Every project is dependent upon people, processes and tools. They are how the work gets done. But these three essential elements are not equals. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and provides different values to our projects. In this three-part series, people come first, but they’re not enough.
This is the first of a three-part series exploring the relative project value of people, process and tools.
Can you imagine a project without people involved? Of course not. People are the heart of every project. Without the people, the work would not get done. Why are people such an integral part of any project? Why do we put so much emphasis on them?
People are important to our projects because of the value they provide. It is people who are creative. People embrace a vision of the future a future that has not yet been realized. And people apply their intellect to turn that vision into reality. This creative energy is the life-blood of our projects. It is what makes the difference between something that might happen and the realization of a dream.
People Are Indispensable
For decades now, we have been anticipating ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI); the dream that computers will someday be able to do the work of human beings. And, although the capabilities of computers have increased dramatically each few years, the holy grail of AI has remained beyond our reach. The power of computers, while it serves to enhance our ability to perform work, can simply not replace us, and it will not be able to in the foreseeable future.
Creativity
The reason humans are so indispensable is that we have capabilities that cannot be duplicated by machines. Primary among those capabilities that are unique to us is creativity. Simply put, creativity is the ability to create to make something out of nothing. While we are unable to create in the physical sense, we have vast ability to create in the intellectual sense.
Any project that we embark on requires this sort of creativity. Starting with a goal or a need, we make intuitive leaps from concept to concept as we build on the things we know and our base of experience to establish a springboard into the unknown. Then we launch ourselves from that springboard into new realms where we capture ideas that had not been in our minds before. We find new concepts, new connections, and new ways to attack problems and challenges.
It is creativity that allows us to move beyond what we knew, and capitalize on what we discover. Machines cannot do this. Software is unable to. Human creativity is the key.
Vision
Creativity is most often prompted by vision, another uniquely human ability. Generally, vision refers to the ability to see. But as we are using it here, it refers to our ability to see what is not yet there: to imagine. While machines are able to clearly see what actually exists (often better than humans can), the ability to see what might be is uniquely human.
We humans are able to envision what we might create, and use that vision as the impetus for our actions and the motivation for our creative energy. Every project starts as a vision in someone’s mind, and that vision is communicated from the champion to the rest of the people who work on the project. It becomes the guiding principle for all of the work that is done, and all of the creative energy that is expended.
Intellect
Finally, our combination of creativity and vision provides a special outlet for our intellect. Intellect is more than just what we know. The facts we carry around in our heads provide the basis for intellect, but intellect goes far beyond those mere facts. Intellect is our ability to understand relationships among those facts, and then abstract those relationships into principles that we can apply in new ways in new situations.
Our intellect is the enabler of creativity, as we bring our understanding of facts, relationships and abstract principles to bear on new challenges and problems.
People Are Not Perfect
If people are so able, then why do we need anything else? Why worry about processes? Why spend money on tools? Why not just put our stock in people, get out of their way, and let them work their magic?
The problem is that people are not magic. Although they are essential to the success of our projects, they often also sew the seeds of failure. People are the source of most of the problems we experience on our projects.
They make mistakes, and those mistakes waste our time and money. They forget things, and those omissions force us to go back and rework what has already been done. And they are imprecise. What is ‘good enough’ for one person may not be precise enough for another, and is often insufficient for the machines we must interact with.
Errors
‘To err is human.’ Indeed, just as with creativity, vision and intellect, our propensity to error is a defining attribute of being human. While we expect consistency from the machines we use, when people are involved, we expect errors. We don’t double-check the compiler, because we fully expect it to produce correct results. But we have little trust for the programs that people write until they have been tested, reviewed, examined, and tested again.
The errors that people commit have significant impact on our projects. First, because we expect errors, we plan for them by including reviews, audits and tests as part of our project plan. This time and expense is simply part of what we do on projects because we know that people make mistakes.
In addition, when we detect the defects or other problems that people’s errors cause, we must spend more time and money to correct those errors. This usually includes scrapping some work that has been done, and spending additional time and money on rework.
Omissions
In addition to the mistakes people make, they also forget things. Often we forget facts and information, but we also forget to do things that we are responsible for. When an activity includes many steps, it is not unusual for the person who must do that activity to omit one or more steps. This can happen because he or she is unfamiliar with the activity, and is unaware of all of the steps that comprise it. But it can also be an effect of familiarity when the person’s attention lapses, and his or her normally complete actions fall short for a change.
In either case, the omissions almost always result in problems for the project. Someone must often go back and fill in the missing work, and in many cases, the entire job must be re-done, wasting the person’s original effort.
Imprecision
Often, even when a person does all of the things that are necessary, the resulting work product can still lack the necessary precision. For example, an analyst may document the requirements for the system the project will build, but if the words and graphics in the specification do not communicate the stakeholders’ needs with sufficient precision, then the system that is built may not satisfy those needs.
Or, if the system architect does not analyze the impact of his or her design choices in sufficient detail, important ramifications of those choices may be missed until they show up as problems during construction (or worse, during testing).
Human perception is quite tolerant of ambiguity, and we readily fill in the gaps by making assumptions. As a result, we are often satisfied with work that lacks the level of precision that is actually needed by the circumstance.
People Alone Are Not Enough
People are a critical part of every project, precisely because of the unique abilities they bring to the project. Their creativity, vision and intellect are what enable projects to build complex systems or derive new concepts, but their propensity to error, omission and imprecision puts a serious damper on the results that can be achieved.
Clearly, to gain the full benefits that people bring to our projects, we must look for opportunities to mitigate their shortcomings. And this is the reason for processes and tools. In the next two parts of this series, we will look at how processes and tools enable our most precious resource: our people.
Next:
Processes for People
