Appendix A
A short course in project management
Throughout this book, we’ve included advice on how best to use Project Online desktop client while following sound project-management practices. This appendix focuses on the basics of project management, regardless of any software tools you might use to help you manage projects. Although project management is a broad, complex subject, this appendix focuses on the project triangle model. In this model, you consider projects in terms of time, cost, and scope.
Understand what defines a project
Succeeding as a project manager requires you to complete your projects on time, finish within budget, and make sure your customers are happy with what you deliver. That sounds simple enough, but how many projects have you heard of (or worked on) that were completed late, cost too much, or didn’t meet the needs of their customers?
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, published by the Project Management Institute and referred to as the PMBOK Guide, defines a project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.” Let’s walk through this definition to clarify what a project is—and what it is not.
Tip
For more information about the Project Management Institute and the PMBOK Guide, see Appendix B, “Develop your project management skills.”
First, a project is temporary. A project’s duration might be just 1 week, or it might go on for years, but every project has an end date. You might not know that end date when the project begins, but it’s out there somewhere in the future. Projects are not the same as ongoing operations, although the two have a great deal in common. Ongoing operations, as the name suggests, go on indefinitely; you don’t establish an end date. Examples include most activities of accounting and human resources departments. People who run ongoing operations might also manage projects—for example, a manager of a human resources department for a large organization might plan a college recruiting fair. Yet projects are distinguished from ongoing operations by an expected end date, such as the date of the recruiting fair.
Next, a project is an endeavor. Resources, such as people and equipment, need to do work. The endeavor is undertaken by a team or an organization, so projects have a sense of being intentional, planned events. Successful projects don’t happen spontaneously; some amount of preparation and planning happens first.
Finally, every project creates a unique product or service. This is the deliverable for the project and the reason the project was undertaken. A refinery that produces gasoline does not produce a unique product. The whole idea, in this case, is to produce a standardized commodity; you typically don’t want to buy gas from one station that is significantly different from gas at another station. On the other hand, commercial airplanes are unique products. Although all Boeing 787 Dreamliner airplanes might look more or less the same to most of us, each plane, in fact, is highly customized for the needs of its purchaser.
By now, you might realize that much of the work that goes on in the world is project-oriented work. In fact, a substantial portion of your own work might be focused on project management, even if that’s not your job title.
Project management has been a recognized profession for many decades, but project-management work in some form has been occurring for as long as people have been doing complex work. When the Great Pyramids at Giza in Egypt were built, somebody somewhere was tracking resources, schedules, and specifications in some way.
Tip
Project management is now a well-recognized profession in most industries. To learn more about organizations that train project managers and advance project management as a profession, see Appendix B.
The project triangle: View projects in terms of time, cost, and scope
You can visualize project work in many ways, but our favorite method is the project triangle, or triangle of triple constraints (see Figure A-1).
FIGURE A-1 The project triangle is a helpful model for visualizing how time, cost, and scope relate to each other in a project.
Tip
The three constraints can be modified to meet your needs. For example, you can replace cost with resources if cost is not a constraint on your project. If a three-sided triangle does not seem appropriate, you can use another multisided shape and add one or more additional constraints, such as quality or resources.
This theme has many variations, but the basic concept is that every project has some element of a time constraint, has some type of budget, and requires some amount of work to complete (in other words, it has a defined scope). The term constraint has a specific meaning in Project, but here we’re using the more general meaning of “a limiting factor.” Let’s consider these constraints individually.
Time
Have you ever worked on a project that had a deadline? (Maybe we should ask whether you’ve ever worked on a project that did not have a deadline.) Limited time is the one constraint of any project that most people are familiar with. If you’re working on a project right now, ask your team members to name the date of the project deadline. They might not know the project budget or the scope of work in great detail, but chances are, they all know their immediate deadlines and probably also the overall project deadline.
Consider the following examples of time constraints:
You’re building a house and must finish the roof before the rainy season arrives.
You’re assembling a large display booth for a trade show that starts in 2 months.
You’re developing a new inventory-tracking system that must be tested and running by the start of the next fiscal year.
Since we were children, we’ve been trained to understand time. We wear watches, carry paper organizers or smartphones, and use other tools to help us manage time. For many projects that create a product or event, time is the most important constraint to manage.
Cost
You might think of cost simply in monetary terms, but in the context of projects, cost has a broader meaning: costs include all the resources required to carry out the project. Costs include the people and equipment doing the work, the materials being used, and all the other events and issues that require money or someone’s attention in a project.
The following are examples of cost constraints:
You signed a fixed-price contract to develop an ecommerce website for a client. If your costs exceed the agreed-upon price, your customer probably won’t be willing to renegotiate the contract.
The president of your organization has directed you to carry out a customer research project using only the staff and equipment in your department.
You received a $5,000 grant to create a public art installation. You have no other funds.
For virtually all projects, cost is ultimately a limiting constraint; few projects can go over budget without eventually requiring corrective action.
Scope
You need to consider two aspects of scope: product scope and project scope. Every successful project produces a unique product: a tangible item or service. Customers usually have some expectations about the features and functions of products they consider purchasing. Product scope describes the intended quality, features, and functions of the product, often in minute detail. Documents that outline this information are sometimes called product specifications. A service or event usually also has some expected features. We all have expectations about what we’ll do or see at a party, concert, or sporting event.
Project scope, on the other hand, describes the work required to deliver a product or service with the intended product scope. Project scope is usually measured in phases and tasks.
Consider the following examples of scope constraints:
Your organization won a contract to develop an automotive product that has exact requirements—for example, physical dimensions measured to 0.01 millimeters. This is a product scope constraint that influences project scope plans.
You’re constructing a building on a lot that has a height restriction of 50 feet.
You can use only internal services to develop part of your product, and those services follow a product development methodology that differs from what you had planned.
Product scope and project scope are closely related. The project manager who manages project scope should also understand product scope or know how to communicate with the people who do.
Time, cost, and scope: Manage project constraints
Project management gets most interesting when you must balance the time, cost, and scope constraints of your projects. The project triangle illustrates the process of balancing constraints because the three sides of the triangle are connected: changing one side of a triangle affects at least one other side. The following sections provide examples of constraint balance.
You have less time
If the duration (time) of your project schedule decreases, you might need to increase budget (cost) because you must hire more resources to do the same work in less time. If you can’t increase the budget, you might need to reduce the scope because the resources you have can’t complete all the planned work in less time. You can see these scenarios illustrated with the project triangle in Figure A-2.
FIGURE A-2 When you have less time than you planned for, you might need to increase cost or decrease scope (or both).
If you must decrease a project’s duration, make sure that you don’t unintentionally lower the overall project quality. For example, testing and quality control often occur last in a software development project; if project duration is decreased late in the project, those tasks might be the ones to suffer from cutbacks. You must weigh the benefits of decreasing the project duration against the potential downside of producing a deliverable of poorer quality.
You have fewer resources
If the budget (cost) of your project decreases, you might need more time because you can’t pay for as many resources or for resources of the same efficiency. If you can’t increase the time, you might need to reduce project scope because fewer resources can’t complete all the planned work in the time remaining. You can see these scenarios illustrated in Figure A-3.
FIGURE A-3 When you have decreased cost (or have fewer resources) than what you planned for, you might need to increase time or decrease scope (or both).
If you must decrease a project’s budget, you might look at the grades of material resources you had budgeted. A lower-grade material is not necessarily a lower-quality material. As long as the grade of material is appropriate for its intended use, it might still be of high quality. Here’s one example we can all relate to: fast food and gourmet food are two grades of restaurant food, but you can find high-quality and low-quality examples of each.
You also want to look at the costs of the human and equipment resources you’ve planned to use. Can you hire less experienced people for less money to carry out simpler tasks? Reducing project costs can lead to a poorer-quality deliverable, however. As a project manager, you must consider (or, more likely, communicate to the decision makers) the benefits versus the risks of reducing costs.
You have more work
If your project scope increases, you might need more time or resources (cost) to complete the additional work. When project scope increases after the project has started, it’s called scope creep. Changing project scope midway through a project isn’t necessarily bad—for example, the environment in which your project deliverable will operate might have changed, or you might have learned more about the nature of the work since beginning the project. Changing project scope is bad only if the project manager doesn’t recognize and plan for the new requirements—that is, when other constraints (cost and time) are not correspondingly examined and, if necessary, adjusted. As Figure A-4 shows, changes in project scope may result in a need to change duration or cost.
FIGURE A-4 When you have more work than you planned for, you might need to increase time or cost (or both).
Time, cost, and scope are the three essential elements of any project. To succeed as a project manager, you must know how all three of these constraints apply to your projects and be able to communicate this to your stakeholders.
Here’s our final word about the project triangle model. As with all simple models of complex subjects, this model is a useful learning tool but is not always a reflection of the real world. If real projects always performed as the project triangle suggests they should, you might see projects delivered late but at the planned cost or with the expected scope. Alternatively, projects might be completed on time and with the expected scope but at higher cost. In other words, you’d expect to see at least one element of the project triangle perform as planned. But the sad truth is that, even with rigorous project management oversight, many projects are delivered late, over budget, and with far less than the expected scope of functionality. You’ve probably participated in a few such projects yourself. Project management is a demanding field. Success in project management requires a rare mix of skills and knowledge about schedule practices and tools, in addition to knowledge in the domain or industry in which a project is executed.
Manage your projects with Project
The best project-management tool in the world can never replace your good judgment. However, the right tool can and should help you accomplish the following:
Track all the information you gather about the work, duration, and resource requirements for your project
Visualize your project plan in standard, well-defined formats
Schedule tasks and resources consistently and effectively
Exchange project information with stakeholders in a variety of ways
Communicate with resources and other stakeholders while leaving ultimate control in the hands of the project manager
The chapters of this book introduced you to the rich functionality of Project. Not everything in this book might have applied to your needs, and you probably also have needs that this book did not address. But we hope that this book helps you get off to a great start with Project!