PREFACE

When we were children, or even later when we went to college or started our first jobs, I doubt that many of us said “when I grow up, I want to be a project manager.” I certainly didn’t. I wanted to be a ballerina, maybe you wanted to be a fireman. But, thanks in part to a sister who wanted to be a teacher and who taught me to add, subtract, multiply, and divide before I entered elementary school, I excelled in mathematics. I earned a BS in mathematics and lasted one year as a math teacher in an experimental middle school.

After a short stint as a bartender, I landed a job with a consulting firm working with Goddard Space Flight Center doing quality testing of satellite imagery. During this time I decided to go back to school to pursue a higher degree and was convinced by a counselor, because of my math background, to choose operations research. I eventually earned an MS and proceeded to use my newfound knowledge in pursuit of a career performing reliability studies and statistical analyses.

Most project management techniques stem from the field of operations research. Operations research includes the study of business analysis, network analysis, decision analysis, and simulation, all of which provide the basis for many of the tools and techniques used in project management. Once I acquired the degree, it would seem preordained that I would be doing what I am now doing in the arena of project management. But it didn’t start out that way. I started experiencing many of the notions I will be presenting long before I obtained that degree. I just had not connected the dots yet.

With another consulting firm working with Goddard Space Flight Center, I was assigned to a project to determine the attitude specifications of an orbiting satellite. When my project manager asked me how long it would take to do my part, I told him three days. He obviously didn’t believe me because he gave me a month to complete the task, which fit into his delivery schedule, rather than using my talents to get other tasks accomplished. I was taking university courses at night to obtain my master’s degree, so I took advantage of the time by studying and doing homework at work for three weeks. I started the assigned task at the beginning of the last week and finished it a day early. The customer loved what I produced, but my performance appraisal disparaged me for “lack of initiative.” This was my first encounter with bad project management.

Shortly after completing my degree I was employed by a consulting firm contracting with the Department of Defense. After completing my first assignment analyzing the reliability of some Army communication headsets, I was asked to come into my manager’s office and heard these words that many of us have heard: “You’re doing such a good job that we are going to make you a project (manager) engineer….” This firm had yet to embrace the term “project management” because that seemed like a soft skill. (I was also told on a number of occasions that mathematics was a soft skill.) Nonetheless, the notion of “You the PE” instilled a feeling of accountability that far exceeded any I’ve experienced since.

I must admit I took on this assignment with some trepidation, as I had no idea what I was doing on the management side. The technical (and social) side of the project, which was to have an Air Force Security Police vehicle tested at a secure site in the Nevada desert (about an hour from Lake Tahoe) for six months, was right up my alley (skiing and sailing are my two favorite hobbies). I was told that our company had an in-house course that would teach me all I needed to know to manage the project. This course taught me how to plan the tests and schedule my effort for each test, as well as how to chart my actual expenditures against my planned expenditures. I was to return to headquarters each month for a project review.

During my first project review, my actual expenditures were lower than planned and I was told I was doing a great job. This continued to be true for my second, third, and fourth project reviews, during which time my customer was asking for new tests to be performed. “What the customer wants, the customer gets.” It was at the time of the fifth project review that the actual expenditure line crossed over, that is, went above the planned line on my graph. This was when I realized that there was more to this management process than just tracking planned versus actual expenditures. I wasn’t taught how to track what was really being accomplished for the expenditures and how to determine how much money would be needed to complete the project. I had to “bite the bullet” because my project was going to come in over budget.

After this episode, I lost the title of project engineer and was eventually assigned as a project team member on a project managed by someone who finally showed me what management and leadership were all about. He had a way of making the team want to work for him by allowing everyone to participate in the planning and ultimate success of the project, but what I thank him most for is when he figuratively slapped me across the face by saying, “Ursula, you have a degree in operations research. You should know this stuff.” I began to grab as much reading material as I could find to quickly learn what this process was all about.

It wasn’t the reading that caused the eureka moments, though. Many of the books I read had a lot of interesting and enlightening words in them, but none seemed to tell me just how to do it. I remember waking up in the middle of the night saying, “I get it. It’s so simple,” after reading a huge book on how to use earned value analysis to control the cost and schedule of projects. Yet the book never showed me how to calculate the earned value. I soon realized that I was going to learn more about the subject of project management through experience and intuitive reasoning. My experiences and reasoning served me well because I took the Project Management Institute’s certification test for a Project Management Professional (PMP) in 1995, without taking any classes in project management, and passed it on the first try.

It was in 1993 that the most enlightening moment about controlling cost and schedule occurred. I had acquired a fondness for sailing and had become an accomplished team member on a racing sailboat. I found myself complaining quite a bit about having such a hard time finding good sailing gear to fit me. I remember complaining the most about my inability to find a decent pair of sailing gloves to fit my small hands. I was told by a clerk in a marine supply store that “women don’t need good sailing gloves because they don’t do any of the hard work on the boat.” I saw the need for something, or someone, to show the manufacturing world that there were a lot of women not only sailing, but also racing sailboats. To help fulfill that need, I undertook a project to start a small retail company, produce a catalog for women who sail, and supply whatever products I could find that women could use on a sailboat.

I put together a business plan and was approved for a small business loan to undertake this endeavor. I hired a graphic artist to produce my catalog and this is where the true essence of the project management process began to unfold. My graphic artist asked me what kind of catalog I wanted. I looked at her in amusement and replied “… a catalog-catalog, like I get in my mail every day.” Luckily this graphic artist knew more about integrated cost and schedule control then she probably realized herself because she broke “a catalog” down into all of the major parts of producing a catalog: paper, color, copy, photographs, graphics, printing, postage, etc. She showed me estimated costs for each of these parts and forced me to take a look at my small business loan budget and see what I could afford.

After a bit of negotiation we settled on a six-page, black and white brochure with a splash of teal, with photos that I would take myself and mailing preparation that I would convince my friends to help me with. It wasn’t until we had gone through this process that together we could begin to plan this part of the project to get the catalog out on time (I had secured a booth at the U.S. Sailboat Show) and within my budget.

After my experience with the catalog, the pieces all fit together. Controlling the cost and schedule of a project is an integrated process of balancing the scope to the budget to the time. Over the years many tools and techniques have been developed to help us control this integrated process. In this book I describe this integrated process and share some of the many tools and techniques that I have learned and used on the many successful projects that I have been lucky enough to help manage.

We all manage projects every day. Most of us have just never taken the time to learn the process and to see how this process will make our daily lives more efficient and fun.

I’ve written this book to reach the reader who has never been introduced to the integrated process of cost and schedule control but is willing to learn. I also have geared the book to the more experienced project manager who would like to learn something new or something he or she has never thought of in this manner before. I use simple examples, most of which are projects around my house, to demonstrate how the tools and techniques work.

In Part 1, Chapter 1 presents some basic concepts of project management that that are the underpinnings of many of the concepts discussed throughout the book. Chapter 2 addresses just what is meant by integrated cost and schedule control. I define the integrated process as a number of overlapping subprocesses and show how the results of these processes help guide the project to a successful result.

In Part 2, Chapters 3 through 5 take the reader through the steps of performing the initiation process, one of the subprocesses defined in Chapter 2, where the project deliverable is defined. The emphasis of these chapters is on defining the scope of the best deliverable that the customer’s budget can afford. This is the most important step for controlling the cost of the project.

In Part 3, Chapters 6 through 10 take the reader through all the steps of the planning process, another subprocess defined in Chapter 2. The emphasis in these chapters is on building and analyzing the schedule of the work identified in the initiation process introduced in Part 2.

In Part 4, Chapters 11 through 16 take the reader through some essential steps of the execution process and the controlling process, also defined in Chapter 2. The emphasis in these chapters is on baselining the plan, gathering information about the progress of the work being executed, using earned value techniques to determine the status of the cost and schedule aspects of the project (including ANSI/EIA-748, which lays out the government’s criteria for a compliant earned value management system), insulating issues that affect the cost and schedule, and resolving those issues. The contract performance reports required by the federal government are also described, with example formats provided.

Last, Part 5 presents some techniques for closing the project properly.

So, before we start into the actual process, I present a number of basic concepts that I believe lay the foundation for an overall understanding of the nontechnical aspects of integrated cost and schedule control. The subsequent chapters then show how the puzzle pieces work individually and how they logically fit together to work toward the success of managing a project.

In the second edition of this book I have included a focus on how this all works within the U.S. federal government based on my experience as a consultant at the National Archive Records Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The federal government is starting to demand a level of transparency on how the taxpayer’s money is being spent on major projects. Earned value management is now a requirement on all major initiatives. As a taxpayer, this could not make me happier.

In this edition I have provided links to various regulations, directives, standards, and guides used by the federal government and added my own explanations to demystify the process of performance management.

Ursula Kuehn
Annapolis, Maryland