Project Management

The experts tell all!

Matthew Batchelor

Good project management is vital to business success

In today’s highly competitive business world, more and more organizations are moving to a project approach. Whether launching a new, multi-million-dollar product or planning an office move, project management will enable you to deliver high-quality results on time and within budget.

Just as important, it provides a framework for continuous learning and improvement. In my own field of communications, I’ve spent over 20 years as a project manager, delivering projects as diverse as product launches and health conferences. I’ve observed a range of different project management approaches in action, and tried to adopt the best of them to improve the quality of the projects I manage.

Successful project management is about good systems and good leadership, to be sure, but it’s also about exercising good judgement when required. This book will help you develop all three of these skills. It aims to impart what I believe are the 50 most important project management secrets I’ve learnt along the way. These secrets are divided into seven key chapters:

Understand the role of projects. This section introduces you to the world of project management and helps you choose the right approach.

Aspire to succeed. To start your project you need a clear ‘vision’ and the ability to convince people to support your project.

Plan for success. Learn how to use Gantt charts, network diagrams and other essential tools for the project manager.

Manage your money. This section tells you how to build a project budget, manage risks and allocate contingency (extra); it will also help you identify the key areas to focus on to keep costs under control.

Lead and inspire your team. How to recruit, manage and fire up your project team.

Turn your plan into reality. Introduces some of the most common project management software, shows how to monitor progress accurately, and how to diagnose and solve problems.

Maximize project learning. Shows you how to close a project properly and conduct an effective evaluation.

Whether you are an experienced project manager or novice, if you follow these simple rules, you will be more confident in your ability to lead projects succesfully. This book will not only teach you how to act like a project manager but also enable you to think like one!

1.1 Projects are not tasks

Before getting started, it’s worth understanding what a ‘project’ actually is. The UK Association of Project Management (APM) defines a project as ‘a unique, transient endeavour undertaken to achieve a desired outcome’. In other words, a project has a defined beginning, middle and end, and a stated purpose.

Managing a project therefore differs from fulfilling a task, programme or professional work role. The following list helps to differentiate a project from other types of work.

• A project has a specified outcome. Unlike a job or work role where you are likely to have aims that change over time, a project sets out to achieve a stated goal (or goals) within a certain timetable.

• A project involves a number of different tasks. These tasks are generally defined as the smallest useful units of work. Related tasks are often combined into work packages or activities, which can be assigned to a single supplier or team.

• Each task will ideally be carried out by someone with suitable skills. Project working therefore calls for a multidisciplinary approach. The more complex a project, the greater the degree to which people and tasks need to be carefully matched.

one minute wonder Are you still confused about what a project is? Take a moment to consider this: despite their very different sizes, delivering the 2012 London Olympics and relocating your team to an office down the corridor are both projects. ‘Being a sales rep’ is not a project because it is an ongoing work role. On the other hand, a plan ‘to deliver a 20 per cent increase in sales leads through the installation of a new marketing database’ is likely to fulfil the critera for a project.

• A project is self-contained. It has its own aims, timetable and resources. That’s not to say that projects should be sealed off from the rest of the business – they can and should utilize skills and resources possessed by the wider organization, and the lessons learned should be exported to other colleagues and teams, and used on future projects.

Though they are capable of standing alone, projects may be linked to a wider programme of work, or be part of a portfolio of similar projects.

Adopting a project approach can yield significant benefits by defining clear outcomes against which to measure the input of resources and the quality of the project team and leadership. A project’s resources can be human, or financial or physical – equipment and so on.

1.2 Understand project constraints

Planning your project will involve making a series of assumptions and a consideration of the constraints facing your project. Understanding these factors will help you plan a project that is of the right size and has appropriate objectives.

The assumptions you might make about a project normally involve things such as:

• Scope (scale). How big is the project? Where does it fit into what your organization is doing? Roughly how much money is likely to be available?

• People. Who can I get to help deliver this project?

• Physical resources. What equipment and meeting space, for example, will be available?

None of this information has to be 100 per cent (or even 90 per cent) accurate at the outset. Nevertheless, understanding the assumptions around a project is an important first step – even if at this stage there are more questions than answers!

A useful way of looking at the constraints faced by projects is known as the ‘project triangle’. This model describes three main things to consider for any project:

• Time. How much of it do you have to complete your project?

• Cost. What is the available budget?

• Quality (or specification). Are you aiming to deliver something fairly basic, or more of a ‘Rolls Royce’ model?

With any project you will face a series of decisions about whereabouts in the triangle you position your project. For example, let’s say you are asked to complete an office move for your company. If you are asked to complete the move over a weekend at short notice, and given only a limited budget, you are unlikely to be able to deliver the best results. So the costs and time used will be low, but so will the quality. If you are given more time, the results will be better; if you have more time and a bigger budget, they will be better still.

Another dimension often added to this diagram is people. For any given amount of time and money, the greater the skill and motivation of the people involved, the better the results will be. Looked at this way, the triangle becomes a pyramid, with the project manager leading his or her team upward to achieve the best possible results within a given schedule and budget.

1.4 Know your stakeholders

There are likely to be several different groups of people taking an interest in your project. Collectively, these people are known as ‘stakeholders’. It’s important to understand the actual stake each group has in the project – otherwise it may be difficult to balance what may seem like competing priorities. Here we outline the key roles.

• Sponsor. The person who has asked you to undertake the project, and to whom you are accountable for its success. Often, this will be a senior manager within your organization – maybe your immediate boss. On larger projects, or within larger organizations, you may be asked to report to the sponsor via a project executive.

• Customers or users. These are the people who will make use of the product or service you are designing, whether it be a new school, a product launch party or a company database. A key concern for this group is usability.

• Suppliers. This group of stakeholders will undertake the design and delivery of your product or service, to ensure it meets the needs of users or customers. Suppliers also play an important part in risk management.

one minute wonder A useful way of classifying a project’s stakeholders is by assessing how interested each group is in the outcome of your project, and the authority they have over it. This enables you to work out the best way to communicate with each group throughout the project, which is essential both in ensuring continued support and in planning your time.

• Project team. The people who will help you deliver the project. These could be colleagues from within your existing team, others from across the organization, externally recruited specialists, or a mixture of all three.

• Project manager. That’s probably you! The project manager is accountable for the planning and delivery of the project, including progress reporting and project team management. Hopefully, one of the reasons you are reading this book is to discover more about this role, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section.

• Others. Depending on the nature of your project, other stakeholders might include your board of directors, the media, local or national politicians or industry regulators – even your competitors.

1.5 See your stakeholders’ points of view

As project manager, your role is to understand the perspectives of individual stakeholders and bring them together into a shared vision for the project. This involves taking a ‘helicopter view’, to see the project as a whole.

• Business aims of the project. The project sponsor is interested in the business aims of the project. ‘What value will this project bring to the business?’ and ‘What is its role in our strategic development?’ are likely questions he or she might ask.

case study Carole was asked to take on a project to upgrade her company’s website. She started by asking each of the main stakeholders what they thought would constitute success for the project. The project sponsor, one of the company directors, replied: “I’d like you to deliver the project on time and within budget, and to keep everyone happy.” The IT manager was less concerned with how the new site would work than with ensuring it would integrate well with the existing IT system. Other managers stated different priorities. The supplier said “Project, what project? All we’ve been given is a list of required modifications.” Reflecting on these comments, Carol was concerned at the lack of clarity and shared understanding of the project. Her next step was very sensibly to call a meeting of all the main stakeholders, in order to define the key success factors and build a shared sense of purpose.

• Benefits of the project. The customer wants to know what benefits the project will bring to them and how they will be able to make use of the end product.

• Capability of the project. The skills and resources of suppliers and the project team determine the project’s capability. They will help you answer the question, “How can I successfully deliver what customers and users need, within the available schedule and budget?”

This diagram, adapted from the popular PRINCE2™ project approach (see page 23), shows how you can think about bringing these potentially diverse perspectives together.

1.6 Choose the right approach

Modern project management emerged in the 1950s, with the development of a series of techniques aimed at making planning, estimating and controlling costs and schedules more effective.

You may not need to use a formal methodology for a small project, but it is still useful to know what the main methods are.

• The traditional, or ‘waterfall’ approach. This approach treats projects as a straightforward series of steps from beginning to end. Each phase must be completed before the next begins. If, for example, your company is planning to upgrade its website, then all the user requirements must be known before the programmers begin work.

case study Ali worked for a recruitment agency, where she was asked to install a new database. She felt that the user requirements were not made clear and that the suggested timetable was possibly unrealistic. She decided to adopt an ‘agile’ approach to the project, where she and her team would meet twice a week at the start of the day to discuss problems and set short-term goals. They managed to install a working version of the new database by the specified launch date, using feedback from staff on this ‘first release’ to make modifications that were incorporated into the final version.

• PRINCE2™. This framework for managing projects was developed by the UK Government and IBM and is now used in more than 50 countries worldwide. It describes the different project roles and tasks, how to design and monitor a project, and what to do if the project isn’t going according to plan.

• ‘Agile’ or ‘lightweight’ project management. This is a more informal approach based on breaking down tasks into small units, with minimal long-term planning. It is descended from the ‘Lean’ manufacturing approach pioneered by Toyota, and often uses a framework known as Scrum. Team sizes are kept small, with face-to-face communication preferred over lengthy written reports. Agility (flexibility) is the key.

• Critical chain (CCPM). This aims to reduce project costs and timescales by making the best possible use of resources (people).

Other approaches stress the need for the close integration of project management and a wider business strategy, and emphasize the importance of becoming a learning organization.

A list of useful online resources appears in the further reading section at the end of this book.

1.7 ‘The buck stops here’

Though everyone connected with the project has a role to play in bringing it to fruition, it is you, as project manager, who is ultimately responsible for its success. You are uniquely placed to see how the different elements fit together, and to drive your team forward towards completion.

Good project management rests on three fundamentals. It’s about having the right systems in place, inspiring high performance through good leadership, and exercising sound judgement when required. These are some of the key things you need: