projectified

Agile Methods: Based on False Assumptions?

I have been trying to expand my understanding of some of the newer PM and software development methodologies, Agile, XP, Scrum, TOC, etc. To that end I found this document at the CCPace website called Agile Project Management.

I was troubled by some of the assumptions that it makes about what it calls "traditional" project management. I was also troubled by the obvious derision the authors have for managers and project management as it has been practiced in the past (and contrary to their hopes, in most places in the present). "Traditional" project managers are "mechanistic", "Uninspired Taskmasters. Project Management has a "tendency towards slavish process “compliance” as a means of project control" and provide "a false sense of security that management was 'doing something' by exhaustively planning, measuring, and controlling."

The paper continually places management and 'the technical community' at odds with shots like: "While managers designed traditional methodologies in an effort to control projects, the technical community gave birth to agile methodologies in response to their frustrations with traditional management (or lack thereof) and the resulting impact on their products and morale."

The lowlight of this paper was this paragraph:

Regardless of the particular methodology, the traditional project manager is often seen as a “taskmaster” who develops and controls the master plan that documents (often in excruciating detail) the tasks, dependencies, and resources required to deliver the end product. The project manager then monitors the status of tasks and adjusts the plan as necessary. Underpinning this mechanistic approach is the assumption that equates individuals to interchangeable, controllable commodities.

Over the last 5 years I have worked with 20 or 30 software development organizations that nearly all used 'traditional' project management practices. NONE of them had anything close to an "assumption that equated individuals to interchangeable, controllable commodities." Sure for the sake of downstream planning there were several that used an analysis of what kind of developer might be needed on a project that was coming up in the mid to long term future but these were by no means viewing all resources as the same.

The paper goes on to say:

Traditional management theory assumes that:
○ Rigid procedures are needed to regulate change
○ Hierarchical organizational structures are means of establishing order
○ Increased control results in increased order
○ Organizations must be rigid, static hierarchies
○ Employees are interchangeable “parts” in the organizational “machine”
○ Problems are solved primarily through reductionist task breakdown and allocation
○ Projects and risks are adequately predictable to be managed through complex up-front planning

"Rigid procedures are needed to regulate change"
Well if 'Rigid procedures" means documenting the change so that it can be verified that the change was made then I agree I guess. How do you know the change was made unless other people know it needed to be made?

"Hierarchical organizational structures are means of establishing order"
Im not sure where these guys worked before they found the Agile religion but it was certainly a sad, sad place! :-) Hierarchies exist in all organizations regardless of the Agile utopia that the authors talk about. At some point someone on the Agile dev team has to report status to someone. Most PM organizations I ever worked with had managers and project managers but it was not as if the PMs were walking around with stop watches and clipboards timing the developers.

"Increased control results in increased order" and "Organizations must be rigid, static hierarchies"
Again, Im sad for the authors that they worked in such a place but none of the software development organizations I worked with were so into static hierarchies or increased control that it would rise to the level of an assumption of the system. There were semi-static hierarchies in that the development manager always reported to the same VP position and certain devs generally resided within the same organization but it was not as if it was this way as a means of control.

"Employees are interchangeable 'parts' in the organizational 'machine'."
None of the 20 or so dev orgs that I worked with had this assumption and neither have the other 50+ non-software organizations I have worked with. This is not an assumption of traditional PM it is the sign of a terribly broken organization. Im sure that there are orgs out there like this but they are like this NOT because they use traditional project management methods but rather because they have a fundamentally flawed way of dealing with their workforce.

"Problems are solved primarily through reductionist task breakdown and allocation"
I don't know of any traditional PM methodology that solves problems through 'reductionist task breakdown'. Now lots of them do chop the work into smaller and smaller parts as a way of being able to more easily track how much of the project is done and to help figure out which parts need to be completed in which order but I assume that Agile methods have a similar function as well. I would assume that Agile does not work like this: A customer says "I want a CRM system" and the dev team says OK and they put 10 devs on it and they all just start coding and exactly on time a CRM system is born. Maybe it does work that way I don’t know but I figure that at some point there is a requirements gathering (likely several of them, in iterations) that define what has to be built. Then it is defined by the team the different components required to build that 'thing to be built". That sounds a lot like a "reductionist task breakdown" to me. If the problem the authors have with this is that in traditional PM they think that the PM is the one doing the breakdown in a vacuum then I have solved their problem: they had a bad PM! If they had a PM that was breaking down the tasks into a WBS without talking with the team (and not just talking but REALLY sitting down and working out the breakdown) then they were just a bad PM. This goes for if you are doing iterations or waterfall. Most PMs don’t have the full technical skills to fully breakdown a complex project of any kind. If they do they are likely kidding themselves. Good PMs start their WBS process in a working group of experts on the subject (the team in most cases).

"Projects and risks are adequately predictable to be managed through complex up-front planning"
This is again assuming the presences not only of a pure 'Waterfall" methodology but also another case where a bad PM is to blame, not the PM method used. If you have a PM that plans the whole project up front and then does not change it based on changing realities as the project progresses then you have a bad PM not a bad method. If you have a PM that is doing risk analysis one time before the project starts then go to www.monster.com and post a job opening because you have a bad PM. If you have a project with rapidly changing requirements and the PM picked a waterfall methodology for the management of the project then you have a bad PM (or at least an ill-informed one).

The paper blames a misunderstanding of what Agile methods really are for why adoption has not been as fast as they might think. This may be true as I do think that Agile, XP, Scrum ,etc have some VERY valuable points to make about delivering good software but I find it ironic that they would say this given that their paper is so full of their own misunderstandings of "traditional" PM. Their characterization of 'traditional' PM and it's practitioners as "mechanistic", "slavish" and devotees of Taylor's scientific management theories may have a part in the slow adoption as well. How willing will anyone from the 'traditional' world of PM be to what you have to say if you say it in such a way as to ridicule and debase the things they now hold dear. You are trying to convert people to a new way of life. You don’t do that by telling them they are bad. You do it by showing them how doing something else might be better.

That said I do think there are huge benefits in much of what this paper has to say. It's underpinnings in complexity theory as a means of better dealing with, well, complexity have obvious benefits. Pair programming and the Agile\XP call for more serious and meaningful customer involvement in the requirements and development process seem more than obvious to me as a way to improve quality and customer satisfaction. Im no where near far enough along in my studies of these methods to have anything more meaningful to say about them in particular but I am still troubled at the way this paper characterizes the methods I do know enough about. As I continue to grow my understanding I will come back to these topics and try to expand my thoughts on these methods.

bk

But is the "Greater Good" Really Great or Good?

Frank Patrick, in his post "No Project (Manager) is an Island" has this to say:

Most project managers are willing to accept the notion of their responsibility for their project. As such, they're comfortable with the notion of managing not just the boxes and arrows of their plans but more importantly, the "white space" of un-pre-defined dependencies. What they often need to be reminded is that they are also responsible for the success of the larger organization within which that project exists. This means that sometimes they need to subordinate the needs of their project to the needs of another project. A good project manager knows where their project fits into the portfolio and pipeline and knows how their project (and the resources and performers associated with it) might be better used elsewhere.

I think this point about the PM needing to be reminded that they might need to subordinate their project to the greater good raises an interesting point about why PM's have increasingly (well it seems like it is increasingly but maybe it has been like this forever, I don’t know) created themselves nice little island empires within the confines of their project. How can a Project Manager be expected to happily subordinate the good of their project to the "greater good" if they have no reason to feel confident about the process (or lack thereof) of defining the very meaning of "greater good"? WAY too many organizations ask PMs to give up resources or budget based the outcome of poor planning by some other PM or the political winds shifting that have nothing at all to do with the REAL 'greater good". I have seen a lot of PMs that have this siege mentality of "me against my execs" for the survival of their projects. I think that this mentality is fed by a total lack of a documented project selection and review process that puts at least the appearance of science behind how projects are selected for kickoff and continued through some kind of phase-gate review process. Combine this will the lack of organizational visibility into the state of other projects (as Frank mentions above) and you have an environment where the PM has no reason to have any faith that the 'greater good' is either great or good.

So all this boils down to the result that we all see in the field and Frank describes above: PMs guard their little kingdoms and do their best to ignore the world outside. As I cover above my point here is that it may not be power crazy or overly focused PMs that are to blame for this (at least not totally.)

How can it be fixed? Well if an organization has the problem I am describing even to a small degree then the solution is not a quick one I'm afraid. It will take the design and implementation of a system of project selection that is based, at least in part, on quantifiable factors like ROI or other financial metrics as well as on other more subjective factors. The selection process should not be based solely on the opinion of one person but rather it should be the result of a group dynamic and documented in a place where the PMs are able to read and understand them. Then the organization needs to have a system for tracking the status and health of the projects, both those that are in progress but also those that are approaching the starting line. This system should be at least semi-public. Openness is a good thing and will go a long way to fostering a sense of trust within the greater 'project organization.' Might I suggest Microsoft Project Server? :-) Seriously, a system like Project Server or one of the other Enterprise level project management and tracking systems would be a great way to solidify the processes around project selection and the management and tracking tasks for projects that are in progress.

They key for me when working with my customers is to help them understand that the sharing of information, within the confines of any security constraints, is vital for creating a healthy PM ecosystem. If the PMs all understand (and hopefully agree with) the project selection process and can go and see the health and progress information for other projects it will give them that sense of the "greater good" that Frank talks about as well as making them feel like the greater good is both of those things. With that feeling the organization as a whole will be better off because it will be staffed with players that WANT to further that greater good.

Is CPM Wrong or is it Just That Some People Think Wrongly about CPM?

I was going back through some backlogged reading and re-read Hal Macomber's post about CPM and I had to respond.

In it he says the following:

Schedules are constructed using estimates of task durations and task dependencies. Goldratt showed us the effects of dependence and variation on the predictability or reliability throughout a project. At best we have reasonable estimates. But they are estimates. Rarely do people take the time to produce estimated ranges of effort and duration. Consequently, our schedules fail to represent the stochastic (probabilistic) nature of the project. Yet we treat our schedules as if they are deterministic. This is the fundamental flaw in our use of the critical path method.

I have seen this kind of comment lots of times from people that use TOC or XP or Agile, etc methods for their PM and they all seem to imply by these comments that the CPM method itself is flawed. But is it really? The CPM method as I was thought it simply says that based on the dependencies within a set of tasks that there are some of the tasks that will likely have a greater impact on the schedule if they slip. I don't remember it being said that these where the ONLY tasks to be watched.

On the issue of estimates I could not agree more with Hal when he says that estimates are just that ESTIMATES. But the problem with their lack of quality is not the fault of the CPM method they are the fault of sloppy estimating. And along the same lines I also agree that PMs that see their schedules as deterministic are flawed in their thinking. I mentioned this same idea in an article I wrote for Techrepublic called New MS Project users often run from reality. But again are we talking about a failure of CPM to be a valuable tool for project managers or the failure of project managers to use the tool? I think this is an important distinction that often gets lost in the fray of "New Method" vs. "Old Method" discussions.

To be certain I am not fully versed in the ways of TOC, Agile, XP, etc. I am working hard to get up to speed on these topics as we speak, so I'm no expert. However, I think that saying that CPM is flawed BECAUSE some of it's practitioners are wrong in their use is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Tools I Couldn't Live Without

Trillian Pro
Multi-provider IM tool. Lets me use the same UI for dealing with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL. Plus it is just a nicer UI to work in. It keeps a log of all my conversations, it lets me keep all open chat windows in a single container on the desktop so I don’t have a bunch of chat windows taking up space on my Windows bar. The company I work for (QuantumPM) has employees spread out all over the country and we make HEAVY use of IM for communications so I figure I owe it to myself to have a UI that makes it easier to deal with. $25

SnagIt 7.0
The coolest screen cap application I have used, EVER! Ive been using it since about 1999 and have loved it the whole time. Let’s me take caps of just the menu, of certain parts of the UI or even scrolling captures to get the whole page, even if it is more than one screen long! I can output to any format. It will auto-name them…the list goes on and on. Only $39.99 but if you have to do lots of screen shots it will be worth it!

Onfolio
Cool KM tool for capturing AND sharing content from the web or from docs you read. See this post for my opinions on this app. But it will suffice to say that I have only had the app for under a week now and I already use it 20 times a day! It comes in two flavors $29.99 for the or $79.99 for the Pro edition which gives you more output options.

MyIE2
VERY cool shell for Internet Explorer that adds a tabbed interface, ad blocking and a TON of options and cool time and work saving features. I always hated opening new windows if I wanted to NOT navigate away from the page I was on, plus it cluttered my task bar. MYIE2 also lets you save sets of open pages as “Groups” so you can open them all at the same time. Too many features to even go into. It is free too. You can also look at AvantBrowser for many of the same features at the same price.

NewsGator
Outlook based RSS/Atom aggregator. Brings newsfeeds into Outlook and treats them like posts\emails. Allows you to have all your feeds offline so it is great for laptop users since they can download their feeds and then take them with them on the road. I am now not sure what I would do without this application. It is at the very center of my personal strategy for learning and keeping up to date on the ever changing world of project management. It is $29.99

Lookout
Super fast searching for Outlook. I use this 20 times a day. Since I use NewsGator and keep many of the posts offline I use this to search my feeds as well. It is in Beta but coming along nicely. It is free right now and Im not sure what it will cost when it goes v1 but unless the developers go crazy and charge some HUGE price…I will pay it gladly. I figured out that in the last 2 weeks it has saved me about 3 hours (roughly) over the built in search in Outlook)

UltraMon
Makes multiple monitors much easier to deal with. It has a ton of features but the two I use most are the profiles (which lets you quickly setup monitor profiles if you, like me use a laptop with multiple monitors) and the 2nd Windows task bar. It adds a task bar to the bottom of the 2nd monitor so you don’t have to look back over to the main monitor to min or max an application running on the 2nd monitor. Very cool!

MindManager X5
Mind Mapping software that figured out that the WBS in a project looks a lot like a mind map. You can export your mind maps to a Project MPP file and it will retain the hierarchy as summary task\sub-tasks! A bunch of features I have not had time to look at yet (like it will read RSS feeds and then MAP them visually!) I use it for decomposing task hierarchies and braining storming. It is $199 but well worth the price.

VMWare WorkStation
Lets you have “virtual” computers within an application window right on your machine. So I can be running Windows XP on my laptop and have a VMWare Virtual Machine running on it that is running Windows Server 2003! If I did not have this software I would need 5 or 6 machines in my office. I have been using this software for a few years now and it is pretty amazing. It is $299 but also comes in Server versions for virtualizing your server environments.

Microsoft VirtualPC
This is pretty much the same concept as VMWare but it is made by Microsoft. Im in the process of moving away from VMWare and toward VirtualPC based on the amount of work I do with Microsoft and the obviously widespread use of the tool there. It does not have all the features of VMWare but it is also cheaper and does an excellent job. It is also only $129

Microsot Project\Projct Server 2003
If it were not for this product I would not even have a job. Well OK I would have a job but it would not be nearly as cool as this one! :-) The most popular\best selling, easiest to use and coolest Enterprise Project Management application out there. Sure I have a vested interest in this product doing well but don't we all have an interest in the tools we make a living supporting?

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part III

In Part II we looked at how WebLogs and RSS might be used in a Project Management setting. Now I want to look at how lightweight (or “low impact”) KM tools might be used by teams to share information. I do not mean lightweight or low impact in a bad way but rather in a good way. Many of the more traditional KM tools are ‘heavy’ in that they often require a shift in the way users do their work. They are heavy on process and workflow. While this can be very good in that it enforces a system of use that can be good for the organization it can also stifle the use of the tools. Low impact tools do not require a strict workflow to be followed and they do not have a significant impact on the everyday work that people do. They can be worked into almost any work routine with almost no effect on that routine.

One such tool is Onfolio. This tool integrates into the IE interface and acts as a collector of web pages, images or text snippets. These collections are organized by creating folders within the collection. When you capture an item you specify the folder into which the item should be placed. You also get to provide notes about the item and can also define other meta-data in the form of custom fields that you can define.

Now this might not sound revolutionary…yet. There are other applications that do similar things. But the really neat part is the Onfolio Publisher. This is where it gets really cool. With this you can create reports on the items you have collected. So if you collected a set of code snippets from various programming sites you could create a report and upload it to an intranet or internet site or email it to a coworker as a .mht file. You can even save the whole thing as an RSS feed. (Here is where it gets cooler.) You can save the report to an RSS feed and then upload that to an intranet\internet site where your coworkers or others can subscribe to it in their aggregators! Each report you create gets saved as a different RSS feed so they can subscribe to the ones that they like. You keep collecting and then every so often you update the report by dragging the new content into the report, save it and publish the feed to update the xml file. Poof! You have knowledge sharing going on with out a wildly expensive server-based KM system.

What I envision here for a future version of this product is a predefined report that goes and builds itself based on the contents of certain Onfolio folders and then publishes itself on a preset schedule. Then what you have is one very cool way for project teams to share the information they are finding in their own personal research about the project. The developers on your team have these Onfolio reports about code they have found. They also have reports about the research they are doing on the different ways the system could be architected. You are interested in the architecture stuff but not the code part so you only subscribe to their architecture feed! I have been told by people at Onfolio that this exact feature is on the list for a future release. But even as it sits the updating and publishing of a report would take no more than about 5 mins a day. Drag a few entries onto the page and click 2 or 3 buttons and you have updated your feeds.

I have been using Onfolio for about under a week and it is already part of my daily routine. I have collections for Project Server sites, competing product information, documents of interest, project and portfolio management sites, etc, etc. I find something interesting, I right click on the page in IE and I select the option to Capture Page to Onfolio. I select the folder and click OK. Done.

Im also told that they are looking at integration with many of the blogging packages so that you could capture pages or snippets of pages into Onfolio and then blog them right from inside Onfolio.

So I guess the call for Part III is to go check out Onfolio or one of the other apps like it and spend a hour checking it out and then think about how you might work a tool like this into your project team. How might this kind of tool increase the sharing of information among your team? What impact would this sharing have on your project? Download it and give it some thought.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part II

In Part I of this series I talked about Weblogs as a source of information for Project Managers for keeping up with the state of the art of PM. Now in Part II I will talk about how I think Weblogs could be used by PMs and by project teams to improve and expand the state of the art.

I picture WebLog software hosted on a corporate intranet and used by Project Managers as a combination of status report, informal issue log and project diary from the perspective of the PM. If done correctly this would become a much more valuable project artifact than the same old weekly status reports. It would be a documentary film in words of how the project was going each day. Post categories could be used to put posts into a specific context of status, issue, work report, etc.

Team members on the project could keep a WebLog to share solutions to problems encountered in the day to day work of the project. These could then be kept as a record for future teams on similar projects. Again post categories could be used to put the posts into context.

RSS feeds for each category in these WebLogs would let PMs, stakeholders, team members on the project or even team members on other projects get updates on the newest entries for those categories. Stakeholders could subscribe to the RSS feed for the Status category on the PM's WebLog to get instant micro-status updates. Team members could subscribe to a category on other team member's blogs that hold found code snippets, solutions to problems or discussions of how problems are going.

Often in a project team there are lots of emails that go out to a distribution list that includes the whole team. In many cases these lists can become jammed with emails that really only needed to go to the Devs on the team or to the testers. Other team members might be interested but not everyone! RSS feeds would help solve this problem. You have a set of standard categories in the Team Blogs. When a project starts you could subscribe to the blogs and categories that you find interesting. Then when a post is made it can be seen by all those that are interested in that subject or in that person's comments.

An app like Movable Type can support custom fields (as I understand it) so each entry could be marked with the project it pertains to so if a team member is working on more than one project it could be tracked in their blog entries.

I think that Weblogs and RSS feeds of their content could really become a powerful tool for PMs and their teams for sharing project information. Will it work for everyone? Certainly not but it does not have to work for everyone. If only 50% of your team decided to use blogs to share information as part of their daily routine it would be a huge thing. Movable Type is $150 so there is not a COST excuse.

The call? I'd like to see a project manager take the leap and use an internally installed blogging app like Movable Type to create a set of team blogs for their next project. If you do this please let me know how it goes.

Part III will touch on "Low Impact" KM tools.

A Call to Arms for Project Managers: Part I

There are a bunch of new technologies and products out there that can have, in my opinion, a really big impact on Project Management as a profession. They are Weblogs, RSS and what I call "low impact" knowledge management tools. (This will be a multipart series of posts.)

Weblogs
Weblogs are a technology/tool that almost all PMs should at least explore on two levels: information source and project communications tool.

Info Source
Up until about 2 months ago I had almost completely stopped using the Internet as a source of information about PM. I was stuck in a rut of checking the same few sites for new papers. There were a few that I liked and did a good job of giving me info: Niwot Ridge for one was very good but even places like Gantthead seemed to just be giving me advertisements made up to look like articles and whitepapers. It should be noted that I have since visited Gantthead and found that the impression I originally stated here was very much mistaken. I feel now that I formed this opinion from WAY back in 1999 (when I last spent any real time there and the few times I went back I must have hit the wrong articles and they just reinforced my false impression) and things have obviously changed. Gantthead is certainly worth your time to check out. I felt like I was missing out. Then I installed NewsGator and found a few sites like Frank Patrick's blog. I started checking out their blogrolls and BAM. It was like turning a corner. There are a bunch of people out there blogging project management topics and they are all scary smart.

Reading a good WebLog is like getting to see what is inside the head of an expert that you usually only get to hear talk for an hour at a conference. If they are good at blogging and really do it well their blog is like a record of their thoughts and opinions on the subject. They change and evolve and get influenced by other bloggers on related topics. Reading blogs lets you read opinions of people you would not ever have thought about including in your scope of thought.

PM has been changing and adding concepts and knowledge so quickly it is hard to keep up. Blogs, in my opinion, are THE way that we as a profession will be able to keep up.

So the first call to arms here is this: go get an RSS reader (NewsGator, Bloglines, Feedster) and start looking for Project Management blogs. I have a list of a few of my favorites on www.projectified.com but you can also search Technorati or Feedster to find others. THEN after you have read a few blogs and see what they are about go and start one of your own. I use TypePad and it costs about $5 a month but there are free ones out there like Blogger and BlogSpot You have something to say about PM. You have experience that is unique. Share it with us and let us learn from it!

Part II of the Call to Arms will be for PMs to use WebLogs as a Project Team communications tool.

10 Questions you MUST be able to answer...

AJ over at Value Management Partners has a great list of questions that all PMs should be able to answer BEFORE they begin their project.

To this list I would add:

-What would the impact be if you lost 50% of a key resource's time
-How sure are you that the resources you have will be yours in 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months?

What questions would you add?

Resource Management Gone Crazy II

Frank Patrick made an excellent point on the misconception of resource utilization on his blog a few days ago that I somehow missed! (Thanks, Frank, for pointing this out)

Im glad Im not the only one that sees organizations striving to over-allocate their resources! The worst part of this kind of overallocation is that it is disguised as perfect allocation. Applications like Microsoft Project ask you to define the threshold it will use to determine if a resource is "overallocated". In Project this is called the "Max Units" field. Then you assign resources at a given Units value and if Project sees that for any given time period the sum of the assignment units for a given resource is greater than their Max Units value that resource is seen as "overallocated". So the sticky part is where to set Max Units. 100% is the default out of the box and there are organizations that think that is a goal. It makes sense when you first think about it. "I want my resource to be fully allocated." Well sure. Who would not want that! But if you have someone assigned to even a single project (because you have recognized the evil that is multi-tasking) at 100% then they are not OVER allocated on paper. But they really are because NOBODY is available 100% of their X-hour work day. They answer email, go to meetings, get asked questions by coworkers and sometimes they even get up to go to the bathroom!

Most 'authorities' agree that the real amount of availability for a resource is somewhere between 65% and 80%. Im kind of in the middle of these two figures at about 70%. That gives a resource about 2.5 hours a day to "other things". This also acts as a buffer so that if a resource does have to push it and work more than that 70% they are not automatically in OT territory.

So if you are using Microsoft Project to manage your schedules/resource usage then make a note to examine the Max Units values for your resources. If they are at 100% you may want to rethink it to take these concepts into account.

Resource Management Gone Crazy: Dont let this happen to you!

I was recently working with a person via email to offer some help in the setting up of their Project Server environment. It was a friend of a friend that worked for a nonprofit and so I was donating time to fill in the gaps they had in understanding a few of the finer points. Anyway, one of their goals for deploying Project Server was to "better manage the time of their staff." A laudable goal to be sure, right? Well recently, after they had the deployment underway I got an email talking about how the resources were revolting against the system. I talked a bit about how things were going and asked some questions about how they were using the system. It turns out that the deployment of Project Server helped them see that many of their resources were not 100% utilized, not even close and many were only working on one project while also being "underutilized". Well they soon fixed this and there were some resources that now had 30 or 40 (one had 75) tasks A WEEK across as many as 10 different projects! (in a single week!)

I told him that revolt was not bad and that he was lucky the resources did not band together and have him killed! These resources went from working on 1 or maybe 2 or 3 projects at a time to working on an average of 7 projects in any given week.

I had to explain to my friend the evils not only in assigning anyone at a full 100% for extended periods of time but also the evils of having someone do work on that many different projects at the same time. I referred him to the August 2003 Software Development Magazine article on task switching/multi-tasking by product management guru Johanna Rothman. She does a great job of discussing why continual context switching is a bad thing.

Nobody should be assigned to work on 8 projects at a time and if it MUST be done it should only be for a very short period of time. Johanna talks about the cost of this in terms of time but there is another cost to this and that is the toll this kind of switching has one the morale of your resources. It is draining physically and mentally to have to move between so many different projects. The other factor that comes in is that if there are 6 or 8 project managers in this persons life there is no way they are not being pressured to give one project more time than has been allotted in this complex assignments scheme. Each project manager has only been given a small fraction of that person's time. You KNOW that at least one is sending that person email asking for more time "under the table". Nobody will fess-up but you have to know it is happening. :-)

Do you best to consolidate the assignments on different projects so that they can be done in chunks that require a whole person or at least as much of a whole person as possible. You will get better work out of your resources and you can just a little more sure that they are not plotting your death. :-)