Project Management

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.

For your project, try listing the following in priority order – speed, quality and low cost.

1.3 Understand the project life cycle (#ulink_bf45ceda-8c86-5d9c-8866-ec07a8280e7a)

All projects have a recognizable ‘life cycle’. There are many different approaches to managing projects, but all agree that projects can be divided into various stages, each requiring a different focus.

The most straightforward life cycle approach recognizes four main stages of a project: aspiration, planning, implementation and measurement. You can easily memorize this life cycle because the stages both represent and substitute the words for how A Project Is Managed:

1 Aspire This stage focuses on the creation of a shared vision for your project. What are you aiming to achieve and why? How will you recognize and measure success? Whose support will you need to begin the project, and what will convince them to support you?

2 Plan This stage looks in detail at identifying what needs to be done to deliver your project successfully. What are the various tasks that need to be done, and how can they best fit together? Who will you need on your project team? What resources will you need, both financial and physical (equipment, meeting spaces and so on)? What are the main risks to successful delivery, and how can these be avoided (or at least minimized)? Lastly, how will the project be managed, and progress communicated?

3 Implement This stage can be divided into two parts: motivating and monitoring. At the beginning of your project you will need to form and motivate your project team, and agree the project’s aims and working methods. Once your project is underway, your role shifts to monitoring – what progress has been made? What if any changes need to be made to the original plan? Is your project running on time, or has the schedule slipped? Are the costs as expected, or is the project in danger of going over budget? Have any problems been reported and discussed, and any necessary changes to the plan or budget been agreed?

4 Measure Once the project is complete, the final role of the project manager is to determine its success and to communicate the results, so that the lessons learned can be incorporated into other projects. To what extent were the original aims achieved? What went well and what went not so well? What lessons are there for future projects?

Adopting a life cycle approach will help you focus on the most important issues at each stage of the project.

1.4 Know your stakeholders (#ulink_6d079bab-50b3-584c-b6bf-5f1c3b31b02a)

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.

Take time to identify the main stakeholders for your project.

1.5 See your stakeholders’ points of view (#ulink_13c21253-7d73-50ef-90b4-69c8e6624c38)

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.

Understand your stakeholders’ perspectives, and bring them together in a shared vision for the project.

1.6 Choose the right approach (#ulink_6a1ab8ed-4fdc-5a48-a0f2-93c4666706b4)

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.

Familiarize yourself with the main approaches to project management.

1.7 ‘The buck stops here’ (#ulink_28fee66f-bfab-5de3-8830-1cf0ae4f23cf)