Information-Driven Project Management (IDPM)

It’s a fact that:

• Doing a bunch of planned activities does not guarantee a successful project.

• The results of project activities are not always right the first time.

• Projects stray from plans, get surprised, discover problems, and are beset by changes.

• Projects are often late, overspend their budget, and under-deliver—that is, they often fail to deliver their originally promised value.

• Process improvement efforts such as Lean and Six Sigma do not always make projects faster, better, or cheaper.

Why?  What’s driving this situation?  This course delves into systemic reasons underlying these phenomena and provides powerful tools to expose and address them.  Participants will be equipped with the concepts and methods to tackle systemic, structural problems in projects.

For example, efficient, effective, value-adding activities still require appropriate information upon which to base their work in order to yield valuable results.  Thus, the value added by an activity is not just a function of the activity’s internal capabilities but also of its inputs—one reason many efforts to “get lean” run into problems.

Information is the life-blood of projects, but many projects suffer from poor definition of the information flow among activities.  Activities are allowed to proceed based on poor assumptions or other bad inputs.  The resulting outputs in turn become bad inputs for other activities, and the result is a cascade of rework, delays, and wasted resources leading cost and schedule challenges.  Empirical research has shown that this effect can consume more than 30% of a typical project’s duration, thus being a key driver of cost and schedule risks.

The conventional methods and tools of project management fail to shed light on these challenging issues.  Information-Driven Project Management (IDPM) allows managers to unlock the information flow structure of a project and to visualize, organize, and exploit information relationships among activities.  The focus shifts from managing activities to managing results, which form the basis for agreements, commitments, and accountabilities in projects.  Managers will learn about methods and tools such as the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) that empower both project managers and participants to recognize and avoid many unwelcome surprises.