The Cheshire cat and Project Management
The Cheshire cat is a character in Lewis Carroll's "Alice In Wonderland" novel, a mysterious character with a distinguished feature that involves a periodic gradual disappearance of its body, leaving only one last visible trace; its iconic grin. He can disappear and reappear just about anywhere at any time.
With a soft cryptic voice the cat leads Alice through the maze that is Wonderland. Alice asks, "How do I get out of here" as the cat responds, "Where is it you want to go?" In much the same manner project managers ask "How do I complete this project successfully, and the cat's response, "What do you consider success." Like the cat's mesmerizing grin and colorful shifting body, projects are full of mystical algorithms, fanciful colors, silos, or accompanying software that pop up from the nether land of project management confounding users and blinding them of their mission or objective.
The Cheshire cat knows that if you are chasing your tail you cannot possibly innovate. In much the same manner if you are focused on project management rather than project planning you will create a project that is unmanageable. As Dwight D Eisenhower said, "I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Look up project management on the web and you will find a dizzying array of software platforms each offering to be the "holy grail" of PM, yet the success rate continues to be miserably low. It's not the 70% success rate proclaimed by the PMI, it's more like the 4-5% reflected in studies, reports, and real life experiences.
As the cat would say, "What do you consider success"?
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A study by Cambridge University of over 250 Department of Defense projects found that 90% of them failed to meet project objectives; ten percent were too small to evaluate. A report to Congress on naval shipbuilding (GAO, (GAO-18-238SP Navy Shipbuilding) concluded the Navy was experiencing significant difficulty in managing projects successfully. The Boeing KC-46 for the US Air Force is some 2 billion dollars over budget on a fixed contract and vastly behind schedule, the Boeing "Starliner" space craft failed to reach its intended orbit while NASA and Boeing refer to it as a "success", just to name a few.
A comment from a US Navy Under Secretary exclaimed; "The problem is not the software but bad managers making bad decisions." Judging from the level of "bad decisions" being made one must conclude that somewhere the Cheshire cat lurks. The cat is there, he's just built into 40 year old software. The above manager claimed to be, "An avid user and supporter of Microsoft PM". I'm quite sure he's never tried to print out a network diagram from one of his MS Project plans; so much for visibility. Even the Cheshire cat knows that bad planning begets poor execution. If you were to ask the cat when your project will complete he will cryptically respond, "On tomorrows date; in 2035."
You can defeat the Cheshire cat's cryptic language and deceptive character through simplicity and a singularly focused approach to accomplishing your objective. Colorful arrays, obscure algorithms, and deceptive visibility, all features of the Cheshire cat and traditional PM, will not get the job done. A simple and agile approach, singularly focused on the outcome will overcome the Cheshire cat who will lead you down the "rabbit hole." Clairvoyant™ offers the simplicity and clarity in an agile and singularly focused approach to Plan-Manage-Measure projects that will subdue the cat.
Loomis Technologies seeks corporate partners and individual investors to develop this Next Generation Managing Software from working model, to proof of concept, and final market ready cloud based SaaS.
For additional information contact:
Email: info@loomis-tech.comPhone: 253-431-0004
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