project notions
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project notions |
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[business case] [contingency] [estimate] [plan] [pripiska] [problem] [programme] [project] [risk] [scope/scoping/scope-creep] [stakeholder] |
| Veryard Project Papers | Making the Business Case
(pdf)
Developing a Business Case
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Project Management |
A quantity added to a budget or schedule to allow for uncertainty. |
Risk Management |
A specified response to a specified event. |
Systems Theory |
A variation in style or tactics for different conditions. |
| Veryard Project Papers | Three Notions of Contingency |
To be an accurate prediction or forecast of the project. To be a commitment on the part of project manager and project team. To be a bargaining counter between the project and its customers. (Customers assume estimates are inflated and try to bargain them downwards; projects inflate estimates as a precaution against customers trying to bargain them downwards.)
| Veryard Project Papers | Project Estimation |
| Ja, mach nur einen Plan.
Sei nur ein grosses Licht! Und mach dann noch 'nen zweiten Plan Gehn tun sie beide nicht. [Brecht, The Threepenny Opera] |
Make a single plan -
so everyone's enlightened. 'Cos if you make a second plan
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| Veryard Project Papers | Planning
Organic Information Planning An alternative to top-down information strategies Infrastructure and its Cost-Justification see also Confucius on planning |
Pripiska is a key component of what John Gall calls the Potemkin
Village Effect (PVE). "The PVE is especially pronounced in Five-Year Plans,
which typically report sensational over-achievement during the first four-and-a-half
years, followed by a rash of criminal trials of the top officials and the
announcement of a new and more ambitious Five-Year Plan, starting from
a baseline somewhat lower than that of the preceding Plan,
but with higher goals.
Usually, problems only trigger action when they are judged to be of sufficient size or value.
Within various discourses, there is an imperative to replace the word ‘problem’ with some other word or phrase. For example, some managers adopt a no-nonsense practical manner, repeating such catch-phrases as: “We don’t have problems, we have opportunities”, or “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. (This leads to the ironic use of substitute words as opportunity or challenge, as in “intractable opportunity”.) At the other extreme, there is resistance to the notion that there might be anything so straightforward as a problem. In this discourse, the word problem is replaced by such sociologically correct euphemisms as “problematic situation”.
If the former can be interpreted as a form of resistance to the latter,
perhaps the converse is also true. There can often be an interesting
opposition between these two extreme attitudes towards problems.
| Veryard Project Papers | Programme Management |
| Veryard Project Papers | Project Types |
Risk management addresses the extent to which individuals and groups
within the organization face up to (or retreat from) the challenges and
uncertainties of the task.
| Veryard Project Papers | Risk Management |
Scoping includes both defining where the separation line is drawn (planning, design) and maintaining / enforcing the separation (management, governance, control).
Scope creep occurs when the line is moved - usually outwards.
Thus what was excluded is now included, making something (such as a project)
larger.
| Veryard Project Papers | In praise of Scope-Creep |
| Veryard Project Papers | Stakeholders - Inclusion and Exclusion |
| usa | uk | |
| B. Kagarlitsky, The Dialectics of Change (Verso, 1990) | usa details | uk details |
| Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge University Press, 1987) | usa details | uk details |
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