17
Project management basics
What you will learn in this chapter
- The A-B-Cs of good project and initiative management
- Techniques for tracking projects and setting milestones
- How to create a master plan
Project management is something every manager has to do. Projects can be big or small, strategic or operational, aimed at cost-cutting, growth or process improvement. They typically involve people, technology and money. Managing projects is about prioritising, defining an objective, establishing a process and roadmap to achieve the objective using defined resources, timescales and success measures. It is not enough to deliver a project on time and on budget – although this is essential. It is also important to deliver the outcome the project intended. I have seen many projects managed on time and on budget that do not deliver their intended outcomes. For this reason, I like to refer to projects as initiatives rather than projects.
An initiative implies proactively taking steps towards a new or better way of doing something. It also implies an outcome. Whether you are managing projects or initiatives it is vital that you focus on the business reasons for doing something before you do it, and compile a business case with defined benefits and costs in numeric terms. Make sure, too, that your projects are linked to the overall strategy of your organisation.
There are many frameworks for successful project or initiative management. One popular model is based on studying failed projects. It identifies ten factors that contribute to a project’s success:
- Clearly defined objectives.
- Good planning and control methods.
- Good-quality project managers.
- Good management support.
- Enough time and resources.
- Commitment by all.
- High user involvement.
- Good communication.
- Good project organisation and structure.
- Being able to stop a project.1
case study
A project managed well: The London Olympics
There is a good reason for the success of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. I’ve heard the leaders of the Olympics, like Sir John Armitt, head of the ODA, talking about the great project management. From forward planning, to shared and clear objectives and structures, to inclusive communication and training, to spotting key issues like transport and having excellent contingency planning, such as the British Armed forces stepping in to help with security; everything was well thought through, linked and planned as part of a larger ‘legacy-led’ Olympics. Behind the success were years of great and hard work by lots of stakeholders. But because they all shared the same objectives, and stuck to good project management practice, they all delivered. In fact, it was voted one of the best-run organisations in a recent poll.2
A project managed poorly
One company I know spent several hundred thousand pounds and loads of global project and IT team time installing an LMS (Learning Management System). The LMS was supposed to enable customers to book directly online. But it wasn’t really needed by this business because over 90 per cent of the learning was done offline. Moreover, online booking and payment wasn’t the core function of the LMS so much time and money was spent adapting the system to enable online booking and payment. The hybrid LMS was clunky and didn’t perform very well, so almost no one in the company used it – instead, they found workarounds and invented new ‘hybrid’ procedures as they weren’t supposed to use the old system. So there were no standard processes; hence reading the business around the world became almost impossible as everyone did things differently.
This project suffered from a fundamental mismatch between the objective (online booking) and the ‘solution’ (online learning) from the outset. Everyone knew that, but no one wanted to stop the project because several hundred thousand pounds had been spent already. Finally, a new manager came in and stopped the project. But it was a difficult time for all.
exercise
Look at your projects. Are you clear on the link to your organisation’s strategy? Is there a measurable benefit and awareness of costs? Is there a clear outcome and business case? Do you fulfil the ten criteria of successful project management?
Managing projects for outcomes
It helps if you take an outcome-focused approach to managing your projects. Doing this means you start with the ‘end in mind’ and set your activities and goals accordingly. The six steps listed here will help you to ensure you don’t get swallowed up in process management and keep your outcomes in mind.
Prioritise objectives, and stick to them
Many projects don’t succeed because of poorly set objectives, or objectives that alter – also known as ‘scope creep’. In order to track a project successfully for outcomes you have to be quite rigorous in setting these early on. You also have to ensure you don’t have too many, and guard against changing them at whim.
Plan backwards to set a critical path
It is often useful to work backwards in order to create good timing and a roadmap. Once you know what your outcome is, and by when you need to achieve it, you can identify the steps that need to happen and in what order: a critical path schedule.
Not all activities are equal. Some are essential to the success of the project. For example, if you are launching a new product, you cannot do it without a pack to put it in. If that pack takes 18 months to produce, then even if the product only takes 12 months, you cannot launch it. Similarly, in software projects, upgrades are often timed to releases. If your upgrade is not on the schedule of releases, then you won’t be able to launch it until it is.
Communicate a clear plan with clear accountabilities
Projects need to be broken down into tasks – your critical path schedule will help you identify them. All of the tasks need to be assigned to people in the project team. Everyone involved needs to know what they are expected to do and by when for a project to succeed. That’s why clear communication and clear expectations are essential for success.
Allow for contingencies and risks
You should also build extra time into your plan to allow for unexpected events. The best approach is to identify risks up front, and incorporate contingency planning. It is typically a few extra weeks or months to compensate for the unexpected and keep things on track.
To prevent running over time and budget, it is important to keep track of the project throughout its life cycle. Irrespective of the scale of the project, it typically goes through four stages: initiation/start-up; planning and organisation; implementation with monitoring; and completion and evaluation.3 It is helpful to understand this project life cycle. The project manager should oversee the entire process.
Agree milestones
You should mark key milestones in your project plan: moments when you review the project with your boss or other key stakeholders before proceeding to the next phase. Examples are when you are moving to a test market or proof of concept, or when you later move to a phased implementation. The last phase is the review and evaluation – one that most often gets left out, but it can be very valuable.
It’s always a good idea to review your team’s progress at each milestone to ensure you’re still adhering to your objectives and that you have the right people in place. It may be a good idea to switch team members in different phases, for example from developing, where customer insight and product development will be key, to launching, where sales and marketing will be important, to monitoring and evaluation, where finance may have more of a leading role. If you are way off track at your key milestone it’s really important to communicate that. Equally, if you are ahead of schedule, then celebrate. If you need help, ask for it! It’s also a great time to review how the team is working and whether or not the project is still meeting its objectives. If you plough on despite not being sure of these things, there is a high chance of failure. If the project continues to miss its milestones, is not meeting its objectives, or is unclear, it may be time to stop it, and launch a critical review. Too many projects develop their own lives and carry on regardless.
Monitor
An essential part of project management is monitoring the status of projects. The Gantt chart is a commonly used project scheduling tool, which provides a visual representation of the project plan.4
- List all your activities. You may want to start from the endpoint and work backwards, especially if you have a non-missable deadline, like the Olympics Opening Ceremony. So start with your endpoint, then list the activities that you need to do in order to achieve that project.
- Estimate the amount of time each activity will take. Be realistic. If your project involves lots of sign-offs and agreements with others then build in a lot of time for coordinating diaries, or else find a more efficient method. If you have very long lead-time items, pay special attention to these. Always make contingency plans.
- Put the activities in order. Where things can happen simultaneously note that. However, pay special attention to dependencies. For example, if you cannot install the new packaging line until you have hired and trained the crew to run it, then factor that in. It’s best to try to eliminate as many dependencies as possible, or at least have risk mitigation plans for them. In the example – can you identify another short-term personnel solution if your crew isn’t recruited in time? Could other part-time workers be trained just in case?
- Chunk the activities into sections and highlight the critical milestones where you wish to pause and review. Equally, you may wish to highlight those activities on the critical path, such as key management reviews, test results and research.
- Draw a picture using Excel, Microsoft or other software. When finished it will look like Figure 17.1.
Figure 17.1 A visual representation of the project plan
Other methods
The Red, Amber, Green ‘traffic light’ approach adopted by the RAG Reporting project management model is another useful tool for project management. To use this, simply add in green for on-track, amber for off-track on one parameter but on-track on others, and red for off-track on critical parameters or off-track on the majority of the items. Then list your plan to get the project back on track. Here is an example:
Project Status/Progress/Issues R-A-G Rating Steps to resolve5
Additional common techniques include Programme Evaluation and Review Techniques (PERT) and Critical Path Analysis (CPA).6
The overriding point is to have a method for visualising and tracking project progress. If you are having to oversee many different projects, then you will also wish to have an initiative master plan, which will track all the key projects in terms of their timing, revenue, cost, profit and other critical path items, such as supply chain.
How to create a master plan
Initiative master plans are often very detailed and require keen eyesight to read, but they are rigorously used to provide a single-page overview. They should basically be the same as your Strategy Implementation Roadmap (see Chapter 11) but mapped in more detail. You put time across the top and the various initiatives and their milestones down the side.
Pulling together all your projects or initiatives in one place is a powerful exercise. It allows you and your team to take a look at what people are doing, and what they will deliver when. If you also classify each project by of the amount of revenue or profit delivered, or benefits if you are in the public sector (you can do this on a scale of Low–Medium–High) as well as the amount of time and resource required (again using a scale of Low–Medium–High), you will end up with an overall Initiative Master Plan that you can prioritise.
Mapping out projects in this way will also help you to spot opportunities to combine or streamline initiatives that overlap, and pull together activities that should be linked but aren’t. For example, if you are doing research into healthcare, running a healthcare seminar and launching a healthcare LinkedIn group, all at different times, it would be more sensible to pull these projects together into a single ‘healthcare launch’ rather than do them separately as a series of stand-alone projects.
These plans help to ensure that major projects don’t conflict with one another for timings or the deployment of critical resources. It’s also important to ensure your initiative master plan has enough in it to achieve your revenue, cost and profit targets. If not, you may have an identified ‘gap’ which you will need to fill. But at least if it’s identified and visible you can try to close the gap by generating more revenue or cutting your costs.
Finally, you can review these plans regularly to ensure everything is on track or take action if it isn’t. Adding in an R-A-G rating, described earlier, for projects on your master plan allows you to do this easily.
exercise
Ask your team to identify the top three to five projects. Make certain you have a visual method for tracking them, such as a Gantt chart. Pull together an initiative master plan of all your top projects to see how they all stack up in terms of outcomes, timings and deliverables. Do they make sense or can you eliminate, combine or simplify some of these? How do they fit with your overall strategy?
Top tips, pitfalls and takeaways
Top tips
- Always be very clear about who is doing what by when if you are managing a project. Giving people clarity will save a lot of time, trouble, money and rework.
- Always make contingency plans.
Top pitfall
- Project management can become all about updating the Gantt charts and the R-A-G review and not about the outcomes or the steps truly necessary to make the project successful. Sometimes these steps include stopping the project, or switching the team or the project manager.
Top takeaway
- Having some sort of system to track key milestones and visualise the steps is a good way to plan projects. If you have multiple projects you will also need to keep track of all of them in a master plan.
1 Chartered Management Institute, Elbeik and Thomas’s successful project requirements, Management Models Series.
2 2012 CMI poll of best-run organisations.
3 Chartered Management Institute, Project life cycle, Management Models Series.
4 Chartered Management Institute, Gantt chart, Management Models Series.
5 Chartered Management Institute, RAG reporting, Management Models Series.
6 Managing Projects, CMI Checklist Series, no. 35, rev. Nov. 2011, p. 3.