Have you ever played Whack-a-Mole, the game where objects pop up randomly and you win by being able to whack them as fast as possible? It says something that even if you have not played or heard about the game itself, “Whack-a-Mole” has become iconic in language because it so well encapsulates the complexity we all navigate in life and our jobs.
This is especially true for those of us in MSP project management where managing project schedules can seem like a never-ending session of Whack-a-Mole given all the variables and their permutations that MSPs must manage. A typical MSP project schedules must take into account project factors such as: the skills required, location, client history, resource skills, resource experience, prerequisites required and their delivery schedules, whether onsite work is required or not, how tasks within the project should be sequenced, client preferences for resources, client requested start dates, client requested end dates, among many others. The real game of Whack-a-Mole starts though when things change, as they inevitably do. So, call it Whack-a-Mole or, more commonly, firefighting, scheduling chaos is just a fact of life for MSPs. And it is a truism that those who manage this scheduling chaos better are the ones who are more likely to win in the market. Why? Because it is the ability to effectively manage this complexity that allows MSPs to maximize utilization, billing, revenue and profit.
Given the importance of managing complexity, what are strategies or methods MSPs can use to solve the chaos that arises? Not surprisingly, complexity as a field has been well studied. NASA, for example, has gone so far as to define a metric called the System Complexity Metric (SCM) to quantify the complexity of systems. Roughly speaking, the NASA definition is that complexity grows as the square of the number of variables in the system. If a system has 3 variables, then the SCM metric is 9; if the number of variables is 5, then the SCM metric jumps to 25. Relatively, then, if you consider the number of variables MSPs need to juggle as they manage their schedules given a typical book of 100 projects at a time with, say, 30 resources and 20 scheduling variables, their SCM metric is on the order of 22,500. This is immense! Especially when you compare it to the complexity that humans can manage in terms of complexity.
Studies in Cognitive Science have shown that humans can effectively manage only up to 4 variables! Beyond that, humans start to struggle. If we convert this to NASA’s SCM metric, then humans can manage up to a system with complexity of 16. This is orders of magnitude less than the SCM complexity of MSP scheduling of 22,500! It is no wonder that MSP project scheduling is one of the more demanding tasks out there.
If human cognitive power does not allow us to deal with the complexity of MSP schedules, what should we do? This is an important question because the more successful an MSP wants to be, the more it has to contend, as it grows its project portfolio, with higher and higher SCM metrics. Complexity is a limiter to success and must be solved if MSPs want to grow.
The answer is to turn to systems that are specifically equipped with the purpose-built algorithms needed to help MSP project owners bridge the gap between 16 and 22,500 in SCM complexity.
This is exactly what Red Swift is focused on. If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch.
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