9.2 Understand the ways we add safety to task durations - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->And as my first piece of evidence,</v> what I would like to do is I would like to propose something that we often deal with, or at least some of us deal with, and that is the problem or the issue of building in personal safety. Now, what do I mean by this? Suppose your boss comes to you and ask you to give a duration estimate for an activity. The boss would like you to complete activity X and ask the following question: "Here's what I want you to do. How long will it take you?" It's a fair question because remember, the boss, or in your case as the project manager, when you're in that position, you're trying to build your schedule. So you need reasonable activity durations to create your schedule. So you ask your subordinate, or in this case your boss asks you and says, "How long will that activity take?" Now, here's a question. How many of you would be comfortable giving your boss a 50:50 likelihood answer here? In other words, how many of you would give the answer, "Well, maybe I'll hit this number, maybe I won't. It's about a 50:50 chance"? Especially if future promotions, or bonuses, or boss's goodwill, or, I mean, there's issues here that can come from this. So if you don't make your number, you may be in the boss's black book. If you make your number, you may be in the good graces. So let me go back to my question. Under those circumstances, how many of you would be content offering your boss a 50:50 likelihood? Not many. Understandably so, in fact. So what you see here in front of you is what's called a log normal distribution. And a log normal distribution basically tries to capture this point. When the boss asks me how long an activity is likely to take, the range is kind of interesting here because you can see the 50% likelihood point right up there near the peak of this shows that 50:50 is right about there. That means that if you look at this distribution, I may be a little bit early but I could be really, really late, right? That maybe I could get it done, let's say I say five days is a 50:50 likelihood, maybe I'll get it done in four. But what happens if, what happens if I don't factor in the other four projects I'm involved in? I don't factor in the fact that my compatriot who I need help with to do this activity is going away on maternity leave? Or I don't factor in some other issues that could pop up? Suddenly something could happen. And in those situations, my 50% likelihood here, well, maybe I would make it, but think about it for second. I may miss it, and I may miss this number pretty spectacularly. That being the case, when I ask people, when I've done consulting and I've asked audiences, "Okay, you're not comfortable with a 50:50 likelihood. What would you be comfortable with? What percentage would allow you to sleep at night? Would give you a sense of, 'Yeah, I can feel confident with that'"? And what they come back with to me when I ask that question invariably is they say, "Something around 90%. I would be much more comfortable giving you a number where I feel a 90% likelihood of completing it rather than a 50% likelihood." Look at the distribution in front of you and look what that means. When we talk about this, we're talking about something now that isn't around the the top of there, around five days, we're actually talking about something that's more around 15 days. So my estimate to you when you're asking me how long should this activity take, and I really want a 90% likelihood, look what I've just done here. Well, what I've done is we can see that estimates for personal safety that are around the 90% confidence interval means an increase of anywhere between 150 to 200% off the original estimate. Let's be clear. All other things being equal, it should take me, that's the operative word, it should take me, about five days to get this done. But I know in my heart that that assumes that everything goes correctly. And with everything else that could possibly pop up, maybe I'm not comfortable giving that five day estimate. Maybe in fact I'm more comfortable with the 90% likelihood and I go and tell the boss, "15 days." Five days has now magically become 15 days for nothing else except I need a margin of personal safety. This is pretty powerful, folks, because if we think about our own situations, many times I don't know if it comes up to 200% increases, but we tend to be pretty comfortable with giving an increase there rather than just the 50:50 point. Okay? So my first item of information, my first bit of evidence for you, members of the jury, is our own personal predispositional behavior. We wanna make sure that when the boss asks us for a duration estimate that we're comfortable with, that we feel we can hit, we're gonna give them something that is more around a 90% likelihood than a 50% likelihood. That's going to add a lot of days to my estimate. But we're not done because there's something else out there, and I know I'm dating myself when I talk about this, but way, way back in the last century there used to be something called the new math. Some of you may remember the term, the new math. The new math, I have my own version of the new math. The new math goes something like this. You can see it on the screen here. Two plus two plus two equals eight. Well, what in the world am I talking about? Two plus two plus two equals eight? What I'm talking about is the fact that, remember the boss who asked me for my estimate? Suppose there is two other people in the department, so I'm responsible for activity A, Joan is responsible for activity B, and Charlie is responsible for activity C. So three of us. And the boss goes to each one of us and asks for those duration estimates, and each one of us gives him a number. But, you know, the boss is thinking about it and thinks, "You know, it wouldn't hurt, it wouldn't be a bad idea if I just added a little bit of an inflation to that number just for a little protection." And you see, isn't that funny? I inflated my number. Do you see the irony? I inflated my number. Joan probably inflated her number. Charlie probably inflated his number. We give those inflated numbers to the boss, and the boss turns around and inflates the numbers further to add in their own personal safety. And the irony, of course, is that inflation that the boss did is based on already inflated numbers. So now two plus two plus two have magically become eight. So those are two things that you and I tend to do. It's not a universal law, as I said, but there is a natural motivation, and an understandable one, for us to want to do these things, so we may tend toward inflating our numbers in order to build in personal safety, and the boss then builds in their own personal safety on top of that. But there's another dynamic, our third item. Suppose you have a boss who operates like this: "The best way to keep my people motivated is to keep them working hard. The best way to do that is to keep a pressure underneath them, keep a fire lit under them." How do I do that as the boss? Well, that's simple. When they give me an estimate, I'm gonna shave something off of it. So let's say, I'm gonna pick an arbitrary number. Let's say that I shave 15%. And pretty quickly, by the way, folks, because people aren't stupid, pretty quickly it's picked up on around the company that Pinto is known for taking the estimates you give him and he's immediately gonna shave 15, 20% off of it. Now, I call that motivation through pressure, or in this case you can see I don't think it's much motivating, but you can at least see that this is the idea that motivation is through ramping up the pressure. So I'm gonna shave time off the estimate to keep the pressure under you. How do you respond? Well, it's not hard to figure out, is it? If you know that I am notorious for shaving percentages off of those estimates, the estimates you give me are going to have an inflation added to them to anticipate my cut. You know I'm gonna be cutting this, so you build that into your estimate as well. And so now we have this really strange dynamic where I thought I was keeping pressure on you, so you gave me a number. Let's say I asked you, "How long is this gonna take?" And you say, "It's about 100 hours worth of work." And you say, "No, I can't possibly budget that. I can okay you up to 85 hours worth of work." But if I knew this in advance, and I came to you and you asked me, "How much time will this take?" And I said, "About 120 hours," you would give me the same response. "Well, I can't give you 120 hours, that's impossible, but I can give you 100 hours." And the door closes, I turn around, and I laugh because I got exactly what I wanted. You see what's happening here is we have a situation, I use the term down here, "If you don't take my estimates seriously, I'm not gonna give you serious estimates." You and I have this inability to be honest with each other, and it becomes this negative cycle where I'm not expecting honest assessments from you, you are not taking my estimate seriously, and back and forth we go. And all we end up doing is playing a game, folks. So think about this a second. Just on the basis of trying to come up with duration estimates, what I've presented to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are three bits of evidence. Number one, people have to add... I shouldn't say have to. Number one, people routinely add some multiplier to their estimates because they would really rather give you a 90% likelihood estimate than a 50:50. So they inflate the initial estimate. The boss takes those collective inflated estimates and adds their own personal safety margin on top there. So they inflate them further. And finally, knowing that top management is likely to cut this number, I inflate it one step further simply to anticipate top management's cut. Do you see that? Three levels of inflation are taking place here. So I go back to my original point. Under those circumstances, why would any project ever be late? With that much schedule inflation built into it, why would any project possibly be late under those circumstances? Now, at this point, I'm the one attorney, and at this point, I turn to you as ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and I thank you for your time. And I go and I sit back down because I believe I've made my case. I think I've done a good job here of sketching out why no project should ever finish late. Look at what we do to ensure our own personal safety.