This book will never forget that in project management there are two goals - the success of the project and you; your future, your career and your salary. There was a TV program on Channel Four about the management of the Calgary Winter Olympics project and the Lombard RAC Rally. The project management team just organizes, manages, plans and tries hard not to do too much of the real work.
The project management task is to ensure that a rally takes place on the right date and in the right place. The more people you involve in this forward thinking process, the better the project will be. Not many companies can get everyone involved in the project together to plan the project.
If we tell everyone their part in the project and how their work affects others. The wise project management expert chooses to ask such questions when the project is going well and stays out of sight at other times. Things often don't go according to plan – what's the point of planning?' The plan also provides a yardstick to monitor the project.
As you complete parts of your project, less work needs to be done and therefore the project becomes smaller.
This chapter takes our hero, the project manager, through a series of steps essential to a good project, and comes out brilliantly at the end. The diligent reader who takes the time to study this short chapter will gain an insight into the true nature of a successful project and will easily and easily become acquainted with a lot of potential. A successful project is one that was completed on time and on budget, and that met the quality standards.
Let's assume you've been assigned as a project manager for a new project that will likely receive approval to proceed soon. We look at what a successful project manager does before a project starts and during the project itself, and how projects are planned.
Discuss the project, or at least a significant part of it, with every manager, every engineer, and do your best to make sure both of you understand the processes involved. Successful projects have motivated the teams that implement them, and motivation can be created by setting realistic goals that the project team believes in. If you're working in a corner creating the world's most beautiful critical path diagram, you're going to have a lot of trouble selling your idea to others on the project.
You talk to the experts about how they think the project will go, who will do each task, and what they will need to help them do it. Then you translate the information into the language of critical path analysis and bring the plan back to them to check ideas. It's easy to create plans that are used to get back at people: 'You said it would take ten days - it's all your fault' is not an attitude likely to foster mutual respect and a strong team .
A statement such as 'We estimated ten days, but it actually took longer; we had too little experience to go on' is likely to create a better atmosphere in the project. If you can achieve this positive attitude, you are already halfway to a successful project.
They feel part of the plan, they feel warm about project planning, they feel warm about your role. Too much information is usually met with a gruff comment and raised eyebrows. This process of 'designer barcharts' will improve the attitude towards you and your plans and continue to increase the likelihood that the project will be highly successful.
As part of this communication process, you might organize a project meeting, go over the plans and explain to everyone why things should happen when you say and why you planned it that way. You might learn a lot about the project and you will make people think ahead. In such a project meeting, you should ask a question that is crucial at this stage: 'What have we forgotten?' This might promote some more useful forward thinking.
Once you have established the status of current activities and any changes that need to be made to the future plan, you can modify the plan to include these changes. Successful project managers go to regular project meetings, hand out the new plans, and listen to or lead the ensuing discussion. If you have followed all these steps, you will leave all those project meetings with a feeling of confidence.
Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
Let us outline each of these three, remembering at all times that we are concerned with bringing about change within our own organization. Slightly better projects are 'justified' by someone who estimates that the cost of the project will be returned many times over. But this process of justification answers this inadequate question: is it a good project to do? PPM asks a better question: what is the best possible group of projects that we can deliver and that will help our organization the most to its strategy.
PPM is not a simple process to establish, but it is cheap relative to the fantastic waste of money that occurs in many organizations. One American study showed that only one in four projects undertaken by the IT departments of some large banks produced a benefit. PPM suggests a process where all ideas for projects are analyzed in a consistent and thorough manner before any work begins.
Often this involves spending some money on a discovery project designed to investigate the idea more fully. Ideally this work is done by an independent group of experts, not the overly enthusiastic person who came up with the idea in the first place. Ideally, the groups to be affected support the proposal by agreeing to the proposed benefits (see later section on benefits management).
Once the project is defined, it goes before the program council, where projects and programs are selected and prioritized. The program committee has a clear understanding of the organization's strategy and is looking for ideas for programs and projects that will help them realize that strategy. Only with the approval of the programming council does the project get the green light and continue.
The program board will publish a project schedule showing all the live projects (except maybe a few secret ones) and make it widely available. In many organizations, the program board meets quarterly to review all live and competitive projects. The program board can cancel, redefine or delay live projects and approve new ones.
An environment within which projects can be successfully managed
In an organization where the program management team does their job well, running projects is easy.
Benefit management
The program's management team stands back with admiration, but carefully reviews the size of the waiting list over the coming months and years. Making qualitative statements such as 'we will have a better public image', 'staff turnover will decrease' and 'the workplace will be safer' are nice, sometimes inevitable, but difficult to 'tried and disproved. I mentioned earlier that these risk analysis things should be done early in the project life cycle.
Thus, a simple statement of foreseeable risks is a useful part of the project definition. Qualitative risk, at its simplest, involves only describing the obvious risks that are implemented as part of the project. There are techniques to help understand and locate these risks, such as a fishbone diagram (does this look like a red herring for Issue and risk management .. you?) where the impact associated with project failure is selected and those elements that which are likely to cause this effect.
The risk analysis group sits down and thinks about the causes that could send the project over budget and finds three main categories. One value relates to the probability of the risk's manifestation and the second value relates to its impact on the project. There are events that would ruin the projects, but are very unlikely - the earthquake for example.
You end up with a one- or two-page summary of the main risks in the project, which forms part of your project definition document. Some hazards are highly numerical - weather data can be analyzed and accurate predictions made. Here you should start with a project critical path diagram created within a project planning software package.
The critical path analysis engine, which is part of any project planning software system, runs through the model and determines when each task can and should start and finish, and which are critical to the project's success. There is something else that comes out of the risk analysis engine that is kind of funny. Before you dive into the deep end of the pool marked quantitative risk analysis, think about the cost.
