 If you've been involved with any kind of projects, maybe this story that follows rings true to you. A man is piloting a hot air balloon several thousand feet up and comes to the conclusion that he is hopelessly lost, so he descends to a lower altitude hoping to get his bearings. Not having any luck, he descends further until he's about 30 feet off the ground where he spots a man walking along in a field. He then calls to the man, excuse me, can you tell me where I am? Why yes the man responds, you're in a hot air balloon 30 feet above this field. To this the balloonist responded, you must be an information technology. The man in the field answered, why yes I am, but how did you know that? Well said the balloonist, what you told me was technically correct, but of little real use to anyone. After hearing this the man in the field shouted back, you're in senior management aren't you? To which the balloonist answered, why yes I am, but how did you know? To this last query the man in the field responded, well you don't know where you are or where you're going, but you expected my immediate help. You are in the same position you were before we met, but now it's my fault. If you've done very many projects at all, you've probably felt like the world is your fault and this is a double-edged sword. You see in the real world of project management that statement is actually true. At the end of the day the project manager holds ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the project, even in situations where they don't necessarily have all the authority or control in order to actually deliver the right business results. This is a pretty precarious position to be in. All of a sudden everyone is going to blame you if it doesn't go well, but you might not necessarily have all the formal authority and tools you need to actually deliver the right results. So how are you going to succeed in that kind of environment? Well one thing you might choose to do is not get yourself in that spot in the first place. If that doesn't sound like a place you want to be, maybe you shouldn't be a project manager to begin with. If however you are a little nuts and decide that maybe project management is something you'd like to learn a little bit more about, we need to figure out some better tools to allow you to succeed. The goal of this course is therefore to allow you to develop the tools and techniques you need of project management in such a degree in order to successfully manage a small to medium sized project. Now what does small to medium sized really mean? What we're really talking about is any project under five million dollars. Being a hundred resources or less, taking anywhere from a year or less time. Now your resources might not all be located in one single location. We refer to that as being co-located and it is much easier to deliver a project when all the resources are co-located, but more and more in the real world we don't see that often happening. So you're going to have to deal with that giant elephant in the room of communication and in fact in the real world it accounts for more than 90% of the success that you are or are not going to have. No matter what kind of formulas or tools I teach you in this course, they will not overcome an inability to successfully communicate with all the stakeholders that you have on your project. Communication is something that cannot be done through email. It is done face to face or over the phone verbally day after day after day. It is a process involving building relationships and you're going to have to get very very good at it in order for you to succeed. So when we talk about project management, what are we really talking about? According to PMI, the world's leading organization for the field of project management, they estimate that there are approximately 16 million people engaged in the field worldwide. Four and a half million of those people are involved in the field in only the United States. So you're not alone. There are an awful lot of crazy people out there all trying to figure out how to manage projects better. And the real question is why? Well, the answer comes when you look at how much money is really spent on projects and how well we are not doing at executing them. You see nearly 25% of the world's gross domestic product is spent on executing projects every single year. That equates to somewhere between 10 and 12 trillion dollars being spent worldwide on an annual basis. With all that money being spent every single year, how well are we really doing? Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of numbers out there for the field of project management. The most commonly cited numbers are from the Standish group in publication they refer to as the Chaos Chronicles. For the low, low price of $5,000 a year, you too can become part of what's referred to as the Chaos University. Now their leader, gentlemen by the name of Jim Johnson, started collecting his data in 1994, looking at literally thousands of projects across a wide range of industries but primarily focused in information technology. What Jim found really frightened many people involved in project management. Now in order to really gain insights into the impact of this data, imagine that you're a chief information officer or a chief executive officer, the senior most people in some organization and you're reading your monthly magazines that help you become a better leader. And as you're reading CIO magazine or Forbes or any number of other publications, you run across a variety of different articles highlighting some of the information I'm about to share with you. The question you need to ask yourself is number one, how would you feel? Number two, what would you do with that information? And perhaps the most important question, how many projects would you really be interested in executing if this performance was what organizations were seeing at the particular time? So in 1994, the very first year Jim started collecting information. It was found that only 16% of projects were deemed successful. Another 53% were deemed challenged and a full 31% were deemed outright failures. Now stop and think about what those three numbers really mean. And let's talk a little bit about the definitions. The first question you really need to ask yourself is, what is a successful project? Well, according to these definitions, success is defined as a project being delivered on time and on budget with the specified requirements and or features. A challenged project is one that fails in one of those three areas and a failed project is one that fails or does not deliver in all three of those areas. Pretty easy definitions, right? Well, the numbers are pretty sobering if you stop and look at them. In 1994, what the number said is one in six projects approximately were delivering success. More than half the projects out there were challenged, meaning they were struggling in one or more areas and a full one in three projects were just outright failures. If you look at it, 84% of all the projects being done were either failures or challenged. Well, that scared the living daylights out of executives everywhere and started Jim and his organization down the path of becoming truly a prime resource for tracking the performance of projects globally. Jim continued his work in 1996 and found that we'd had some significant improvement. In 1996, 27% of projects were deemed successful and only 33% were deemed challenged. A full 40%, however, dramatic increase were deemed outright failure. This jump was largely attributed to a higher vigilance or people watching the execution of their projects. But if you calculate the numbers, what you're talking about is still 83 or 73%, I apologize, of the numbers representing challenged and failed projects. Now this is a drop of about 10 to 12 points from the previous measuring year and those points moved over to the rate of success. So now we're talking about let's throw a party because one in four projects now are successful. And again, you have to ask the core question. If one in four projects were deemed successful and you're a senior leader, how many projects are you going to want to fund? Jim and his team continued tracking every few years and in 2004 found that 29% of projects were deemed successful. A full 53% stabilization back to our original numbers of projects were deemed challenged and only 18% were deemed outright failures. By 2012, you're looking at a success rate of 39%. Basically four out of 10 projects were now deemed successful. 43% were deemed challenged and only 18% were deemed outright failures. What you're seeing is a dramatic shift over these years as we've seen a rapid increase in the professionalization of the field of project management. Additionally, as you've moved along through these years, we've seen significant changes in the cost and schedule overruns that go along with those projects. In 1996, the average schedule overrun was 222% and the average cost overrun was 189%. Basically, that's saying it was taking more than twice as long to do the projects and most of them were failing anyway and almost twice as much money as what was originally attributed. In 2012, you're now looking at numbers where 74% of the schedule was overrun and only 59% was cost overrun. So now you're dealing with a significant improvement in terms of schedule and cost and expenditures. However, notice that there is still significant room for improvement. Imagine if somebody came to you and said, you know, we were really successful. We only had a 74% schedule overrun on the project I led. Would you really have a lot of respect for that particular project manager? The numbers also highlighted some other interesting factors, especially when you look at the requirements being completed. In 2010, what Jim and his organization found was that 74% of the requirements originally specified were actually completed. In 2012, that number had dropped 5 points to 69%. The question you really need to ask yourself is how is it that the numbers look like they are improving in terms of overall performance, but we are actually completing fewer requirements. And what's happening there goes to the very heart of what we're seeing as a major shift in the field of project management. It is the movement towards agile development in many, many organizations. One of the basic tenets of agile development is the importance of completing the most important requirements first and allowing the organization and or the team to complete the other requirements based on their priority. So at some point, at the very beginning of the project, the team goes through a process of prioritizing all the features and requirements on the project and then does work in such a way to deliver the most important features first. At the end of the project, when all of a sudden we've hit a deadline or the end of our budget, we're no longer trapped as previous project teams have found themselves into having to complete all of the work in order to have something of value. Because the team has completed the most important features first, in many cases they are able to stop there because maybe those last features just weren't necessary after all and hence you see the requirements completed numbers looking like they do. We'll get more into this subject when we review the topic of agile development and methodology practices later on in this course. But as you look at these numbers, the next key question you need to ask yourself is how do we get at improving these numbers so that we're not on that failure or challenge side and we can start moving those successes even further above the 39% we're seeing today.