Anatoly V. Chekmarev

“Gazprombank” (Joint-stock company)

Moscow, Russia

Abstract— The paper presents the results of the research of interconnection between agile methodology of IT projects, system conflicts, and adaptation theory. Every project generates new unique outcomes and alters the organization. So adaptation process is unavoidable. Are conflicts unavoidable too? What is the affordable level of complexity of a project for an organization of a particular level of maturity? What is the optimal project pace? Can we tune up parameters of agile software development process such as sprint length by measuring characteristics of conflicts and stress during a project?

Keywords—quality; maturity model; project; CMMI; IT; conflict; adaptation

I.Introduction

Stress

Dead line

System efficiency

SS1

SS2

SS3

Currently almost every complex IT project in the world is failed. According to the report of the Standish Group in 2015 only 29% of projects met time, budget and quality requirements, 19% were totally failed, 52% were challenged or partially failed. And the bigger a project is, the more probable is its failure. Let’s take into account the following digits for financial evaluation of the problem: during 2013 the whole world spent about $750 billion on IT projects[1] . It is 1/3 of Russia GDP ($2231 billion) or 1% of world GDP. The USA spent about $300 billion during the same year, Europe – $200 billion, Asia– $100 billion.

Therefore world economy lost about $150 billion via unsuccessful IT projects during 2013 and those losses had continued to rise. This evaluation does not take into account additional losses via deficiency of future benefit and misuse of resources.

The Standish Group gave us additional information about success of IT projects in 2015:

TABLE I. 2015 IT projects statistics according to Standish Group

Size of a project $million

Method

Success

Challenged

Failed

All

Agile

39%

52%

Waterfall

11%

60%

29%

~ 2.5

Agile

18%

59%

23%

Waterfall

55%

42%

~1.3

Agile

27%

62%

11%

Waterfall

68%

25%

~0.4

Agile

58%

38%

Waterfall

44%

45%

11%

We can see that agile projects could provide dramatically higher success level than traditional waterfall for complex projects, especially from the size of 1 million US dollars. But what is at the bottom of that? What is the reason of effectiveness of agile IT-projects? And how could we improve agile methodology to make it more effective? The possible benefit of such findings is about 300 billion US dollars a year.

II.Conflicts in project management

Every project creates unique outcomes and alters the company. It inevitably forces the surrounding organization to change its way of work and to leave its current comfortable stable state. These states are called structure-strategies (SS) in complex systems theory (Venda, 1990). Complex systems can function effectively only in discrete particular states. Not any state is possible for a particular system. Transition from one state to another temporarily puts a system into stress and loss of efficiency (see figure 1).

Fig. 1. Possible structures-strategies of a complex system

If it moves from structure strategy 1 to structure strategy 3 the system needs to move via structure strategy 2 or else its way will cross efficiency dead line and it will collapse. Let’s imagine that SS1 is the state before project and SS3 - the state after the project.

An organization could not adopt new outcomes without being changed. Sometimes we call projects as leaps to the future. The more outcomes it is going to receive the more changes it should adopt, the longer leap it should commit. The more complex project we are trying to perform the more adaptation we require from the surrounding system and the more complex way of the project (via several sequential states) we should apply.

Some leaps can become tragical if the goal was mistaken. And every leap requires resources. Leaps are short term, have smooth trajectory and do not require energy while in the middle of the way. The better way to call projects – diving through low efficiency to adaptation into another SS. Adaptation requires not only resources but also a lot of time. Some projects require more resources than others and some projects require more time than others despite the volume of the resources spent. In case of lack of resources or time organization can collapse. High level stress could lead to crucial loss of effectiveness of a system (Venda, 1990).

Thus the project manager should choose the way of the project in order to make stress higher and adaptation faster but avoiding crossing the efficiency deadline. Making no stress leads to failure of the project. Making it too high leads to collapse of the project team or the organization.

If we chose the future state of the system mistakenly (an impossible state for a particular system), or chose an incorrect way of movement from the current state of the system to the state which is the goal of the project, the project would be inevitably failed or the system (organization) could crash by itself.

The right and wrong ways of project implementation are shown in figure 2.

The left side diagram presents state transition through state with fatal loss of efficiency. It puts either the organization or the project into collapse. The right side diagram presents wave iterative way which is very similar to agile sprint mode with periodical loss of efficiency without crossing efficiency deadline. To find the right way of a project we should implement some like probe strategy which is really agile and needs a tool to measure the system stress in order to evaluate adaptation process.

Here we can see a curve which is very similar to every modern agile project with several stable states. These stable states are very similar to minimal viable products.

Fig. 2. Organization state transition diagram during project implementation

Leaving comfortable stable state brings stress and tension. Every complex system resists it. Real complex systems “do not like” a decrease in efficiency and a waste of resources. During fulfillment of a project every organization leaves its comfortable state (before the project), moves to the future state (after the project), wastes resources not only for the project but also to compensate the decrease in efficiency (between stable states) and does a great job transforming itself while resisting the transformation at the same time. The Project managers and their project teams try to accomplish the projects but almost all organizations resist it. And this resistance is natural. The difference in goals brings natural conflict (Druzhinin, 1989). Thus, project conflict is unavoidable because changes, adaptation and stress are unavoidable during every project. High level of conflicts can put the system into collapse but the absence of conflict demonstrates lack of adaptation processes and project progress.

In conflicts measurement we can find an effective tool for measuring of intensity of a project work. Conflicts can provide a lot of information.

But we need to shorten the term of the project and to boost adaptation to reduce costs and to start making additional profit as early as possible.

Let’s name several variables:

RT - resources required for the project team to make the project work (for example – software development);

RC - resources required for compensation of decrease in efficiency of organization while moving to the future state;

RF - resources required to transform the organization to the future state adopted to the projects outcomes;

RTCN - resources wasted by the project team for project natural conflict;

ROCN - resources wasted by the organization for project natural conflict.

But there are additional components of waste. In (Kurtuhuz, et. al., 2011) is posited that “…conflict will undoubtedly arise in the management team, both functional and dysfunctional. The form of conflict that is productive is cognitive conflict, which is task-oriented and focused on discussing and challenging diverse perspectives…. The opposite form of conflict is affective conflict, which is more emotional based. When considering conflict, the key to ensuring a high performing management team is making sure that conflict is of the cognitive variety, based on critical thinking and focused on tasks, while removing the affective conflict, that which is based on emotion.

In that way we should include:

RTCD - resources wasted by the project team for project dysfunctional/ affective conflict;

ROCD - resources wasted by the organization for project dysfunctional/affective conflict.

And the total project cost is -

CP = RT + RC + RF + RTCN + ROCN + RTCD + ROCD;

Resources of the project team –

RP = RT + RTCN + RTCD;

Resources of the organization –

RO = RC + RF + ROCN + ROCD

It is clear that the project team and the organization conflict wastes of resources are added and do not compensate each other.

And it is clear that the more resources one side spends during the conflict the more resources are spent by the other side. But only in case of both sides do not try to avoid the conflict. It is interesting that if the project team avoids the conflict then it avoids making the organization provide adaptation, if the organization avoids conflict then it avoids making project outcomes become acceptable. But higher level of the conflict lowers the quality of the project outcomes (Barki & Hartwick, 2001). Consequentially there is a range of acceptable and effective levels of the conflict which provides acceptable and effective levels of the project performance and the project outcomes quality.

Each side of the conflict has its own resources reserve, its own efficiency deadline and the pace of resources restoration. If it crosses the dead line, it will collapse. If the project team loses its resources, the project collapses. If the organization loses its resources - it collapses.

In management theory conflicts are widely considered as a development engine and a source of information.

Conflict parameters and project outcomes quality is the function of several main parameters: Project group capability, Organization processes maturity, Project complexity, Level of conflicts and Style of conflicts resolving (Barki & Hartwick, 2001).

If we could evaluate RT, RC, RF, RTCN, ROCN, RTCD, ROCD or theirs shares in total project cost, than we can evaluate, for example, the organization maturity level. If RTCN is greater than RTCD - that means the maturity level is low because the organization produces destructive emotional conflicts and the project progress is low as well, therefore the project is risky and the possible quality of the project outcomes will be low either. “…Completion of projects may require several years, and they can be difficult to manage under the best of circumstances. If organizational conflict is superimposed upon the normal project management difficulties, successful project outcomes are rendered immensely more difficult…” (Sutterfield, et. al., 2007).

If we somehow measure the project complexity RT according to a comparable project but our current evaluation of RTCN is much higher than in the analog, then the project is also risky because the organization is not ready to the project outcomes and requires correction of the scope or decomposition of the scope into several sequential minimal viable products (sequential dives).

Resources wasted can be evaluated via measuring the conflict level and the effectiveness of conflict management. There are extensive researches regarding conflicts. Research examining methods of conflicts level and conflicts resolving effectiveness measurement and interpretation could be found in (Azarov V., Chekmarev A., 2014). The level of conflict can be measured via evaluation of three characteristics: interdependence, disagreement and interference (Barki & Hartwick, 2001). But to measure the resources spent we need to find the scores of resolving approaches of the sides (PMI PBOK): Withdrawing/Avoiding (retreating from actual or potential conflict situation, Smoothing/Accommodating (emphasizing areas of agreement rather than areas of difference), Compromising (searching for solutions that bring some degree of satisfaction to all parts), Forcing (pushing one’s viewpoint at the expense of others), Collaborating (incorporating multiple viewpoints and insights from different perspectives), Confronting/Problem solving (treating conflict as a problem to be solved by examining alternatives).

The theory of complex systems and system analysis interprets any conflict as a natural process of interaction of two or more developing and co-adapting complex systems (Venda, 1990). The main method of effective conflict resolution is intensifying of information exchange because the main cause of dysfunctional/affective conflict is absence of information about the real purposes not only of the opposite side but also about your own purposes (Druzhinin, 1989). Here we can find basing for one of the main agile practices – regular communication.

III.Conclusion

There are some main topics that should be examined in future research: methods for finding dead line of organizational stress via conflict measurement, dependence between the maturity level and the level of conflict during project implementation, evaluating project complexity and its‘ effective implementation way/curve of conflict. Besides that some automated system for collecting data and results interpretation should be developed based on modern project management tools such as Jira.

And some conclusions are to be presented:

• Adaptation theory gives effective foundation for the modern agile methods of IT project implementation.

• Conflict measurement provides repeatable, objective scores, which can be used for project monitoring and process maturity level evaluation. Hence the scores received can be used for instant reacting and for implementation of agile iterative probe strategy for complex projects.

• Level of maturity can be used as threshold value in project monitoring based on conflict characteristics. For example if the conflict score of maturity received is much lower than the results of CMMI appraisal value then the project complexity probably exceeds the organization’s possibilities given its current maturity level and the scope of the project objectives has to be reduced.

references

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[1] The Standish Group

ЧЕКМАРЕВ АНАТОЛИЙ

I.Introduction

II.Conflicts in project management

III.Conclusion

references