can systems thinking help?

Bob Hughes, British Computer Society

Project Management Specialist Group
Successful Projects

20 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013 | www.pmtoday.co.uk

 The Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth could be seen a
monument to project failure: it was to be the Millennium
Tower, but missed the deadline. Yet if the final product
is OK, does the missed deadline really matter? No-one
recalls, or cares, if the iconic Blackpool Tower was built
on time or not.
Is the focus of conventional project management, with
its professed concern for the ‘iron triangle’ of scope/
time/budget too narrow, and would it benefit from
a greater consideration of broader systems concepts.
This was the question raised by Paul Summers, who
is currently responsible for fostering good project
management practice at Portsmouth City Council at a
recent talk to the British Computer Project Management
Specialist group (PROMS-G).
The island city of Portsmouth with its 270,000
inhabitants has a City Council with responsibilities
ranging over such varied concerns as roads, social
services, education, housing, planning and waste
disposal. It is thus likely to have several projects on the
go at any one time, each dealing with very different
types of practical problems. In the early part of the
Not all who last decade, the performance of its projects attracted
encounter the criticism of external auditors. Its initial response
to this was to invest in PRINCE2 training. Despite this,
systems thinking project performance remained poor. We should be
careful about jumping to conclusions about the precise
are immediately
circumstances in any one organisation, but a general
impressed by it perception of PRINCE2 has grown that while it provides
a useful guide to project management processes and,
for example, identifies the points at which management
decisions have to be made, it provides little guidance
on how the correct decisions will be made. There is also
a difference between going on a project management
course and good project practices actually being
embedded in the day-to-day work of project team
members and managers. Finally, PRINCE2 can solve
certain problems, but are they the problems that are
most critical for an organisation?
In December 2007 Paul Summers began work on the
task of improving the project management within the
authority. The first thing to be done was to find out the
underlying problems hindering performance. A systems
approach was adopted. Systems thinking starts with the
idea of a system being a set of interrelated parts. The
parts by themselves can accomplish little or nothing, but
put together in the right way and the resulting system
may have extraordinary capabilities. The components of
a violin are nothing until they are put together in such
a way that they are able to produce beautiful sounds.
However the violin is still useless without a violinist. The
resulting violin/violinist system, can in turn be just one
component – or rather subsystem – in a larger system,
an orchestra. In each case, the sum is greater than the
parts. An orchestra is a particular type of system, an
organisation which needs to be driven by a common
purpose. Systems can, of course, malfunction, and the
remedying this will need attention being given both to
subsystems that may be at fault, but also at the way
the system as a whole behaves.
There are many strands in systems thinking. The one
that was particularly influential here was the idea of
appreciative enquiry, which was originally formulated
by Geoffrey Vickers – who, incidentally, is one of the
few management gurus I have come across to have
won the Victoria Cross. In broad terms, this stresses the
importance of understanding the context of a situation,
using this as the basis for actions, and then evaluating
and reflecting on the outcomes of those actions. These
reflections can then modify future actions. This may
hardly be seen as rocket science, but it could be argued
that a problem with projects is that they are often
started prematurely, before a real understanding of
their context has been reached. Certainly, developers
in an implementation team often have little idea about
why a project has been embarked upon.
Yet not all who encounter systems thinking are
immediately impressed by it. It is often couched in
an off-putting jargon. I can remember, many decades
ago, being part of a group of very bright people from
a variety of backgrounds – military personnel, teachers,
NHS workers and emergency services staff who were
all baffled by the terminology of the soft systems
method: rich pictures, root definitions, conceptual
models and even weltanschauung, the last a term not
widely understood and even less often correctly spelt.
Perhaps it is good to practice systems thinking but
not to say that you are, or just say you are applying
commonsense.
At Portsmouth it was found that projects were failing
according to the conventional tests of time and
budget. As well as this, there was little consideration of
the practical benefits that the projects were to deliver.
Business cases were prepared but these tended to be
purely financial appraisals. A consequence appeared
to be that the focus on time led to project planning
being rushed, as staff felt the need to get on with it.
In a local authority there may a range of stakeholders
who need to be consulted. Some may argue that
this is just red tape, but it is also an indication of the
inter-connectedness of different aspects of service to
the local community. Early haste can lead to a lack of
clarity about what a project is to achieve and to vague
specifications which in turn lead to over-optimistic time
forecasts.
The current emphasis on agility – as we have seen in
the Met Office WOW project (PMT December 2012)
– encourages development work to start very quickly,
but the systems approach cautions against this until
the full context and outcomes of the project have been
properly considered.
www.pmtoday.co.uk | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013 21
Paul Summers’ way out of these difficulties was to
try to embed effective project management practices
more deeply in the organisation. Many of the staff
had already attended PRINCE2 courses which focused
on the correct bureaucratic project procedures.
More learner-centred training was embarked upon
where participants had to address practical project
management problems, and were expected to reflect
on the lessons learnt from these problem-solving
activities. Some staff were uneasy about this new
approach as things seemed to be unstructured and
what was expected was not always clear. Applying the
appreciative enquiry approach meant this emerged in
evaluation and training was adjusted to deal with these
concerns without losing the learning benefits.
Paul Summers stresses that interventions to improve
project management practices have to be tailored to
the local situation. The key issue with projects is their
purpose and it is worth investing considerable time
in ensuring that everyone is aware of the motivation
of for a project. There is a need to create learning
environments as opposed to teaching ones. Staff need
to get beyond the bullet points to practical application
followed by evaluation and reflection.
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22 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013 | www.pmtoday.co.uk
Management must focus on the three iterative
steps: gaining an appreciation of the current system,
implementing improvement actions and reflecting on
outcomes as a way of increasing the appreciation of
project context, so that more effective actions can be
planned in future. As someone in the audience noted
after Pau Summers’ presentation, it is a matter of
taking project management more seriously.
Some sources on the web if you are interested in
following this topic are:
Brian Hineken(2005) ‘Confessions of a recovering
knower’ The Systems Thinker Volume 16 Number
7 pages 2-6 http://2012-leadership-forum.iste.
wikispaces.net/file/view/System_Thinker_article.pdf
Linda Booth Sweeney (2001) ‘Systems thinking: a
means to understanding our complex word’ Pegasus
Communications. http://www.pegasuscom.com/pdfs/
systems-thinking-introduction.pdf
Paul Summers ‘A systematic approach to improving
project management performance’ http://journals.
isss.org/index.php/proceedings55th/article/
viewFile/1638/601