Chapter 20
IN THIS CHAPTER
Following good project-management practices
Scheduling projects efficiently
Benefitting from mistakes
As you begin to use Project 2019, the common sayings (or aphorisms, axioms, and precepts) in this chapter can help you recall basic project-management principles. Tack them on your office wall so that you can review them throughout the workday.
Rolling wave planning is an excellent way to simplify the management of a project. Plan no further into the future than you can reasonably see — and don’t plan in more detail than makes sense. When a project is first chartered, you only have milestone dates. As you begin to understand more about the project, you can define the project life cycle and the key deliverables to be created in each of its phases.
Build the project in phases. Start with the initial phases, and fill in detailed tasks, sequences, resources, and durations. Leave the later phases at a high level of detail; that way, you’ll have less work to redo on later tasks that simply can’t be anticipated at the beginning of the project. You’ll also have less need to manipulate the baseline of those later tasks: If tasks are too far in the future, their time requirements won’t match up with the resources you originally set aside for them.
Project can help you with rolling wave planning when you use these features of the program:
Before you start creating the project, do your homework. If you don’t have all the information you need when you sit down at the computer to work with Project, you’ll continually stop midplan and run off to find the information — not an efficient way to work.
Before you sit down to build a project schedule, think about the following project information:
After you contemplate the issues in this list, you’re ready to sit down and start entering information into Project.
You know he’s out there — Murphy and his darn law stipulating that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Most projects, especially lengthier and more complex projects, aren’t completed on time or on budget. Your job as the project manager is to plan as accurately as you can and then make prudent adjustments whenever someone throws a wrench into the works — and Project gives you lots of tools to do it. But beyond all the automated features of Project, you can anticipate change by simply planning for it.
The critical path determines the project duration. Every wise project manager builds contingency reserve time and funds into his or her projects. When a project wraps up a week late and $5,000 over budget, only the project manager knows that it was four weeks later and $25,000 costlier than originally scheduled, with no contingency reserve. (I introduce contingency reserve in Chapter 12.)
Use the cost resource type (rather than a work or material resource) to add a set amount of contingency reserve to a task or phase.
Though Project management software can simplify many aspects of your work life, most people using Project for the first time become overwhelmed by the amount of time they spend entering and updating data. These tasks can certainly be cumbersome, but the reward from mastering the automated updating and reporting capabilities in Project more than makes up for any labor invested upfront.
Track as often as you can — at least once a week. If you don’t tend to the task of tracking progress on a project, you may wind up behind the proverbial eight ball. This strategy not only saves you from having to enter a mountain of tracking data, but also lets you — and your team — see the status of the project at any time. That way, you can promptly spot disaster approaching and make preventive adjustments.
Avoid the urge to attempt to do everything on a project yourself. Although creating and maintaining the Project file on your own might seem to give you more control over the result, flying solo in a larger project is nearly impossible (and possibly a full-time job). Of course, you can’t allow dozens of people to make changes to the plan, because you would risk losing track of who did what and when. However, following these few simple practices can convert a few fingers in the project pie from harmful to helpful:
Most people have heard the project management warning “Cover your assumptions,” and Project helps you do it easily. Use these features to document the details of the project:
Save multiple versions of the project, especially if you change the baseline in later versions. This way, you have a record of every step in the project planning to refer to when questions arise down the road.
I’ve worked in offices where I spent more time wrestling with the question of whom to keep informed about what than I did working. If I didn’t include marketing and finance in every email on a new product launch, I’d be called on the carpet the next day, or (worse) a vital action step would fall through the cracks because someone didn’t know to take action. Follow these methods of keeping communication channels open:
When you begin the project, you should have an idea of what constitutes success, and you should know how to measure that success. You’ve heard this one: “You can have the deliverable on time, on budget, or done right. Choose two.” Success can involve attaining many goals, such as:
To determine how you’ll measure success, ask these questions:
Stuff happens. There’s never been a project that didn’t require accommodations for surprises along the way. The mark of a good project manager is that she’s alert to these changes and makes adjustments to deal with them quickly.
Making adjustments to accommodate bad news isn’t easy; in fact, it can be truly difficult to deliver bad news. However, avoiding a problem in the project and hoping that it will simply disappear has a nasty habit of snowballing into an even worse problem. The following tools can help you stay alert to changes and make adjustments:
One great gift that Project offers is the capability to look back after completing a project so that you can learn from your mistakes. You can review the original schedule, and every version after it, to see how well you estimated time and money, and then figure out how to do it better.
By using records of the project, you can spot trends to find out, for example, where you always seem to miss on timing, or why you always allow too little time for market research and too much time for questions and answers. Perhaps you always forget to budget for temporary help during rush periods, or you overstaff early on, when you need only a few people.
Use the wealth of information in Project schedules to educate yourself on your own strengths and weaknesses as a project planner and manager and to improve your skills with each project you take on.
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