Jiri’s Notepad

I am still working through lean book & blog shelf, trying to sieve sense from non-sense (or more practical from less practical ideas). One of the pages I recently came across recentlyt is this talk on the Role of Leadership in Software Development by Mary Poppendieck, one of the original proponents of the lean IT idea.

The video is a great example showing both Poppendieck’s story telling skills as well as her point of view that is still new and fresh. If you can make some time, seriously, go and watch it. If not, here is a summary of the talk’s killer story for you.

Polaris, a hugely successful 1960s US weapons programme, was one the defining moments in the history of project management. The programme inveted the PERT planning technique, at that time hailed as one of the key contributors to the programme success, allegdely shaving off 2 years off the expected nine years worth of effort. Strangely enough, despite all the hype that it created and the generations of project managers that had to learn it, PERT was only a minor contributor to the project success. So what was it that this huge programme actually did that made the difference? That’s actually something that cought my eye, because it formulates some of the experiences i had on large programmes:

• Quality of leadership: The programme technical leadership directed all key decisions and the programme identified its own success criteria;
• Focus on deployment: The programme did not care about anything else than getting results operational as quick possible. They used timeboxed iterations of a technical solution to achieve this.
• Use of decentralised competitive organisation: Polaris had had to invent most of the technologies they wanted to use. They managed the risk by using a kind of a parallel development - three competing vendors working on the same solution at the same time, with the target solution being the one that came out as the best one;
• Reliability: Very harsh quality control with ‘excessive testing’ and redundancy designed in to cater for virtually any kind of failure;
• Esprit de corps - The top brass encouraged and rewarded teamwork and commitment.

So what about fancy PM techniques? Poppendieck mentions that purpose PERT was actually used for was to to keep sponsors at bay preventing them from interfering! Or in other words:

Polaris had a gimmick, PERT.[…] PERT was less effective than advertised but more so than rain dancing. As such it served its purpose. […]

The Polaris project enjoyed top quality graphics - crisp, clear, full color, visually very attractive and impressive. They were very successful in persuading Congress.

Which shows that good delivery gets you so far and that there is always a space for good marketing.