cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page i Visualizing Project Management Models and frameworks for mastering complex systems Third Edition Kevin Forsberg, Phd, csep Hal Mooz, PMP, CSEP Howard Cotterman John Wiley & Sons, Inc. cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page i Visualizing Project Management Models and frameworks for mastering complex systems Third Edition Kevin Forsberg, Phd, csep Hal Mooz, PMP, CSEP Howard Cotterman John Wiley & Sons, Inc. cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page ii Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. 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HD69.P.75F67 2005 658.4′04—dc22 2005007673 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page iii To those who master complexity and provide us with simple, elegant solutions. cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page iv cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page v Foreword to the Third Edition Today’s industrial products, and many public sponsored projects, show a strong increase in functionality and complexity. Think of au- tomobiles, mobile phones, personal computers, airplanes, or a space mission. To ensure success and cope with inherent risks of modern products, project management and systems engineering have be- come indispensable skills for forward-looking enterprises. They have been thrust into the center of attention of top executives. Both fields, project management and systems engineering, ensure success by focusing on technical performance, cost, and schedule—and be- yond that on parameters such as return on investment, market ac- ceptance, or sustainability. Anyone who has lived with the space program, or any other high- tech industrial product development, can immediately appreciate this acclaimed book. It addresses and “visualizes” the multidimen- sional interactions of project management and systems engineering in several important ways. The book shows the interdependencies be- tween the two disciplines and the relationships that each discipline has with the many other engineering, manufacturing, business ad- ministration, logistics, enterprise, or market-oriented skills needed to achieve successful products. Since the early 1970s, many of the world’s space projects have been planned and implemented through broad international cooper- ation. Having lived through some of these as engineer, project man- ager, and managing director, I well understand the need for simple and broadly accepted principles and practices for the practitioners of project management and systems engineering. My years in industry gave me significant insight into the dif- ferent engineering and project management cultures and practices prevailing in Europe and the United States. It enabled me to un- derstand and easily interact with the different organizations that v cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page vi vi FOREWORD TO THE THIRD EDITION were involved in the most complex transatlantic cooperation of the 1970s. Remember, failures result not only from poor hardware engi- neering, software engineering, or systems or project management; they can also originate from differing cultural interpretations of en- gineering, communications, or management practices. On more recent, highly complex international projects, such as the world’s largest radar missions (SIR-C and SRTM) flown on the space shuttle, and the International Space Station (ISS), we learned again the lesson that project management and systems en- gineering, when focused on the essentials, are key ingredients to assured success. At the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands a few years ago, we initiated a new international postgraduate Master pro- gram of space systems engineering for senior engineers with a focus on modern “end-to-end” systems engineering. We emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary engineering, communication, and management interaction on the basis of a common use of terms and definitions. We also gave strong consideration to the fact that sys- tems engineering and project management need to closely interact to achieve results. The importance of this excellent book, able to encompass these two key disciplines, cannot be overemphasized. I was hence delighted to have been invited to write the Foreword for this third edition. —Heinz Stoewer Heinz Stoewer is the president of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Professor Stoewer started his career in aero- space. He spent a number of years in German and U.S. industry (MBB/EADS and McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing). In the 1970s, he was ap- pointed the program manager for the Spacelab, the first human space- flight enterprise at the European Space Agency. He eventually became a managing director of the German Space Agency. As professor for space systems engineering at the Technical University of Delft in The Nether- lands, he initiated a highly successful space systems engineering Master program. Throughout his career, he has been aware of the need to interact effectively with compatriots in other fields and in other countries in areas covering the management of projects, systems, and software engineering. cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page vii Foreword to the Second Edition There are a thousand reasons for failure but not a single excuse. Mike Reid It is every manager’s unending nightmare: In today’s world of in- creasing complexity, there is less and less tolerance for error. We see this daily in the realms of health care, product safety and reliability, transportation, energy, communications, space exploration, military operations, and—as the above quote from the great Penn State foot- ball player Mike Reid demonstrates—sports. Whether the venue is the stock market, a company’s customer base, consumers, govern- ment regulators, auditors, the battlefield, the ball field, or the media, “No one cares”—as the venerated quotation puts it—“about the storms you survived along the way, but whether you brought the ship safely into the harbor.” Over the course of my own career in aerospace, I have seen an unfortunate number of failures of very advanced, complex—and ex- pensive—pieces of equipment, often due to the most mundane of causes. One satellite went off course into space on a useless trajec- tory because there was a hyphen missing in one of the millions of lines of software code. A seemingly minor flaw in the electrical de- sign of the Apollo spacecraft was not detected until Apollo 13 was 200,000 miles from Earth, when a spark in a cryogenic oxygen tank led to an explosion and the near-loss of the crew. A major satellite proved to be badly nearsighted because of a tiny error in grinding the primary mirror in its optical train. And, as became apparent in the inquiry into the Challenger disaster, the per- formance of an exceedingly capable space vehicle—a miracle of modern technology—was undermined by the effects of cold temper- ature on a seal during a sudden winter storm. Murphy’s Law, it would seem, has moved in lockstep with the advances of the modern age. vii cott_a01ffirs.qxd 7/1/05 4:06 PM Page viii viii FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION THEORETICALLY, SUCCESS IS MANAGEABLE In the grand old days of American management, when it was pre- sumed that all problems and mistakes could be controlled by more rigorous managerial oversight, the canonical solution to organiza- tional error was to add more oversight and bureaucracy. Surely, it was thought, with more managers having narrower spans of control, the organization could prevent any problem from ever happening again. Of course, this theory was never confirmed in the real world—or as Kansas City Royals hitting instructor Charlie Lau once noted regard- ing a similar challenge, “There are two theories on hitting the knuck- leball. Unfortunately, neither one works.” The problem with such a strategy of giving more managers fewer responsibilities was that no one was really in charge of the biggest responsibility: Will the overall enterprise succeed? I recall the comment a few years ago of the chief executive of one of the world’s largest companies, who was stepping down after nearly a decade of increasingly poor performance in the marketplace by his company. He was asked by a journalist why the company had fared so poorly under his tutelage, to which he replied, “I don’t know. It’s a mysterious thing.” My observation is that there is no mystery here at all. After decades of trying to centrally “manage” every last variable and con- tingency encountered in the course of business, Fortune 500 com- panies found themselves with 12 to 15 layers of management—but essentially ill prepared to compete in an increasingly competitive global marketplace. Or as I once pointed out in one of my Laws, “If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.” A NEW LOOK AT PROJECT MANAGEMENT Today’s leaders in both the private and public sectors are rediscov- ering the simple truth that every good manager has known in his or her heart since the first day on the job: Accountability is the one managerial task that cannot be delegated. There must be one per- son whose responsibility it is to make a project work—even as we acknowledge the importance of teamwork and “worker empower- ment” in the modern workplace. In other words, we are rediscov- ering the critical role of the project manager. The importance of the project manager has long been noted in our nation’s military procurement establishment, which has tradi-