Summary: Play Now: This episode is sponsored by the PMP Exam Simulator: Cornelius Fichtner and Frank Parth This interview with Frank Parth was recorded at the 2015 PMI Global Congress in Orlando, Florida. We discuss his paper and presentation "Successful Projects Depend on the Business". Here is the paper's abstract: This paper looks at the literature on successful critical projects and examines the impact of decision making on project success. When are the most critical decisions made? Who makes them? Where are the sensitive areas that can have a huge impact on project success? Research in this area shows that the only part of the effort where traditional project management approaches makes sense is in the later stages, the engineering and EPC stages. The earlier stages require a different approach to ensure success. While all projects are dependent on decisions made outside the project, large projects are particularly susceptible to this because of the increased number of stakeholders and increase complexity. This paper will focus on the pre-project decision process for large construction, engineering, and infrastructure projects. We will examine how these projects are most effectively divided into several stages and compare the approaches promulgated by both academic research as well as by private industry. They are all consistent with each other in where the critical decision points are. We will examine those critical points, the data needed to receive a “go” decision, and who should be involved in those decisions. We will see that the data needs to be increasingly complete and accurate the later in the life cycle the decision is made. Giving the engineers and the contractors bad data will ensure cost and schedule overruns as well as claims. Yet the most critical decisions are done when we have the least amount of accurate data, before the project managers ever get involved. We will look at four areas and provide recommendations for the project manager at the end: The business environment Current research Approaches to assessing the adequacy of the early planning Proposed Development stages for programs Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Hello everyone and welcome to the Project Management Podcast. We are coming to you live from Orlando, Florida. We are here at the Disney Resort at the 2015 PMI Global Congress and with me, almost like at every congress, it seems, is Frank Parth. Hello, Frank. Frank Parth: Hello, Cornelius. Good to see you again. Cornelius Fichtner: Same here, same here. It seems like we meet here, at these places once a year. Frank Parth: Well, we don't go to the chapter meetings anymore because both of us, we're traveling all the time. Cornelius Fichtner: We're on the road so much. So your presentation is about successful projects and the fact that they depend on the business. But we're going to start somewhere completely different. We're nearing the end of 2015. What do you see ahead of us in 2016 for project management? What are the big trends coming? Frank Parth: Cornelius, when we look back at Project Management over the last 10, 20, 30 years, PMI and other organizations have done an extremely good job setting up the processes that we have to follow. The methodologies, the tools, the techniques, and all this. So we have a very well defined approach to project management but projects are still failing. The Standish Group Chaos Project where they survey IT projects in North America since 1995 shows a very poor success rate for IT projects. Ed Merrow and his book, Industrial Mega Projects looks at these large market billion-dollar oil and gas processing projects, he says 70% of them failed by his criteria. So with all the methodologies we have, we're still failing projects much too often. I t
