coneblog

In comparing projects, one aspect I’ve been thinking about is the level of dependencies.

Where I live there are a number of road construction projects going on right now. Seems like this has been the case for several years. When driving around the traffic cones, movable barriers, and temporary roadways around the grading or bridging, I think about project management ( -- doesn’t everyone?).

My first thought is a sense of wonder. How do they figure out the sequence of events that need to take place between approving the plans and completing the roadways. In some cases, the number of shifts and configuration changes is truly monumental.

Here in the suburbs of western Philadelphia, we had a ringside seat on a major highway improvement project – the US 202 Reconstruction project. This $250 m project went from 1999 thru 2004, and included such peripheral jobs as the $1.6 m task of moving the historic King of Prussia tavern one half mile out of the way to make room for more turn lanes into the King of Prussia Mall. Even though George W and his crew slept there during the Revolution, shoppers needed to get into the Mall.

Plus, there were new ramps to build, bridge replacements to install, and railroad rights of way to move. All without disrupting traffic on any of the four major highways and dozens of access roads that come together in this nexus of Philadelphia’s northwestern suburbs.

It was quite a feat, and came off very smoothly. There were some bumps, notably the discovery of sinkholes in the limestone underneath the new excavations and footers. These were dealt with by the brute force expedient of constructing a cement plant on site, and dumping concrete into the sinkholes until they would take no more.

But as I navigated through the construction zone, I was amazed and impressed at the planning that must have taken place in order to pull this project off. I saw that a road reconstruction project was all about phases and dependencies. That is, the shape of the project depended on an understanding of what had to come first, then next, et cetera.

Such a project is all about dependent links – those lines in MS Project that make task “R” come after task “Q”. The road construction project is a network of dependencies, with a critical path (the longest duration path) and much cross-linking between tracks and tasks. I would characterize this project as a highly structured one.

A necessary attribute of a highly structured project is a well-defined blueprint of the end-state. You better believe that the first traffic cone was not placed on rt. 202 until the design was complete down to parts of an inch on every component, including all of the intermediate states and routings.

Contrast to a software development project. In olden times (a decade ago) it was understood that coding could not commence until all details of the design had been worked out. This is the so-called waterfall model, where effort cascades down form higher level tasks to more detailed tasks, culminating in a developed system.

More recently however, it has become clear that in many cases a better software project result comes from approaches where all the details aren’t worked out in the beginning.

Next – what we can learn from how others do projects.