Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

Summary
This article uses the song 'One Piece at a Time' by Johnny Cash, where a car is built over 20 years using components from different years, as a metaphor for ensuring that changes in project parameters are properly managed.

Johnny Cash, the well known American Country and Western singer, in a song called One Piece at a Time, recorded in 1979, sings about how he built a big flashy Detroit-type motor car over a period of twenty years. Bit by bit, from one year to another, he took components from the new car factory where he worked and painstakingly assembled them at home. Of course, once he started assembling the car at home he noticed that components changed over the years, some years more chrome, some years different designs, some years bigger, some years smaller. So, as you can imagine, over twenty years the final product was a bit of a mess. For example, the headlights were pretty unusual: “we had two on the left and one on the right, and when we pulled out the switch all three of ‘em come on”. “When we tried to put in the bolts, the holes were gone”. A ’53 transmission was fitted to a ’73 engine.

Medical science might describe Johnny as having the ‘action disorganization syndrome’ where his explicit knowledge of the components (he knew where they fitted) and his ‘temporal order’ (he knew the sequence of fitting the parts) was not matched by his knowledge of change (he did not know that components changed).

Projects are also developed ‘piece-by-piece’: the scope is followed by the WBS; WBSs are followed by activity lists, followed by plans, schedules , cost estimates, S-curves and cost reports; execution is followed up by closure. Knowledge of how the processes to derive these components is critical, as is the sequence in which they have to be undertaken.

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As Johnny found when he tried to assemble his Heath Robinson car, the nature of the components had changed with time, and he needed “a little bit of help with an A-daptor kit”. Changes in project components during the life cycle, for example, scope creep, cost increases, delays caused by confusion over requirements and staff changes cause similar chaos in projects and many types of ‘adaptor kits’ may be required, such as changes of scope and variation orders, re-approvals of budgets, etc., all of which can delay the project and escalate the cost. In view of Johnny’s experiences , Project Managers must guard against the action disorganisation syndrome: they need to be constantly aware of changes and manage them appropriately.

Johnny’s car did, however, have benefits-it was cheap: “I’d get it one piece at a time and it wouldn’t cost me a dime” and very unique: “I’m gonna drive ever’ body wild, ‘cause I’ll have the only one there is around”. Perhaps not the case with projects; they seldom come cheap. Where Johnny’s car and projects have some similarity, however, is that it proved that knowledge can be used in an innovative manner to produce something totally unique.