Ant jeff : Hey boss, i think james was pulling in the wrong direction when we tried to flip it over the second time!
Ant James : Get fucked you damn snich!
I am so done with you jeff!
Ant boss : calm down guys, shit happens...
Jeff, please don't focus on others mistakes so much, just notify him if it happens again...
If i keeps happening then mabye we have a problem but until then we just keep smelling each others stank for communication!
When I was in the army, we taught that the invasion of Iraq was planned with a 278 slide power point (idk if that’s the exact number, but that’s the number in my head when I tell this story)
If it was a human organization like the city of New York they’d pay millions for McKinsey to make PowerPoints to tell them “to solve trash on the street us garbage cans”. Power Points and wasting time is a billion dollar business
The movement away from getting shit done quickly to the current years-long deathmarches that comprise American construction are in many ways associated with the shift towards trying to do big huge plans up front even when shovels could be in the dirt.
Eisenhower said it best nearly a century ago when he said that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. You should know what to do when opportunity arises, but the fact that opportunities may arise is why you not be quick to stick to your old plan you devised before you knew what the day would bring.
Project management as a defined discipline didn't really exist in the pre 1940s the way we know it today. They also had next to zero defined health and safety regs, zero to mediocre environmental or quality regulations so project management the action was just a subset of the Engineering management discipline. It was the manhattan project in isolation which saw the need, then the late '50s post project paperclip and then the space race where the discipline became defined. Traditional Project Management took us to the moon in record time as well, but more importantly brought the people back alive.
The movement away from getting shit done quickly to the current years-long deathmarches that comprise American construction are in many ways associated with the shift towards trying to do big huge plans up front even when shovels could be in the dirt.
The alternative of course is 'putting your shovels in the dirt' and ending up with Tacoma Narrows bridge, or St francis dam. Fast is fine when you're writing No Man's Sky, and can put out partially completed or visualized products, but not when you're building the Burj Khalifa. Watching bright eyed PM grads try and fail to bring Agile to construction, then having to write up repeat copies of Lessons Learned reports for shit we understood as an organization perfectly in 1958, has been a feature of my career in project trouble shooting.
They also had next to zero defined health and safety regs, zero to mediocre environmental or quality regulations
These are all orthogonal to "project management" though, as they act to constrain (or relax) the set of constraints the effort must work within in completing the construction.
They knew how to build to high quality even before the 1940s (e.g. I'd point you to the Hoover Dam). I might remind you to check the date on when the Tacoma Narrows bridge was erected, and compare it to the Golden Gate bridge...
It was the manhattan project in isolation which saw the need
The need was speed! And they did it! They barely gave a single shit about environmental stuff, which is why the Hanford reservation is still a Superfund site. Likewise for the Pentagon, which was an optimization problem to build a massive office space as rapidly as possible in a tight 5-sided ground area without using a lot of steel (needed for the war effort).
In fact WW2 was basically the last time America cared very strongly about time, aside from the Apollo effort that you mention, which had little to do with "traditional project management", as they were still rearranging arguing over things like direct ascent or low-orbit rendezvous at the very beginning of the decade. The lack of time is what led to the decision to pursue "all-up round" test flights to compress the Apollo launch schedules, especially in the wake of the Apollo 1 disaster in 1967, just two years before man reached the moon.
The drastic changes that the Apollo 1 disaster investigation imposed on later flights were possible because the Apollo effort was not so beholden to plans of 1959 that it was impossible to adjust at the last minute.
but more importantly brought the people back alive.
Don't act like PMPs care more about this than others. That wasn't true before there was a PMP and it's not true today, as most dramatically evidenced by how Starliner stranded its crew, who will have to be rescued by a SpaceX vehicle.
The difference is not in who cares more about safety, the difference is in who is most willing to manage uncertainty. Agile methods do not imply "no planning" (indeed, the amount of planning was what frustrated the original commenter in this thread), and in fact are aimed at increasing the team's awareness of the problem rather than pretending that PowerPoints are equivalent to actual work.
These are all orthogonal to "project management" though, as they act to constrain
Constraint management is part of the PM discipline set, not counter to it. It's akin to an electrician understanding isolation. It's not adjacent to what one does, it's part of it.
They knew how to build to high quality even before the 1940s
Some did. That's a matter of having good engineers, average engineers and bad. PM as a discipline is about codifying risk management to offset the average and the bad.
The need was speed! And they did it!
They did it using the first official application of the PM discipline.
They barely gave a single shit about environmental stuff,
As a feature of the PM discipline, Environmental has expanded since then. That said, lessons learned at Manhattan project were retained for future government projects. The body of knowledge expanded greatly from there, which is what made construction of things like Nuclear Submarines possible.
aside from the Apollo effort that you mention, which had little to do with "traditional project management",
My Brother In Christ, the Apollo project was the defining example of modern (post 1950s) PM techniques. The first use of Milestones, meticulous planning, 4 million human resources, detailed risk analysis. Ironically it didn't have an official PM position but used engineers dedicated to the PM task. Nascent.
The drastic changes that the Apollo 1 disaster investigation imposed on later flights were possible because the Apollo effort was not so beholden to plans of 1959 that it was impossible to adjust at the last minute.
All plans can change based on learning and data, This does not make the PM for the project suddenly conform to what we call AGILE today. This is easily managed by standard procresses.
Don't act like PMPs care more about this than others.
PMP is a small subset of the PM landscape. We aren't comparing PMP to AGILE, more AGILE to most others, and in that landscape most PM practitioners outside of software are very aware of the shortcomings of AGILE when misapplied, and construction is a major misapplication for it. AGILE is suited to low risk environments, and it's a mistake to try and retcon the quick completion of projects of the past such that the pace of completion equates to AGILE. It doesn't.
who will have to be rescued by a SpaceX vehicle
There's a reason they weren't in the air 5 minutes after the issues arose. Regardles of the methodology they may or may not have chosen (I have no idea what they use), they will invariably be using a high risk model which will require the fundamentals taken care of. They won't be 'breaking ground right now'. It certainly won't be an iterative process.
The difference is not in who cares more about safety, the difference is in who is most willing to manage uncertainty.
'Managing uncertainty' is just another name for Risk managment, and it's not an agile strength, but it's not like it doesn't exist there. Ultimately the PM of any type doesn't make the call. That will be the Client. Risk management and identification is the primary strength of traditional PM disciplines.
and in fact are aimed at increasing the team's awareness of the problem rather than pretending that PowerPoints are equivalent to actual work.
Endless standups aren't fun, and are time consuming, blunt instruments masquerading as problem solving. What actually solves problems is task and area ownership by individuals. AGILE will send an email to three people expecting a result. Traditional forms will
assign an owner and get a result.
At this stage, watching AGILE methodology struggle in construction is de rigeur. Having people say to me 'hey we learned a lesson', I feel like saying to them "motherfucker we knew this before we started the project." Every decade or so, someone renames the same shit something different and pretends they reinvented the wheel, then proselytize about this new thing and new buzzwords. It's tiresome. Everything one thinks is new, is old. The lessons were learned, the mistakes were made and the rules were adjusted, the regulations changed based on the blood spilled.
Every decade or so, someone renames the same shit something different and pretends they reinvented the wheel, then proselytize about this new thing and new buzzwords.
But this time around they're using Rugby terminology! Isn't that just so clever?!?!?
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u/doesntCompete 2d ago
And they did this without meetings, project management software and reporting.