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Project management best practices
As both an active project manager and a project management
trainer, people often ask me what are the fundamental aspects to
successful project management. Whilst there have been many great
books written on the subject, I always summarise what I believe
to be the best practices at the heart of good project
management.
Define the scope and objectives
For any project to be successful you need to understand what the
project is supposed to achieve. Suppose your boss asks you to
organise a campaign to get the employees to donate blood. Is the
aim of this to get as much blood donated to the local blood
bank? Or, is it to raise the profile of the company in the local
community? Deciding what the real objective is will help you to
determine how you go about planning and managing the project.
The project manager also needs to define the scope of the
project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to the
blood bank within the scope of the project? Or, should staff
make their own way there? Deciding which activities are within
the scope or out of scope of the project has a big impact on the
amount of work which needs to be performed during the project.
An understanding of who are the stakeholders is also crucial if
you are going to enlist their support and understand what each
person expects to be delivered from the project. Once you've
defined the scope and objectives, you will need to get the
stakeholders to review them and agree to them as well as
agreeing who should be on the list of stakeholders.
Define the deliverables
To achieve the desired outcome from the project, you must define
what things (or products) are to be delivered by the end of the
project. If your project is an advertising campaign for a new
chocolate bar, then one of the deliverables might be the artwork
for a newspaper advert. So, you need to decide what tangible
things are to be delivered and document in enough detail what
these things are. At the end of the day, someone will end up
doing the work to produce the deliverable, so it needs to be
clearly and unambiguously described.
Once you have defined the deliverables, you will need to have
the key stakeholders review the work and get them to agree that
this accurately and unambiguously reflects what they expect to
be delivered from the project. Once they have agreed, you can
begin to plan the project. Not defining the deliverables in
enough detail or clarity is often a reason why projects go
wrong.
Project planning
This is the time when you define how you will achieve the
desired outcome of the project embodied within the objectives
and definition of deliverables. Planning requires that the
project manager decides which people, resources and budget are
required to complete the project. You will need to decide if you
will break up your project into manageable phases, decide which
products will be delivered in each phase, and decide the
composition of your project team. Since you have already defined
the deliverables, you must decide what activities are required
to produce each deliverable.
You can use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)
to help you to achieve this. You will need to estimate the time
and effort required to complete each ctivity, dependencies
between related activities and decide on a realistic schedule to
complete the activities. It's always a good idea to involve the
project team in estimating how long the activities will take
since they will be the ones actually doing the work. Capture all
of this into the project plan document. You also need to get the
key stakeholders to review and agree to this plan.
When developing the project plan, a project manager is often
under pressure to produce a plan which meets the (unrealistic)
expectations of some of the stakeholders. It is important here
that the project manager comes up with a realistic schedule -
one which he/she thinks is realistic to achieve. You will be
doing nobody a favour if you succumb to pressure and agree to
deliver the project in a totally unrealistic schedule.
Communication
Even the best made project plans are useless unless they have
been communicated effectively to the project team. Everyone on
the team needs to know exactly what is expected of them, what
their responsibilities are, and what they are accountable for. I
once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his
office surrounded by big colour print outs of his latest plans.
The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and
milestones were because he hadn't shared the plan with them.
Needless to say the project hit all kinds of problems with
people going off and doing the activities which they deemed
important rather than doing the activities assigned by the
project manager.
Tracking and reporting project progress
Once your project is underway and you have an agreed plan,
you
will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of the
project against the planned progress. To do this, you will need
to get reports of progress from the project team members who are
actually doing the work. You will need to record any variations
between the actual and planned cost, schedule and scope. You
will need to report any variations to your manager and key
stakeholders and take corrective actions if the variations get
too large.
There are lots of ways in which you can adjust the plan in order
to get the project back on track (rearrange the order of tasks,
assign tasks in parallel if the variation is small, or add more
staff to the project or reduce the scope if the variation is
very large).
All projects require the project manager to constantly juggle
three things: cost, scope and schedule. If the project manager
increases one of these, then one of the other elements will
inevitably need to be changed as well. So, for a project which
is running behind schedule to recover so it can be delivered to
it's original planned schedule, the budget might be increased by
employing more staff (although this invariably never achieves
the desired result of reducing the time left to complete the
project), or the scope will need to be reduced. It is the
juggling of these three elements - known as the project triangle
- that typically causes a project manager to tear their hair out
in frustration!
Change management
All projects change in some way. Often, a key stakeholder in the
middle of a project will change their mind about what the
project needs to deliver. On projects of longer duration, the
business environment has often changed since the start of the
project, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may
no longer be valid. This often results in the scope or
deliverables of the project needing to be changed. If a project
manager simply accepted all of these changes into the project,
the project would inevitably be delivered late (and perhaps
would never ever be completed) and would inevitably go over
budget.
By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions
about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately or
in the future, or to reject them. This increases the chances of
project success because the project manager controls how the
changes are incorporated, can allocate resources accordingly and
can plan when and how the changes are made. Not managing changes
effectively is often cited as a major reason why projects fail.
Risk management
Risks are any events which can adversely affect the successful
outcome of the project. I've worked on projects where some of
the risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to
perform the work properly, hardware not being delivered on time,
the control room being at risk of flooding in a major
thunderstorm and many others. Risks will vary from project to
project but it is important to identify the main risks to a
project as soon as possible and to plan the actions necessary to
avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to at least
mitigate the risk in order to lessen its impact if it does
occur. This is what is known as risk management.
Do you manage all risks? No, because there could be too many to
manage, and not all risks have the same impact. So a simple way
is to identify as many risks as you can, work out how likely
each risk is to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst),
estimate its impact on the project on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 being
the worst), then multiply the two numbers together. The result
is the risk weighting. A high risk weighting is the most severe
risk. Just manage the top ten risks i.e. the ones with the
highest risk weighting. Constantly review the risks and
constantly be on the lookout for new risks since they have a
habit of jumping up at unforeseen moments.
Not managing risks effectively is also often cited as a major
reason why projects fail.
Summary
So, in a nutshell, these best practices are the main things that
I would expect all project managers to do. They are applicable
on all projects big or small. Project management is not rocket
science. Applying best practices on your project cannot
guarantee that your project comes in under budget, on time and
exceeds all the expectations of the stakeholders, but applying
them will certainly give you a much better chance of delivering
your project successfully than if you don't apply them on your
project.
About the author:
Simon Buehring is a project manager and consultant and has
extensive experience within the IT industry in the UK and Asia.
His company KnowledgeTrain offers project management training courses in the UK. He
can be contacted via KnowledgeTrain.
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