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The Quest to Find the Metis of Projects Ben Berndt The Quest To Find The Metis Of Projects Ben Berndt The Quest To Find The Metis Of Projects De Zoektocht Naar Metis In Projecten (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit voor Humanistiek te Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. Gerty Lensvelt-Mulders ingevolge het besluit van het College voor Promoties, in het openbaar te verdedigen op dinsdag 10 december 2013 om 18.00 uur door Johan Bernard Berndt geboren op 11 januari 1962, te Musselkanaal, Nederland Promotors: Prof. dr. Hugo Letiche, University of Leicester Prof. dr. Michael Lissack, Alaska Pacific University Beoordelingscommissie: Prof. dr. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Indian Institute of Technology Prof. dr. Duska Rosenberg, University of London Prof. dr. Alexander Maas, Universiteit voor Humanistiek Prof. dr. Jean-Luc Moriceau, Institut Mines Télécom Dr. Jacco van Uden, Haagse Hogeschool I was very surprised to find myself in a steppe-like landscape one day, which was characterized by an immense horizon, by vastness, space and time, and, last but not least: by tonal centers and tonality (Canto Ostinato). In spite of various speculations I have not been able to find an adequate explanation for this development yet and, just like before, I have no idea of the next port to which my compass is set. My compositions take shape without any predetermined plan and are, as it were, the reflection of a quest for an unknown goal. A great deal of time, patience and discipline are the prerequisites for making a (genetic) code productive, that eventually determines form, structure, length, instrumentation etc. Such a progress is laborious, as the perception of this generating code is constantly being troubled by human shortcomings and one’s own will, and, it is dependent on moments of clarity and vitality. And then, the sea washes and polishes, time crystallizes. Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt (1923-2012) in 1995. Liner notes from a 2007 release of Canto Ostinato Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with a sure reference to the primary conception. Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a “take”. Bill Evans’ liner notes from the Miles Davis “Kind of Blue” LP release (1959). Frontpage: The Lytro camera captures the entire light field. You can shoot now and (re) focus whenever. Retrieved from: www.lytro.com (with approval of Lytro, Inc., Mountain View, CA 94043) Backpage: Lucca, Duomo di San Martino Editor: Danielle Aaron My sincere thanks go to: Christa Berndt, Esmée Berndt, John van Riel, Andries van der Wiel, Wiebe Cnossen, Richard van Ruler, Björn Hoogenes, Ron Rouwenhoff, Jurgen van der Velde, Hugo Letiche, Michael Lissack, Peter Pelzer, the DBA community and my many colleagues who provided feedback throughout the project. TABLE OF CONTENTS Part A In Search of the Metis of Projects 1 Chapter One: A Feeling of Unease 1 Chapter Two: The Project Management Arena 14 Chapter Three: A Practitioners' View 25 Chapter Four: An Academics' View 62 Chapter Five: Systems Theory 92 Chapter Six: Project Management Frameworks 101 Chapter Seven: Ashby's Law and Snowden's Cynefin Model 126 Chapter Eight: Letiche and Lissack's Concept of Emergent Coherence 136 Part B: Action Research: An Attempt to Touch the Metis of Projects 145 Chapter Nine: Project X 158 An Appreciative Inquiry Experiment 189 Chapter Ten: Project Y 179 Part C: Glimpses of Metis 226 Chapter Eleven: My Way to Approach the Metis of Projects 226 Chapter Twelve: The Quest's Report 238 Samenvatting (Dutch summary) 244 References 248 About the author 258 THE QUEST TO FIND THE METIS OF PROJECTS Part A: In Search of the Metis of Projects Chapter One: A Feeling of Unease Apparently time isn’t really the fuel that projects run on—at least not on “durational time," anyway (Bateson, 1987, p. 171); often, projects go overdue, gradually becoming too expensive and failing to deliver on promises. Projects involve risk and may even create or “manufacture” (Giddens, 1999, p. 4) risk themselves. As a project manager I deal with the risk management of projects, but, disappointingly, this risk management often fails. According to Kreiner (as cited in Berggren, Järkvik, & Söderlund, 2008, p. 117), “Inherent in project undertakings is the basic problem of overambitious goals and drifting scope.” Similarly, Lovallo and Hahnemann (as cited in Berggren et al., 2008, p. 117) state, “Most projects are plagued with over optimism, which is the basic reason why projects fail according to standard criteria such as time, cost, and quality.” Maylor, Vidgen, & Carver (2008, p. 16) acknowledge that “projects regularly fail to meet their objectives (expressed in their simplest terms)—time, cost and quality/scope [with reference to Holmes, 2001, and surveys by KPMG, 2002, and Standish Group, 2001]—and that such failure has a significant impact for practitioners and their employers. The practice of managing projects is, therefore, of significant interest to organizations.” The PMI1 echoes these sentiments, stating in their 2012 Pulse Report that 36% of projects do not meet their original goals, and that just over US$ 120,000 is at risk for every US$ 1 million spent on projects. Further painting this bleak picture, based on research conducted on 256 companies in the United Kingdom, Frank, Sadeh & Ashkenasi (2011, p. 31) revealed that 32% of information technology (IT) projects failed due to poor project management, 20% due to lack of communication, 17% due to unfamiliar project scope or complexity, and 14% due to the inability to cope with new technology (with reference to a survey by KPMG, 2001). Looking to the media, on June 9th, 2005, The Economist ran the following headline: “Project Management: overdue and over budget, over and over again.” Even British MPs have lost faith, calling for the immediate release of a “seriously overdue report on major projects2." 1 PMI: Project Management Institute, the world’s largest professional network 2 www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jun/11/government_transparency_stalls_bob_kerslake 1 THE QUEST TO FIND THE METIS OF PROJECTS One can thus argue that project management is not a proven science, and that a lot of “Masters of Science in Project Management” face considerable difficulties on most projects. Still, it appears as though more and more people are entering the field of project management or project-related environments 3 . This also means that more and more people are being faced with failure, both on a personal and industrial level. A failed project not only negatively affects the manager, but also has the potential to affect future investments. If large projects continually fail to meet their objectives, it is plausible that society may begin to lose trust in the entire management process, which could serve to decrease investor confidence. This type of situation is dangerous for the economy. On a personal level, project failure can also cause negative internal reactions. This type of failure is defined by Seo et al. (as cited by Shepherd and Cardon, 2009, p. 924) as “an event [that] causes an individual’s core affect to become negative.” Furthermore, in an organization, negative outcomes can be overemphasized and, conversely, positive outcomes can be underemphasized (Nygren et al., as cited by Shepherd and Cardon, 2009, p. 924); the organization might become more risk averse (Lerner and Keltner, as cited by Shepherd and Cardon, 2009, p. 924), and the process of learning from the failure might be hindered (Shepherd, Disterer & Garvin, as cited by Shepherd and Cardon, 2009, p. 924). Throughout my career as a project manager I have encountered many of the situations highlighted in the first paragraph, and though I use generally accepted project management frameworks—frameworks that instruct you how to properly start and manage a project, what roles and responsibilities must be delegated, how to deal with risks, how to build a business case, how to establish requirements that meet the customer’s expectations, how to plan and test properly, how to report just-in-time, and, finally, how to make a lessons-learned report—still my teams and I often go overdue. As a result, our project department decided to apply Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC) model to our practice in order to find bottlenecks in our system. The idea was to accept these constraints—mostly scarce human resources—in order to be able to plan more realistically, all the while working to solve those constraints so throughput could be accelerated. As this thesis is being written, we are in the process of 3 Kerzner (2009, p. 52, figure 2-8) shows an increase in new processes supporting project management through the years 1960-2009. 2 THE QUEST TO FIND THE METIS OF PROJECTS implementing Agile Project Management, which aims to move a project forward, but in shorter-term iterations. However, the issue remains that these tools only provide improvements on a linear scale, and can therefore never deliver the certainty that stakeholders wish to secure. This is based on my personal conviction that the entire project management landscape operates non-linearly.
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