this construct has mostly been measured using satisfaction measurements and student samples. Other measures are the degree of taks completion, goal achievement, self-efficacy (intent to stay on the team, ability to cope, percieved individual performance, perceived team performance, satisfaction with the team). Bourgault et al. measure teamwork effectiveness asking for the perceived performance on taks completion, goal achievement, information sharing, conflict resolution, problem solving, and creating a prefereable and sustainable environment.
The authors‘ quantitative analysis shows that in moderated teams all direct and indirect effects can be substantiated, with exception of the autonomy influencing the quality of decision-making. Similarily in highly dispersed teams all direct and indirect effects, but the direct influence of formalisation on teamwork effectiveness, could be proven.
Bourgault et al. conclude with three points of recommendation for the praxis – (1) Distribution of a team contributes to high quality of decisions, although it seems to come at a high cost. (2) Autonomous teams achieve better decisions – „despite the fear of an out of sight out of control syndrome“. (3) Formalisation adds value to teamwork especially the more distributed the team is.
Governance Frameworks for Public Project Development and Estimation (Klakegg et al., 2008)
Montag, November 3rd, 2008 
Klakegg, Ole Jonny; Williams, Terry; Magnussen, Ole Morten; Glasspool, Helene: Governance Frameworks for Public Project Development and Estimation; in: Project Management Journal, Vol. 39 (2008), Supplement, pp. S27S42.
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20058
Klakegg et al. compare different public governance frameworks, particularly the UK’s Ministry of Defense, UK’s Office of Government Commerce, and Norway’s framework. The authors find that „the frameworks have to be politically and administratively
well anchored. A case study particularly looking into cost and time illustrates how the framework influences the project through scrutiny. The analysis shows the governance frameworks are important in securing transparency and control and clarifies the role of sponsor“ (p. S27)
Their analysis starts with the question of „Who are governance relevant stakeholders?„. The authors show two different general approaches to public governance stakeholders – Shareholder Value Systems and Communitarian Systems. The Shareholder Value System is based on the principle that only shareholders are legitimate stakeholders – a system which is used in the US, UK, and Canada. On the other hand the Communitarian System is based on the idea that all impacted communities and persons are relevant stakeholders – a system typically found in Norway, Germany, and numerous other countries. A secondary line of thought is the difference between Western and Asian stakeholder ideas, whereas the Asian idea is underlining the concept of family and the Western idea is underlining the relationship concept.
To pin down the idea of public project governance the authors draw parallels to corporate governance with it’s chain of management ↔ board ↔ shareholder ↔ stakeholder. The APM defines project governance as the corporate governance that is related to projects with the aim that sustainable alternatives are choosen and delivered efficiently. Thus the authors define a governance framework as an organised structure, authoritive in organisation with processes and rules established to ensure the project meets its purpose.
The reviewed governance frameworks show interesting differences – for example in the control basis, reviewer roles, report formats, supporting organisation, and mode of initiation. The principles they are based on range from management of expectations, to establishing hurdles to cross, to making recommendations. Focus of the reviews can be the business case, outputs, inputs, or used methods.
Protecting Software Development Projects against Underestimation (Miranda & Abran, 2008)
Montag, November 3rd, 2008
Miranda, Eduardo; Abran, Alain: Protecting Software Development Projects Against Underestimation; in: Project Management Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3, 7585.
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20067
In this article Miranda & Abran argue „that project contingencies should be based on the amount it will take to recover from the underestimation, and not on the amount that would have been required had the project been adequately planned from the beginning, and that these funds should be administered at the portfolio level.“
Thus they propose delay funds instead of contingencies. The amount of that fund depends on the magnitude of recovery needed (u) and the time of recovery (t). t and u are described using a PERT-like model of triangular probability distribution, based on a best, most-likely, and worst case estimation.
The authors argue that typically in a software development three effects occur that lead to underestimation of contingencies. These three effects are (1) MAIMS behaviour, (2) use of contingencies, (3) delay.
MAIMS stands for ‚money allocated is money spent‘ – which means that cost overruns usually can not be offset by cost under-runs somewhere else in the project. The second effect is that contingency is mostly used to add resources to the project in order to keep the schedule. Thus contingencies are not used to correct underestimations of the project, i.e. most times the plan remains unchanged until all hope is lost. The third effect is that delay is an important cost driver, but delay is only acknowledged as late as somehow possible. This is mostly due to the facts of wishful thinking and inaction inertia on the project management side.
Tom DeMarco proposed a simple square root formula to express that staff added to a late project makes it even later. In this paper Miranda & Abran break this idea down into several categories to better estimate these effects.
In their model the project runs through three phases after delay occurred:
- Time between the actual occurence of the delay and when the delay is decided-upon
- Additional resources are being ramped-up
- Additional resources are fully productive
During this time the whole contingency needed can be broken down into five categories:
- Budgeted effort, which would occur anyway with delay or not = FTE * Recovery time as orginally planned
- Overtime effort, which is the overtime worked of the original staff after the delay is decided-upon
- Additional effort by additional staff, with a ramp-up phase
- Overtime contibuted by the additonal staff
- Process losses du to ramp-up, coaching, communication by orginal staff to the addtional staff
Their model also includes fatigue effects which reduce the overtime worked on the project, with the duration of that overtime-is-needed-period. Finally the authors give a numerical example.
Managerial complexity in project-based operations – A grounded model and its implications for practice (Maylor et al., 2008)
Montag, November 3rd, 2008 
Maylor, Harvey; Vidgen, Richard; Carver, Stephen: Managerial complexity in project-based operations – A grounded model and its implications for practice; in: Journal of Project Management, Vol. 39 (2008), No. S1, pp. S15-S26.
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20057
Maylor et al. investigate the question – What makes a project complex? More specifically this question asks for managerial complexity of projects, which is neither technical nor environmental complexity which has been looked at in depth in research surrounding the whole areas of function point estimation.
The literature review finds several previous approaches to measure complexity
- Number of physical elements and interdependencies (Baccarini, 1996)
- Structural uncertainty (number of project elements), uncertainty of goals and objectives (Williams, 1999)
- Static dimension – assembly-system-array (Shenhar, 2001)
- Organisational complexity, technical novelty, scale complexity (Maylor, 2003)
- Observer-dependent, time-dependent, problem-dependent projects (Jaafari, 2003)
- Organisational x technological complexity (Xia & Lee, 2004)
- Communication and power relationships, amibguity, change (Cicmil & Marshall, 2005)
The authors then propose the MODeST model with the dimensions of mission, organisation, delivery, stakeholder, and team. In this qualitative focus group based research, the authors break down the dimesions into
Mission
– Objectives
– Scale
– Uncertainty
– Constraints
Organisation
– Time & Space
– Organisational setting
Delivery
– Process
– Resources
Stakeholder
– Stakeholder attributes
– Inter-stakeholder relationships
Team
– Project staff
– Project manager
– Group
This Complexity Measurements Table shows their full set of questions with the questions stricken out that were not mentioned sufficiently in the focus group discussions.
Governance and support in the sponsoring of projects and programs (Crawford et al., 2008)
Montag, November 3rd, 2008 
Crawford, Lynn; Cooke-Davies, Terry; Hobbs, Brian; Labuschagne, Les; Remington, Kaye, Chen, Ping: Governance and support in the sponsoring of projects and programs; in: Project Management Journal, Vol. 39 (2008), No. S1, p. S43-S55.
DOI:10.1002/pmj.20059
Sponsoring of projects and programs is increasingly getting attention in project management research. The authors argue that this is due to two factors – (1) recognition of contextual critical success factors and (2) push for corporate governance.
[I personally think that riding that dead horse Sarbox is questionable to say the least and I can think of so many reasons why corporations want some of their projects controlled thightly.]
This article presents findings from a qualitative survey, in which 108 interviews from 36 projects in 9 organisations were collected. Crawford et al. propose a general model of project sponsorship – as they put it: „The conceptual model has significant potential to provide organizations and sponsors with guidance in understanding and defining the effective contextual conduct of the sponsorship role.“
Their general model consists of two dimensions – Need for Governance and Need for Support. In this model each sponsor can find his/her spot in the matrix by assessing what his/her focus of representation is. Sponsors either represent the need of the permanent organisation (need for governance) or they represent the need of the temporary organisation (need for support). In the interviews conducted, they identified typical situations which require a shift in emphasising one or the other dimension.
When to emphasise governance?
Among the resons and examples given during the interviews were: the project is high risk for the parent organisation, project performs poorly, markets are changing rapidly, governance or regulation call for increased oversight, project team behaved illegaly or non-compliant, the project is mission-critical, or the project’s objective is to re-align the company to a new strategy.
When to emphasise support?
Typical situations given were: parent organisation fails to provide resources, project faces resistance in the organisation, different stakeholders impose conflicting objecitve on the project, lack of decision-making by the parent organisation, project team is weak or inexperienced, or the project shows early signs of difficulities.
Among the many open research questions not yet addressed are –
What are the essential attributes to effective sponsoring?
Which influence does one or the other strategie has on project success?
Which competencies are required in a sponsor?
What are the factors contributing to effective sponsorship performance?
What does the role of the sponsor in different contexts of programmes/projects/organisations look like?