Archive for the ‘Planning’ Category

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Project Management and balancing your workload

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

Hi, happy new year – I hope all your projects come in on time, under budget and with all the scope your sponsor wants.

I’m doing a series of blogs over at EasyProjects.Net .

Full disclosure, I’m one of their consultants. I go in and help their clients implement the methodology that surrounds the great tool.

This series is designed to help the project manager who is working off the side of their desk. Often someone with a reputation for getting things done, the volunteered or voluntold PM can find themselves quickly overwhelmed when faced with a project.

I hope you like it.

 

Perry

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Planning the Project – how to massage the timeline

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

You have worked with the team and the sponsor to create the project WBS and finalize the scope. You’ve turned the WBS into a schedule and you’ve validated the estimates of duration. You look at the delivery date with confidence…your jaw drops. The project is going to be ready 6 months after the date you expected it.

What do you do?

A lot will depend on your team. Are they the type of people to be very conservative with their estimates? Are people in your organization used to beating deadlines?

If answering these questions doesn’t do what you need try these three techniques.

1 – look at your logic. Often there’s room to overlap tasks that depend on each other.  For instance, if you have to produce a marketing communication for a grand opening. You might have the following set up.

  1. Create draft plan for grand opening = 3 days
  2. Order supplies = 2 days
  3. invite attendees = 3 days

This gives you a total of 8 days if you do them end to end. But, if you can invite the attendees at the same time you order supplies, you’ve cut the timeline be 2 days. The caution here is to avoid overlapping tasks that end up overloading your team.

2 – check the relationship between end and start dates. Project scheduling software will assume you finish the task at the end of the day and don’t start another task until the next working day. If you have a lot of one day tasks, you can find weeks in the schedule by doing this

3 – walk through your dependencies.  Look at the logic and at the effect on the start dates for subsequent tasks. I often find a bit of faulty logic that pushes my timeline way out of whack.

At the end of this process, decide how tight you want to control the schedule. If you get it down too tight, you’ll spend too much time managing minutes. If you leave it too loose, you’ll find yourself scrambling for deadlines. Some projects, like construction projects, need to be scheduled to the day because of the logistics of supplies, but if you don’t need to do that, then don’t.

Hope this gives you some help.

Happy PMing,

Perry

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Planning the project – how much is enough? Part 1

Saturday, November 12th, 2011

Last time I posted I gave some tips on getting the project initiated well. That leads us into some tips on planning. In my opinion, initiation isn’t complete until the plan is signed off. It seems that one of the lessons project managers take some time to learn is that phases aren’t usually cut and dried. You learn something every step along the way that opens up questions about the step before.

This isn’t a failure of the methodology; it’s reality.

To get your plan underway, you need a good understanding of the goals and objectives and you need to have discussed the scope with your sponsor. When you get together with your planning team, you will uncover more scope and find a few more goals that seem to make sense.

The trick to creating a Work Breakdown Structure in a  planning session is to let them get chaotic so people are bringing up ideas. Brainstorming is the time to let people think about what they need to think about. When it gets a bit quiet, you can start to corral the energy into organizing the chaos: grouping the work ideas, clarifying duplicates and asking if there is anything else that needs to be considered.

I like to end the meeting there. You have enough to put together your first work breakdown structure. You will need to add the estimates and assign owners and organize the work in logical order. But, first pull it into something people can understand. Organize all the ideas of what work needs to be done into a list of tasks. Do what you can to put them together in groups or phases.  Identify items that change the scope or the goals.  Meet with your sponsor and get the decisions you need on the new items.

Then take a breath.

The next steps are all about validating the plan. In the next posts we’ll talk about validating the content of your work breakdown structure, turning it into a schedule  with estimates and dependencies and knowing when it’s good enough to get going on execution.

The answer to the question in the title?

For this stage, enough is when your WBS looks like it at least touches on every aspect of your project.

Happy PMing

Perry

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Planning without a start date.

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

I’m sure most of us have been in the situation where a project needs to be planned before there’s any clear date for the start. Often the start date is out of the control of the client because someone needs overriding permissions before any part of the project can start: construction in a development with more than one developer for instance. The trick is, and the question for this week, how do you know when you’ve done enough planning with the limited information?

I have worked with teams to develop plans with little in the way of specs. We needed to do this to fill out information in the business case – true with lots of projects I’m sure. Without some concept of the cost, time and resources involved, the client doesn’t have a way to properly prioritize the project.

I’ve worked with teams to develop plans that result in an RFP – the only way to understand clearly enough what to put in the RFP was to develop a draft plan.

When I’m faced with this situation I usually start building a plan from the top down and from phase 1 forward. I don’t think this is agile, because we are working with a waterfall schedule, but it does give the client and the team the ability to provide details on what they know and not try to put details into the unknown.

Key to the success of this is communication and team leadership. Communicate frequently and clearly that the plan is draft so that you can minimize the expectations of the stakeholder. Keep the team excited about the possibilities so they don’t get tied to a solution that might not make the cut.

What do you do in this situation?

Happy PMing

Perry

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Success Measures – try a new approach?

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Hi, we all have our set success criteria for projects: on or under budget, on time, within scope. But, what if you made one new criterion every project.

How about setting a goal for customer satisfaction? If you set some standards of performance, you can measure them at the end. If your team has a challenge with customer communication, one way to improve it is to make it a part of the success of the project.

Is stakeholder management a challenge? How about finding a way to measure the satisfaction your stakeholders feel at the end of the project.

These two ideas require that someone in the team take on a role of management. If you want to measure  satisfaction, you start by agreeing on what that means and you have to continue to check throughout the project that you are meeting the expectations. Does it mean you have to do everything the client  or stakeholder wants? No. It means you need to manage the expectations and keep in communication with people.

Have you used something interesting for success measures on your projects? Leave a comment with your ideas.

Happy PMing.

Perry

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How Project Management Can Help You With Any Business

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

Hi, this blog post is the first of what I hope are many guest blogs. In the spirit of open transparency, Jason is providing me licenses for MMPM. I’ll be offering them to my Twitter followers when I have them. If you don’t already follow me, you can find me at PerryAwilson.  Anyway, I’ll let you get on to Jason’s post.

How Project Management Can Help You With Any Business

No matter what business you are in, you have goals and intentions.  From the largest corporation to the smallest home-based business, projects are being started every day.  Without proper management of these projects, all the effort, time, and money are wasted.

The Changing Work Place

It is widely known that change is the only constant in the world.  We see changes in innovation and technology development daily.  People and companies are trying to keep up with all these new products and ideas, with some handling it better than others.

As organizations pursue their goal to reduce the cost of running a business, they are also trying to deal with the changes occurring all around them.  In misguided attempts to stay competitive, many companies are “downsizing” their employees.

For a company to survive the challenges of change, it must change as well.  New ways of looking at employees, new thoughts on preserving its business, and a new dedication to keeping in the forefront of its industry.

To survive a changing environment is only possible if we keep pace with and accept change.

An increasing number of employees are working from home instead of the office.  The use of computers and Internet technologies are a must not only for those working at home, but for every business that is trying to become or remain successful.  Vital for every organization is the technology of computers and the Internet.

The greatest challenges posed by the changing workplace are collaboration and communication.

One requirement of the changing workplace is that we need to be updated and well informed all the time.  Access to updated data and information regarding any business activity is a must.  Sharing information in real-time can guarantee success for organization and individuals alike.

Guarantee the success of organizations and individuals, by sharing of expertise and information in a timely manner.

How a Project Management System Can Help

Challenges in the changing workplace might seem impossible to overcome, but they can become simplified when a proper Project Management Plan is used.

The project management system may be the single best solution for the collaboration needs of any organization.  A project management system is multi-functional software that performs tasks like resource allocation, communication, budget management, quality management, report generation, cost and quality control.

Also, communication, information sharing and administrating are simplified and made much easier through use of a project management system.

Scheduling is an element of a project management system. According to the time limit and given resources the project management system divides the projects into a series of tasks and makes the handling of even complex projects very easy. It enables you to make the best possible use of time and resources.

Another great benefit provided by the project management system is communication. The project management system has a central database, which the permitted users can use to track the work progress and get updated information and data easily. It predicts any kind of problem that can arise in the project and removes uncertainties and ambiguities related to projects. From report generation to risk analysis, project management is very useful. It clearly defines the path to follow and contribution required at every level and from every employee.

These are just a few functions of a project management system. With proper implementation and use, it can help overcome great challenges that otherwise seem impossible. Thus, by making the collaboration, communication and working possible across the organization, the project management system helps the company meets the challenges of an ever-changing workplace.

Jason Westland has 15 years experience in the project management industry. From his experience he has created software to help speed up the management process. If you would like to find out more information about Jason’s  online project management software.

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Posted in execution, Innovation, Planning, Professionalism, Tools | 1 Comment »

Is a list of tasks enough of a plan?

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

When projects struggle with planning sometimes the teams create lists of tasks. To add detail, the lists contain names of people, they estimate how many days are needed for each task, and even list beginning and end dates. So what’s the problem?

If the project is simple and requires a small team of knowledgeable experts, this will probably be enough. I’m a supporter of doing the right amount of  planning rather than completing all the steps and forms.

The problem is when the project is complex. In one of my past projects, the team struggled with the concept of planning. I proposed the process of pulling together a team to plan and spend a day or two for the whole process. At the end we’d have a list of sequenced activities with clear milestones and a resource estimate.

Thinking it would be easier, the team leads sat down and started listing tasks and names. In their defense this was a project that required specific expertise and having the experts do the wbs would be a good approach.

Top three problems with the approach.

No milestones, no deliverables. The list of tasks didn’t lead to a clear deliverable that could be tracked. The team lead was never confident that the tasks listed were complete.

No understanding of overall resource usage. While we knew that Joe had to work a total of 12 days between start and end dates, it was difficult to align the start and end dates of each activity to make sure that the 12 days wasn’t actually over a 3 day period.

No clear reporting ability. When it came to reporting to the steering committee we had to manually pull the information and come to a consensus about status each time.

As a bonus problem – time! Originally I estimated a couple of days for the whole project activities list. It took a week for one part of it.

It’s one of those things that I think we as PMs struggle with all the time. What ideas do you have for selling the client on the process?

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Planning, why is it so hard to sell

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

In the theoretical world it is sound practice to plan before you start anything. In the real world it seems so difficult to see beyond the next milestone or the next deadline.

Some projects seem to lend themselves to crisis planning: how to get to the next deadline, the next presentation, the next milestone. It seems to me that it feels easier to see the future in small increments.

Why do I think this is a problem? After all, lots of projects go well this way. Well, what about engagement? What about alignment? And, what about costs?

Engagement is difficult at the best of times; we all know people don’t like change. Even if your project is bringing non-negotiable change, like legislation, then resistance may be futile, but it still happens. By dropping changes on desks or asking for help on a two week or one month basis, you aren’t doing much to engage the people affected by your project. Engagement in the best of times comes when people are involved at the right time for the right things. Could there be a more right time than at the beginning? When people get to step back and look at the whole picture?

Alignment can suffer from short term views. Decisions may get made that resolve the current issue but slide a bit away from the overall goals; if that happens on a regular basis you can find yourself delivering completely the wrong thing. Expediency overshadows long term solutions.

Costs are hard to control when you only see the next milestone. Think about Christmas shopping. How many people overspend at Christmas because they had no plan? Just sitting down in November and making a list of people and potential budgets can make the difference between getting great presents within budget and breaking the bank.  Taking the time to look forward to the end of the project can allow you to anticipate what budget and resource draw is needed for success.

What are your thoughts?

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PM as e-publisher

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

So, now I’m on the other side of the table from my comfort zone. As the business owner and partner I have to think about much more than just how to deliver. It’s what to deliver as well.

I think we’ve done well in understanding our niche; new authors, good books, all genre’s. And our competition; well, there are lots of flavours of what we’re doing but we look to the traditional p-publishers as the market to watch. Why? Well, they have the market defined and at some point will think of digital as the primary format and figure out how to deal in the digital world.

We agreed to take November off to write our next great novel. It’s been hard for me to stay away from marketing and reviewing other authors’ work. But two more days and we’re back on focus.

My priorities for the next phase – publish books – is to finalize the details of the initiation phase – and move through to execution (how many projects jump into execution with key initiation steps still open).  I hear the screams from the PMs out there – yes we’ve done our planning!!!  It overlapped the initiation phase like so many business projects do, figuring out what we need to do and at the same time figuring out how to do it.

We have some great authors lined up and our first titles should appear at your favourite e-bookstore within the month.

Keep your eye on PaperBox Books - great books on the download

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Novelist as Project Manager

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

The next series of posts will be about how I applied project management to writing a novel in 30 days. Think it’s crazy, project management and creativity don’t mix? Well here’s how it starts.

Initiation. In November of every year novelists around the world participate in 30 days of writing madness. The goal 50,000 words – totally self imposed, no prize but a button on your site and the feeling of accomplishment you get as you type the last few words. This year, more than 150,000 people are attempting the challenge.

From a project management approach, here is how I initiated.

The time line is set. November 1 local time, to November 30 midnight local time.

My personal goal = 80,000 words written in that time period

success measurement – the first draft of the book is complete.

Approach:

Create fully fleshed out characters and a minimum of 60 scene outlines before November 1.

November 1 – 30

Write daily until complete.

Motivation and team building:

  • Participate in challenges.
  • Participate in regional word war with New Zealand – and kick their kiwi butts.
  • Participate in word wars in the IRC

Status reporting:

  • Daily word count posting to NaNoWriMo
  • Maintain spreadsheet with minimum and expected word counts and progress charts

Risks:

1 – will run out of ideas – mitigate with a fully fleshed out outline

2 – characters will take over (did happen in 2008 is happening now) – mitigate with periodic reoutlining of plot.

3 – priorities will change throughout month – mitigate by exceeding word count in early days.

Communications plan:

Tell everyone so I will be too chicken to admit I failed.

Next post  will talk about issue management.

Happy National Novel Writing Month

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