Two siblings were fighting to get a fair share of the pizza . Seeing this, their mother asks the younger one to divide the pizza into two pieces so that each one can have one piece. The smart young one divides the pizza inequally. Then the mother asks the elder one to choose the piece he wants. The elder one chooses the larger piece and the younger one ends up with the smaller piece. While we can draw wisdom from this anecdote, the fact is that one finds the usage of percentages in many walks of life.
In a project execution, many times one has to work with resources who are not fully assigned to the project. It could be that this individual is working on two concurrent projects and cannot spend a 100% time on any one project. It could be that the person possesses a niche skill that has to be shared between many projects. But the most common case is that of a borrowed resource from a different project group, who is partly available. The sourcing project group does not want to let go this person fully, under the fear that it may affect their project schedules. On paper, going by the project management framework, simultaneous progress can be made by both the project teams using this shared resource. But in reality, it creates more uncertainties for both the project teams and more stress on the resource.
Humans are not wired to do two things at the same time for a longer period of time. As both the project teams expect continous progress on their project, the shared resource has to, either split his time every day between the projects or split the days in week between the projects. The former is extremely impractical as not much can be accomplished in half-day before he switches to the other project. Even the latter is not convenient. For example, if in the middle of the week, one is deeply into solving a problem in the first project, it will not make sense for him to switch to the other project without getting the problem to a proper conclusion. It will also, take some time for him to ramp up to the other project. This adds delay to the schedule and makes it unpredictable. The resource may end up spending more than 100% of his time trying to meet the commitments for both the groups. When this continues for a longer period of time, he becomes stressed out and may get demotivated.
If one of the project happens to be a support job then the whole week could be spent solving critical customer issues, leaving nothing for the other project. So working at a percentage effort causes more stress and unpredictable schedule for the project. For the project manager using a borrowed resource beyond the unpredictable schedule, there is also an uncertainty in how long the resource would be available. Given these uncertainities any schedule drafted would make little sense.
The percentage fallacy is more prominent when a resource transitions from one group to the other. The receiving group wants the person to soon come up to speed, so would expext this resource to work for some percentage time in the new group atleast before completely transitioning. The sourcing group wants to get as much done before the person moves to the new group. Caught between wanting to impress the new group and showing loyalty to the old group, the resource ends up spending more than 100% of time during the transition.
When the transition of a resource between groups is worked out based on meeting a milestone, the delays in meeting the milestone adds to the uncertainty of when the transition will be complete. The project manager making project plans based on such a resource would find it tough to meet the project milestones.
So what are the lessons one can learn from this percentage fallacy? If you are a project manager, try to get a dedicated resource. If not possible, factor the potential delay by adding buffers in the schedule. If you are a project manager of a group that is receiving the resource as part of transition, then plan the schedule on when the resource fully transitions into the group. Any percentage effort that the resource puts in the new group before the transition will only help make the schedule better.
Happy Reading.
-Ram
1 comment:
Pretty much all of us are actually juggling multiple roles throughout our lives. Most of us are fathers, sons, husbands, friends, leaders, engineers for a percentage of our time. In general most people manage to make that split work.
Is "empowerment" a missing link that needs to thrown in to break the fallacy? What people can do in their lives, they can do in their workplace if management enables the "degrees of freedom" that exist in life in the workplace as well.
Is it possible that some pizza will be left unused if the mother has just asked the siblings to eat taking smaller pieces from the whole pizza rather that splitting it before they start eating?
Most conflicts, it is said, are about "perceived" scarcity.
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