Derived from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow, gluttony is the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste. In the Christian religions, it is considered a sin because of the excessive desire for food, or its withholding from the needy.

Depending on the culture, it can be seen as either a vice or a sign of status. Where food is relatively scarce, being able to eat well might be something to take pride in (although this can also result in a moral backlash when confronted with the reality of those less fortunate). Where food is routinely plentiful, it may be considered a sign of self control to resist the temptation to over-indulge.

Early Church leaders (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) took a more expansive view of gluttony arguing that it could also include an obsessive anticipation of meals, and the constant eating of delicacies and excessively costly foods. He went so far as to prepare a list of five ways to commit gluttony, including:

• Praepropere - eating too soon
• Laute - eating too expensively
• Nimis - eating too much
• Ardenter - eating too eagerly
• Studiose - eating too daintily

For the purposes of this article this list of 5 ways to commit gluttony will be used to outline some classic project transgressions and their associated penitence.

So gluttony (latin: gula) is defined as 'the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste'. However as stated previously we'll be supplementing this with the, more expansive, view outlined by Thomas Aquinas.

The sin of Resource Management, and its associated transgressions, could, arguably, be regarded as one of the most impactful of all deadly sins. This is simply because in many project environments resource cost is by far-and-away the major cost contributor and hence any lack of control can result in rapid and significant cost impact. Some people are under the impression that once you have planned the project, defined the strategic delivery model (offshore model), estimated the work and allocated the resources you're home free. But by the very nature of projects these activities must be carried out frequently to help deliver against project goals. Take the view of finessing not re-inventing as small resource management changes made in a timely fashion can help you meet the overall delivery budget. The key attributes of a top project resource manager are their ability to spot trends and resource risks, to delivery, before, or as, they happen.

So in bulleted form have a read of the following and see whether you recognise any of these gluttonous transgressions from your project environment:

• Weak planning – Praepropere (eating too soon) – Ramping up your project/programme team before clearly defining a plan (even at a phase level) against which progress can be clearly tracked.
• Imbalanced off-shore model – Laute (eating too expensively) – Using a primarily onshore based strategic delivery model without actively considering offshore options.
• Poor estimating – Nimis (eating too much) – Poor estimating can result in a corpulent project team burning budget against over-inflated estimates
• Ineffective resource allocation – Ardenter (eating too eagerly) or Studiose (eating too daintily) - Being too aggressive in your resource allocation against plan can result in a cost-inflated but schedule-contained position just as being overly cautious can result in a cost-contained but schedule-extended position.

Do you recognise any of these transgressions? With the possible exception of Laute (eating too expensively) all of the above list will be relevant to your project. If you acknowledge the existence of some of these in your environment then you're suffering from GLUTTONY! …the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste.

Let's go through the appropriate penitence to free your project environment from gluttony, the second of our deadly project sins...

Your penitence is to design, develop, implement and operate a robust Resource Management function. To read a short summary on resource management view the category link here:

http://www.decium.co.uk/categories/Human-Resource-Management/

Now as with our previous article on lust we’ll discuss specific actions you can undertake to put yourself back on the virtuous project path. These actions are simple to define but some can be very complex to implement so please don’t lose heart if you don’t have a fully functioning Resource Management function up-and-running by the end of the week!

Let’s investigate actions for each of the transgressions outlined previously…

Weak planning – It may seem like a rather elementary statement but a project without a plan is like going on a long car journey (to a destination you’ve only vaguely familiar with) without a map (or a TomTom!). I’ve been on large programmes before which have ramped up heavily to deliver before real plans are in place. From my experience this has a number of symptoms as the weak planning becomes more prevalent. Namely:

• You have teams working on activities they think will bring them towards the end goal but without the benefit of solid knowledge that they are actually doing the correct work at the correct time e.g. They deliver early and the next team isn’t expecting their output for another 4 weeks;
• You have multiple teams working on the same scope and duplicating work;
• You have teams delivering mutually exclusive elements of work but there are big gaps in what is to be delivered (in totality) as no clear WBS has been defined;
• You have some people doing NOTHING (or more likely becoming well acquainted with YouTube)…this is magnified when those individuals are expensive/scarce resources

…inefficiencies ensure and before you’ve had a chance to put out one small planning fire you’re in the midst of a severe, and widespread, inferno to which application of the metaphorical fire blanket - an A3 project plan ;-) - is far too little too late.

You may notice that the bullets above all cross-reference both people and plans…both need to be inextricably linked to control your project’s gluttony.

The key actions here are to define a WBS (as we mentioned in the Lust Deadly Sin article), schedule the activities and then once it is agreed and signed off then, and only then, start to mobilise your team to start activities. Sometimes Senior Management get disorientated in the melee at the start of a project and start the war-cry of ‘We must start delivering!’ before the project manager has had a chance to get the plan baselined (sometimes it’s the inexperienced project manager who is making the self-same war-cry!). However it is imperative that the project manager stands their ground as much as possible. Failure to do so will result in unnecessary and inefficient budget consumption. Using the journey analogy above it equates to getting lost in a series of streets minutes after you’ve started your journey and wasting valuable minutes (equating to valuable resource cost) going in circles.

Imbalanced off-shore model – I won’t belabour this type of gluttony as it is usually less relevant to smaller projects and, for those that are interested, the penitence to the transgression is in the transgression itself! Bring balance to your imbalanced off-shore model. Explore opportunities to utilise the lower-cost off-shore workforce for more transactional elements of your project delivery. India and Manila now have intermediary companies which specialise in provisioning your project with a very small number of resources and they reduce your operational risk by taking on the middle management tasks of managing and attending to your off-shore staff (clearly they will also charge a higher margin for this but for a smaller project this can still be significantly more cost effective that running the project onshore in it’s totality. Obviously for the bigger programmes you have Tata et al or companies like Accenture have a huge, immensely well organised, CMMi compliant off-shore capability.

Poor estimating – Well, well, well…we’re all familiar with this very common cause of project pain aren’t we! I will make a small disclaimer here...poor estimating isn’t the only cause of an over-sized project delivery team. In some instances project managers or team leads will throw resource at a problem rather than looking for creative alternatives but as bad estimating can cause long term damage to delivery I wanted to concentrate on it for the purposes of this article.

Estimating is a core project management skill and yet many see it as a necessary evil to get through before the ‘real work’ can begin. This little transgression is not only short-sighted but possesses the capability to undermine any chance of making the project a success before it’s even started.

The key elements of robust estimating include:

• Ensuring your Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is complete and signed-off by the key stakeholders;
• Getting the involvement of expert/experience resources;
• Calculate contingency using the totality of risk estimates (estimated cost impact x likelihood);
• Using, where possible, inputs from previous projects/industry sources etc; and
• Consider the skill-set of the resources undertaking the work (more skilled resources will deliver faster); and
• Try to include optimistic, medium and pessimistic estimates. A good calculation is: (O+4M+P)/6

I’d recommend reading a few articles about estimating and talking to someone with experience as well. Once you’ve ticked the boxes above you should have a good foundation from which to launch the project. Your resourcing should be more accurate and can be finessed by reviewing the Earned Value metrics against your time spent against the baseline time forecast for the same period.

Ineffective resource allocation – The final transgression that makes up the deadly project sin of gluttony is poor control of resource positioning. The first step of resource management is to get processes in place to effectively manage the roll-on, roll-off or movement of resources. Once you can track your people you have the framework to get real control of the primary cost contributor on your project (…at least it’s the primary cost contributor in most circumstances).

The second step is to ensure the load on resources is such that they are not over/under utilised. The general rule of thumb to avoid the pitfalls of Ardenter (eating too eagerly) and Studiose (eating too daintily) is to keep your resources operating within the invisible boundaries of 90% utilisation and 130% utilisation.

On a day-by-day basis you might think letting a resource work at 90% of capacity is wasteful and conversely someone working 30% overtime is nothing if unsustainable in the long term. However, from my experience, I’ve found that a WBS framed at a sensible level (no more than 3-levels of WBS) and a minimalist set of tasks/deliverables to which to assign resources (keep it to no more than 5 tasks/deliverables assigned to a resource at one time) will result in completion of the first step of good resource utilisation. The next phenomenon you’ll discover is that, given the many and varied assumptions/estimates that go into forming a plan/WBS in the first place, your resources will, if under-utilised, generally start work on parts of ‘soft-dependency’ task or help out someone else in their team or look for additional opportunities to add value elsewhere. Following on logically from this if your resources are oversubscribed they may work some overtime, benefit from team-mates who are under-utilised helping them out or searching for give them the incentive to look for efficiencies to cut down the effort involved. I have personally seen all of these things happen from both sides and have yet to come to come across a situation where it has caused issues to my baseline delivery schedule or cost (I accept that some of you out there may have experienced that very thing although I predict that if you have the right WBS and deliverable list it would be a diminishingly small number of projects).

So to finish, when your people are within the boundaries…leave them alone. When they go above or below the safety line for a few days…leave them alone. If you see them planned in at above or below for more than a week then you should start, formally, looking to increase/decrease their utilisation by moving team allocation around or sharing tasks. If you see them planned in at above or below the safety lines for longer periods then your resource utilisation is suffering from gluttony and needs to be addressed immediately.

I hope there is some food for thought there to help you address one of the most common project sins…gluttony. With a robust Resource Management function in place you will be able to avoid some of the critical illnesses of failing projects/programmes/portfolios. However this will not be the panacea for all project issues. I hope that by following this series of articles you’ll be able to learn lessons you can either apply on your current project or make sure you put in place on future projects to avoid the aforementioned transgressions.

Coming soon … we’ll be investigating the deadly sin of wrath….defined as:

‘Wrath may be described as ‘Inordinate and uncontrolled feelings of anger and hatred. These feelings can manifest themselves as vehement denial of the truth, both to others and in the form of self-denial, impatience with the procedure of law, and the desire to operate outside of the workings of the justice system (such as engaging in vigilantism) and generally wishing to do evil or harm to others’