Every year, Independent Project Analysis (IPA) conducts various research studies. Keeping track of this ever-growing body of knowledge can be a full-time job. So I thought I would share my Top 5 Favorite Research Studies for Small Projects and why I think they are so valuable for site-based project organizations.

 

The study provides practical information about project manager workload and its effect on project performance (hint: concurrently managing 20 projects is not a great idea) as well as the resources needed by function for typical small projects (how much of that maintenance guy’s time do you need anyway?).

An oldie but goodie, this study still represents a powerful indictment on the poor practices used on many small projects and what should be done to improve performance. Have small projects improved over the past 10 years? Yes, and I like to think IPA has played a critical role in that trend. But is it still true that, for example, the “rate of turnover [on small projects] is disgraceful?"  With one in three projects still experiencing a project manager turnover during execution, absolutely!

This study delivered a shocker – a mere 37% of small projects meet their business objectives. The study introduced a single metric – the Success Metric – that rolls up IPA’s key outcome metrics (safety, functionality, performance, and predictability) into a single figure. The criteria are straightforward and reasonable, providing an easy way to diagnose where a site’s projects tend to fail, making the metric appealing to the busy project director or plant manager.

This study is a great example of the amazing things you can do with a wealth of data. IPA has collected around 2,000 electronic schedules for small projects over the past 10 years. We have several researchers dedicated to analyzing these schedules as part of our site benchmarking evaluations. This study went extremely granular to answer a common question – how much detail does my small project schedule need? If it’s a $2 million project, it better have about 80 activities and 20 of those activities should be resource loaded. How’s that for granular? A great reference for your small project schedulers, this study gives specifics on the scheduling practices used by Industry and the Best, and tells you which practices correlate with which outcomes.

Finally, my all-time favorite so far. This study investigated what really happens at those sites that improve their cost performance by over 10 percent, thus saving millions of dollars. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with project directors at sites that IPA has benchmarked multiple times, we mapped out the practices and processes that need to be in place for a site to succeed. This study gets at the “softer” issues that complicate small projects – management buy-in (or lack thereof) to Best Practices, focus on predictability over competitiveness, and so on – and lays out a roadmap for overcoming these obstacles and achieving better cost performance.

 

To learn more about IPA’s research on small projects, contact me at pkulkarni@ipaglobal.com.