Working Group B: What principles are important in dealing with complexity?

[Andrew Pyke]

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Team, apologies for missing today’s meeting – I was unwell (on the mend now).

[Davin Shellshear]

#16296

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My apologies Lizzy

Unfortunately Stephen has left ICCPM (ended yesterday) and was the organising force behind the meetings.

All meetings have the same login details, as below:

ICCPM ADMIN is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Confirming the meeting link is the same as in the calendar:

https://zoom.us/j/92032821000?pwd=OUtsODkwR3VZSjZyeml5blYyZ0tvUT09

 

Meeting ID: 920 3282 1000

Passcode: 667991

One tap mobile

+61280156011,,92032821000#,,,,*667991# Australia

+61370182005,,92032821000#,,,,*667991# Australia

 

Our next meeting is on 19^th January 2023, starting at 8am AEDT

Cheers

Davin Shellshear

[Lizzy Smith]

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Hi could you repost the meeting link for the Thursday morning discussion please. Was not included in the comms. Many thanks

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B

I thought I would set out the suggestions for a Group B Topic in the attached paper – so everyone can think about the topics and what each of us might prefer. Please add new topics if they emerge during your pondering. Should be an interesting discussion on Thursday.

I have also attached a paper on ‘Conceptualising_uncertainty_in_safety_critical projects – a practitioner perspective’. Thought you may find it to be of interest.

Cheers

Davin

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[Stephen Grey]

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I am still extremely interested in this working group

Just can’t fit much into a current upsurge of work and domestic issues that demand a lot of my time

This article illustrates how ‘white lies’ can add to the confusion on really big projects

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/turnbull-government-knew-submarines-would-cost-80bn-but-told-public-at-least-50bn-audit-finds?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[ian mack]

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Team – Regret I missed the last meeting (yes again over time changes in zones). Having read Davin’s transcript, I realize that we are still brainstorming. However, the following stood out to me as options (without prejudice, and I may have missed a couple) that we might add to the previously raised three subjects of power dynamics, multiple narratives, and the ability of a single PM to deal with the scale of the knowledge needed to navigate complex projects:

– “We have less and less [capable?] resources, for bigger and bigger complex projects [the Hinton lecture highlights the growth in scale of projects which relates to one of the three subjects raised in the previous meeting perhaps?], and in more and more sensitive environments [e.g. polarized politics, multiple agent/principal alignment, and climate change

– “We need a horizontal view – what other thinkers are doing in their problem space and then looking for commonalities and that sort of thing”

– Benefits Realization: Addressing carbon footprint in acquisition and in-service

– The applicability/fit of Monte Carlo & related scheduling tools

– Data digitization to accepted international standards leading to the effective generation of useful information (e.g. identifying signals with a high correlation to failed/terminated projects) through AI with complex projects

– Addressing the shortfall of Enough People with ‘Lived Experience’ (rather than ‘Learned Experience’) in complex projects [e.g. more coop programs and/or apprenticeship programs as part of skills development at universities and certifying bodies, addressing mentor availability (too busy) and ‘lessons lost’, improved practitioner networking]

– How to address the failure (unrecoverable losses) of the Iron Triangle (scope, schedule & cost) in complex projects – what other attributes need to be added to an ‘Elastic Star’?

– Addressing Principal and Agent misalignment as a special case in stakeholder management

– How governance can better address ‘Assurance’ via prudent audit and oversight that a complex project is best set up to succeed (or to do minimal harm to the target outcomes – such things as resources and processes) to enable ‘Ensuring’ that the execution teams of complex projects can deliver the defined measures of successful project outcomes

I hope this is useful in staring a list of questions or themes that new Working Group might choose to pursue after further brainstorming and then assessment – we now have at least 12 – yes, TWELVE). as before, the trick will be choosing a useful project that is within our capacity and could be of strategic value.

And just maybe I will even get to the next meeting on time – Ian

[Tony Graham]

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Hear from Mark Wild, former CEO of Crossrail, at the Royal Academy of Engineering 2022 Hinton Lecture: ‘Owning the whole, leading in complexity’.

https://raeng.org.uk/2022-hinton-lecture

[Davin Shellshear]

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Hi Group B,

Attached are the notes from our meeting on 17th November. There are a lot of interesting comments arising from the meeting.

Our current strategy is to keep talking around the subject and se if a new topic emerges.

Andrew, you have referred to NAO’s definition of project failure as irrecoverable loss of benefit. Do you have the source for that? I have attached a piece from the Department of Finance on benefits, but could not find the bit from NAO.

Cheers

Davin

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[Tony Graham]

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Robert

Thanks

The Liverpool John Moores Lecture a week Monday will be on “Organisational Safety Assessment” – I’ve had to follow their syllabus and teaching so I don’t confuse. I have put some outline slides together this morning and have shared them with the University for review. I will adlib ‘real life’ stories to stimulate the students. I probably can’t give them too much on complexity as I want to ensure they understand the basics in organisational safety assessment.

I will work on the slides next week

Tony Graham

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[Rob McMartin]

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Hi Tony,

This is a presentation that I did for the Predict User Group.  I have a whole manual written for Risk Management if you want.

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[Andrew Pyke]

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As discussed today, the Australian Risk Policy Institute did a great paper or two on RSKM limitations.  Here are my personal notes on it, FWIW:
<ul class=”ul1″>
<li class=”li1″>Risk Policy (Potentiality) > Risk Management (Probability) > Issue Management (Happening)
<li class=”li1″>Think “vulnerability”, well before “risk”
<li class=”li1″>About decisions <span class=”s2″>and</span> non-decisions
<li class=”li1″>Include assessments of “patterns of thinking”
<li class=”li1″>From organisation-centric risk, to network-centric risk
<li class=”li1″>Strategic Risk = Vulnerability ^ Threat ^ Threat Actor (conjunction of all three)
<li class=”li1″>Strategic Risk Policy should define where <i>Consequence</i> will be emphasised
<li class=”li1″>KPI for the risk management system – how many issues being managed came from Risk Management, vs were missed
<li class=”li1″>Personal costs (e.g. including non-decisions) can often exceed organisational costs, which needs to be considered
<li class=”li1″>Outrage Management needs to consider behavioural science in how stakeholders respond to threats
<li class=”li1″>“Risk Landscape” informs risk appetite and tolerance – recommend against defining “tolerance”
<li class=”li1″>“New Civics” for how risk will be managed across the network
<li class=”li1″>Measure risk in terms of magnitude of consequences, not probabilities
<li class=”li1″>Compound Vulnerability – a domino effect of a new potential risk or vulnerability arising from an exposure created by an existing risk turned wicked problem.
<li class=”li1″>Systemic Risks (which can become wicked problems, requiring reconstruction)
<ul class=”ul1″>
<li class=”li1″>Plural (legal/organisational) ownership
<li class=”li1″>Jointly manage – formally and collaboratively
<li class=”li1″>Single integrated processes

[Andrew Pyke]

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All, I recently had cause to analyse a complex project and deeply consider the Principal-Agent Problem and the Multiple-Principal Problem.  Thought I would share fwiw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

[Andrew Pyke]

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We talked about lessons learned today.  I found this great resource that you might be interested in.  https://learninglegacy.crossrail.co.uk/

[ian mack]

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Thanks Rob and Davin for the two papers. A few thoughts after reading them in terms of what topics we might tackle next.

From the paper on ‘early warning signals’, I tried to extract what might be important subjects for us to consider tackling that we think are important, that have depth and that we could contribute meaningful thoughts on elements of solutions – my ‘take’ of some of the tougher nuts to crack:

– [As per Andrew’s comments at last meeting] key stakeholder uneasiness, outright disagreements or marketing of differing project narratives of events and/or their interpretation (including Politicians/political-actors) and I might add that all are affected by power dynamics

– Time pressure (‘when the stars line up, you go & do your best’)

– Weak risk treatment (includes inherent risk of project assumption validity in the face of change)

– Unclear expectations

– Cultural barriers (low risk threshold, group think, blame culture)

– Closed/biased mindset

– Competency shortfalls in project execution teams (including minimum levels to make good decisions when relying on contractors, and lived experience to provide ‘gut feel’,)

– Inept gatekeeper assessments (incompetent or not external enough or frequent enough as black-hat audits/reviews)

– Governance misplacing trust in competent-weak project execution teams

And from the paper regarding categorizing projects, two possible objectives came to mind:

– Noting the disorder in the middle of the Cynefin reality, how does one address the challenge of actually being able to pigeon-hole a category (complicated or complex) based on judgment of the degree of certainty of assessment versus over-confidence?

– What are the aspects that are critical to the necessary level of resilience to navigate complex projects (within the project execution team in particular)?

Some of these might appeal, for consideration Team.    Ian

[Rob McMartin]

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I came across this article today and thought I would share it.

Complicated and Complex are very different things! (danpronk.com)

[Author]

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