Your role as a project manager will improve dramatically when you start to think like a systems engineer. Your organization will improve too.
What does a systems engineer do? A systems engineer takes different components and designs a solution that gets them to work together in a specific way that isn’t possible by each component individually. Depending on the system, the systems engineer may design some redundancy in such a way that if a key component failed, it would not lead to a failure of the entire system. System engineers want their systems to be “reliable”. In other words, the system needs to perform its required function(s), under certain conditions, for a designated period.
So what does this have to do with project management?
If you think about it, project managers are akin to systems engineers. We take multiple “components” and get them to work together in unique ways temporarily. For example, we take the multiple stakeholders—the different organizational functional areas, each with their own people, expertise and priorities—and get them to work together in way that is typically outside of their normal operations. Additionally, we take multiple organizational business systems, processes and procedures and integrate them just for our projects. We also spend time studying the various project components to determine which ones, if they failed, could cause the entire project to fail.
Perceptive project managers recognize that as with systems, a project’s success depends upon the “reliability” of each individual component. Let us pretend for a moment that your project is comprised of four major, independent organizational components: operations, engineering, infrastructure/support, and senior management. Further, let us pretend that you know your organization so well that you can assign a “reliability” value for each component as related to your project. Let’s say you expect each independent component of your organization to be 90% reliable. That’s pretty good, right? Not so fast. Without getting into the math, the reliability of your organizational “system” is 66%. Uh oh.
If you’re a manufacturer, it’s not a stretch to find out what the shop and the engineering “on time completion” rates are. There are dozens of other metrics across the organization, right? Use these numbers and you’ll be thinking a lot like a systems engineer. (For more on systems engineering related to projects, I highly recommend reading PM 101 by Francis Webster. If you want to explore reliability further, definitely get a copy of Reliability, Maintainability and Risk by Dr. David Smith.)
So what are the major components of your project? How “reliable” are they? Which component, if it failed, could cause your project to fail? Or did you already build redundancy into your project? What if you increase the reliability of each component (via process improvement)? Is anybody else in your organization thinking like this?
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