Feedback and project schedule performance

Yasaman Jalili and David Ford look take a deeper look at project model dynamics in the January System Dynamics Review. An excerpt:

Quantifying the impacts of rework, schedule pressure, and ripple effect loops on project schedule performance

Schedule performance is often critical to construction project success. But many times projects experience large unforeseen delays and fail to meet their schedule targets. The failure of large construction projects has enormous economic consequences. …

… the persistence of large project delays implies that their importance has not been fully recognized and incorporated into practice. Traditional project management methods do not explicitly consider the effects of feedback (Pena-Mora and Park, 2001). Project managers may intuitively include some impacts of feedback loops when managing projects (e.g. including buffers when estimating activity durations), but the accuracy of the estimates is very dependent upon the experience and judgment of the scheduler (Sterman, 1992). Owing to the lack of a widely used systematic approach to incorporating the impacts of feedback loops in project management, the interdependencies and dynamics of projects are often ignored. This may be due to a failure of practicing project managers to understand the role and significance of commonly experienced feedback structures in determining project schedule performance. Practitioners may not be aware of the sizes of delays caused by feedback loops in projects, or even the scale of impacts. …

In the current work, a simple validated project model has been used to quantify the schedule impacts of three common reinforcing feedback loops (rework cycle, “haste makes waste”, and ripple effects) in a single phase of a project. Quantifying the sizes of different reinforcing loop impacts on project durations in a simple but realistic project model can be used to clearly show and explain the magnitude of these impacts to project management practitioners and students, and thereby the importance of using system dynamics in project management.

This is a more formal and thorough look at some issues that I raised a while ago, here and here.

I think one important aspect of the model outcome goes unstated in the paper. The results show dominance of the rework parameter:

The graph shows that, regardless of the value of the variables, the rework cycle has the most impact on project duration, ranging from 1.2 to 26.5 times more than the next most influential loop. As the high level of the variables increases, the impact of “haste makes waste” and “ripple effects” loops increases.

Yes, but why? I think the answer is in the nonlinear relationships among the loops. Here’s a simplified view (omitting some redundant loops for simplicity):

Project failure occurs when it crosses the tipping point at which completing one task creates more than one task of rework (red flows). Some rework is inevitable due to the error rate (“rework fraction” – orange), i.e. the inverse of quality. A high rework fraction, all by itself, can torpedo the project.

The ripple effect is a little different – it creates new tasks in proportion to the discovery of rework (blue). This is a multiplicative relationship,

ripple work ≅ rework fraction * ripple strength

which means that the ripple effect can only cause problems if quality is poor to begin with.

Similarly, schedule pressure (green) only contributes to rework when backlogs are large and work accomplished is small relative to scheduled ambitions. For that to happen, one of two things must occur: rework and ripple effects delay completion, or the schedule is too ambitious at the outset.

With this structure, you can see why rework (quality) is a problem in itself, but ripple and schedule effects are contingent on the rework trigger. I haven’t run the simulations to prove it, but I think that explains the dominance of the rework parameter in the results. (There’s a followup article here!)

Update, H/T Michael Bean:

Update II

There’s a nice description of the tipping point dynamics here.