Project management best practices

As both an active project manager and a project management
trainer, people often ask me what are the fundamental
aspects to successful project management. Whilst there have
been many great books written on the subject, I always
summarise what I believe to be the best practices at the
heart of good project management.

Define the scope and objectives

For any project to be successful you need to understand what
the project is supposed to achieve. Suppose your boss asks
you to organise a campaign to get the employees to donate
blood. Is the aim of this to get as much blood donated to
the local blood bank? Or, is it to raise the profile of the
company in the local community? Deciding what the real
objective is will help you to determine how you go about
planning and managing the project.

The project manager also needs to define the scope of the
project. Is the organisation of transport to take staff to
the blood bank within the scope of the project? Or, should
staff make their own way there? Deciding which activities
are within the scope or out of scope of the project has a
big impact on the amount of work which needs to be
performed during the project.

An understanding of who are the stakeholders is also crucial
if you are going to enlist their support and understand
what each person expects to be delivered from the project.
Once you've defined the scope and objectives, you will need
to get the stakeholders to review them and agree to them as
well as agreeing who should be on the list of stakeholders.

Define the deliverables

To achieve the desired outcome from the project, you must
define what things (or products) are to be delivered by the
end of the project. If your project is an advertising
campaign for a new chocolate bar, then one of the
deliverables might be the artwork for a newspaper advert.
So, you need to decide what tangible things are to be
delivered and document in enough detail what these things
are. At the end of the day, someone will end up doing the
work to produce the deliverable, so it needs to be clearly
and unambiguously described.

Once you have defined the deliverables, you will need to
have the key stakeholders review the work and get them to
agree that this accurately and unambiguously reflects what
they expect to be delivered from the project. Once they have
agreed, you can begin to plan the project. Not defining the
deliverables in enough detail or clarity is often a reason
why projects go wrong.

Project planning

This is the time when you define how you will achieve the
desired outcome of the project embodied within the
objectives and definition of deliverables. Planning requires
that the project manager decides which people, resources
and budget are required to complete the project. You will
need to decide if you will break up your project into
manageable phases, decide which products will be delivered
in each phase, and decide the composition of your project
team. Since you have already defined the deliverables, you
must decide what activities are required to produce each
deliverable.

You can use techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures
(WBS) to help you to achieve this. You will need to estimate
the time and effort required to complete each activity,
dependencies between related activities and decide on a
realistic schedule to complete the activities. It's always a
good idea to involve the project team in estimating how
long the activities will take since they will be the ones
actually doing the work. Capture all of this into the
project plan document. You also need to get the key
stakeholders to review and agree to this plan.

When developing the project plan, a project manager is often
under pressure to produce a plan which meets the
(unrealistic) expectations of some of the stakeholders. It
is important here that the project manager comes up with a
realistic schedule - one which he/she thinks is realistic to
achieve. You will be doing nobody a favour if you succumb
to pressure and agree to deliver the project in a totally
unrealistic schedule.

Communication

Even the best made project plans are useless unless they
have been communicated effectively to the project team.
Everyone on the team needs to know exactly what is expected
of them, what their responsibilities are, and what they are
accountable for. I once worked on a project where the
project manager sat in his office surrounded by big colour
print outs of his latest plans. The problem was, nobody on
his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he
hadn't shared the plan with them. Needless to say the
project hit all kinds of problems with people going off and
doing the activities which they deemed important rather than
doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

Tracking and reporting project progress

Once your project is underway and you have an agreed plan,
you will need to constantly monitor the actual progress of
the project against the planned progress. To do this, you
will need to get reports of progress from the project team
members who are actually doing the work. You will need to
record any variations between the actual and planned cost,
schedule and scope. You will need to report any variations
to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective
actions if the variations get too large.

There are lots of ways in which you can adjust the plan in
order to get the project back on track (rearrange the order
of tasks, assign tasks in parallel if the variation is
small, or add more staff to the project or reduce the scope
if the variation is very large).

All projects require the project manager to constantly
juggle three things: cost, scope and schedule. If the
project manager increases one of these, then one of the
other elements will inevitably need to be changed as well.
So, for a project which is running behind schedule to
recover so it can be delivered to it's original planned
schedule, the budget might be increased by employing more
staff (although this invariably never achieves the desired
result of reducing the time left to complete the project),
or the scope will need to be reduced. It is the juggling of
these three elements - known as the project triangle - that
typically causes a project manager to tear their hair out in
frustration!

Change management

All projects change in some way. Often, a key stakeholder in
the middle of a project will change their mind about what
the project needs to deliver. On projects of longer
duration, the business environment has often changed since
the start of the project, so assumptions made at the
beginning of the project may no longer be valid. This often
results in the scope or deliverables of the project needing
to be changed. If a project manager simply accepted all of
these changes into the project, the project would inevitably
be delivered late (and perhaps would never ever be
completed) and would inevitably go over budget.

By managing changes, the project manager can make decisions
about whether or not to incorporate the changes immediately
or in the future, or to reject them. This increases the
chances of project success because the project manager
controls how the changes are incorporated, can allocate
resources accordingly and can plan when and how the changes
are made. Not managing changes effectively is often cited as
a major reason why projects fail.

Risk management

Risks are any events which can adversely affect the
successful outcome of the project. I've worked on projects
where some of the risks have included: staff lacking the
technical skills to perform the work properly, hardware not
being delivered on time, the control room being at risk of
flooding in a major thunderstorm and many others. Risks will
vary from project to project but it is important to
identify the main risks to a project as soon as possible
and to plan the actions necessary to avoid the risk, or, if
the risk cannot be avoided, to at least mitigate the risk in
order to lessen its impact if it does occur. This is what
is known as risk management.

Do you manage all risks? No, because there could be too many
to manage, and not all risks have the same impact. So a
simple way is to identify as many risks as you can, work out
how likely each risk is to occur on a scale of 1 to 3 (3
being the worst), estimate its impact on the project on a
scale of 1 to 3 (3 being the worst), then multiply the two
numbers together. The result is the risk weighting. A high
risk weighting is the most severe risk. Just manage the top
ten risks i.e. the ones with the highest risk weighting.
Constantly review the risks and constantly be on the lookout
for new risks since they have a habit of jumping up at
unforeseen moments.

Not managing risks effectively is also often cited as a
major reason why projects fail.

Summary

So, in a nutshell, these best practices are the main things
that I would expect all project managers to do. They are
applicable on all projects big or small. Project management
is not rocket science. Applying best practices on your
project cannot guarantee that your project comes in under
budget, on time and exceeds all the expectations of the
stakeholders, but applying them will certainly give you a
much better chance of delivering your project successfully
than if you don't apply them on your project.


About the Author:

Simon Buehring is a project manager, consultant, writer and
trainer. He works for KnowledgeTrain which offers project
management training courses in the UK and overseas. Simon
has extensive experience within the IT industry both in
the UK and in Asia. He can be contacted at:
info@knowledgetrain.co.uk or you can visit the
KnowledgeTrain website at http://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk/