In my quest to analyze project stakeholders I came across some very interesting observations by Alistair Cockburn in his book Agile Software Development. In the first chapters he doesnt discuss agile, but he is describing characteristics of individuals and groups that, in his opinion, lead to why agile is a good method for certain projects.

The part that particular interests me is mentioned as Overcoming failure modes. One of the characteristics of humans the project manager should take into account is the mode people are working in. This is more or less a default behavior people have, strategies they tend to do more likely working in projects.

The failure modes are behaviors that probably lead to problems in your project. So recognizing them will bring you already half way a solution.
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There is so much knowledge about software project management available in bookstores, universities, businesses and the internet, if you encounter a problem in your project, chances are the right solution is already invented and waiting for you to find it.

Two problems are popping up here:

1) how do you define the problem in your project?

2) how do you find the right solution for your problem?

There is just too much information about it, but even worse, we are lacking a good vocabulary to link project problems to solutions. If I want to tackle this Project Profiling thing, this is one huge problem to solve.

How to solve it? I dunno. I do know that if you want to be able to use it in everyday project management, it should be simple and easy to use¦ so no huge frameworks and theoretic models.

Two possibilities come to my mind:

I love the solution provided in AntiPatterns in Project Management: they list some sentences that people use to describe the situation: "They Don't Leave Me Alone!", "These Users Keep Changing Their Minds". If you walk around your project these sentences stick out and keep on lingering in your mind. Using these "anecdotes" as they call them, you can identify problematic situations and look up solutions based on the sentences.

Another possibility is the use of analyzing trends in metrics, like schedule slippage, budget overrun, programmer productivity, size of backlog, number of change requests, number of bugs found, number of test cases performed per day. The pattern of the trends can be a starting point for analysis, and combinations of these lines can be used as a descriptor of a problematic situation. This technique is used in The Fifth Discipline.

Most problems in a project occur when the project is actually running. This may seem obvious, but consider the amount of time spent on analyzing the situation and taking measurements to counter potential problems; the majority of this is done at the start of the project. When the project is running on full speed, when everybody is very occupied with their day-to-day work the need for analyzing project circumstances increases, but is hardly done.

Project Profiling attempts to create a set of techniques just for the purpose of quickly assessing a project that has some problems, and to deduct in a speedy way counter measures.

At this moment the potential candidates are:

• Traditional Risk Management
• Stakeholder Analysis
• Fifth Discipline Archetypes
• Project Management AntiPatterns
• Agency Theory
• Job Gap Analysis