project_management_made_easy

Pulling the Plan Together

The goal is to prevent scope creep, which is the addition of more and more items to the project, until the project is so stuffed with stuff to do that we can no more move ahead than we can run a marathon after a Thanksgiving dinner. When people understand scope creep, they know that the answer to the question, “Can you do this, too?” is “Maybe, but it’s going to cost you and it will delay the project.”

I said, “Maybe” for two reasons.

The 1:10:100 rule we introduced in Chapter 3, Prepare, Do, Follow Through, is crucial here. Anything added after the end of preparation will take ten times longer and cost ten times more to do in this project than it will cost if we wait until later and do it as a little project on its own. The preparation review gate—the subject of this chapter—is our last chance to put in whatever should go into the project and leave out whatever should be left out.

The second reason I said, “Maybe” has to do with risk. Every added goal adds risk. Every change to the plan adds more risk. We have to refuse some changes to our project plan because trying to do that one more thing risks causing the whole project to run into big, big trouble.

The iron triangle also reminds us of the three main measures of project success:

Deliver the right results

On time

Within our budget

Bringing the other six areas of project management under control helps make sure we succeed in achieving our basic goal. Let’s review now the five areas that we’ve discussed so far.

Supporting Success: Quality, Risk, Human Resources,

Communications, and Procurement

As we saw in Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11, these five areas of project management help us bring everything that matters to the project under management. Through these management processes (p), we are able to ensure and improve upon the basic results (r) of delivering our scope on time and within budget. Table 12-1 illustrates how these five additional areas support the core three goals of the iron triangle. (It also shows the last area, integration, which we’ll discuss later.)

P roject results: deliver the requested product

with quality on time and within budget.

If we eliminate error and man-

age risk, we deliver quality.

Communications supports

teamwork, procurement, and integration.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

Table 12-1. Project management areas, questions, and issues

If you’ve done all the work recommended up to now in Project Management for Small Business Made Easy, then you’ve covered all the areas except project integration management, which we will cover in this chapter. You know everything there is to know about your project. If your project is a sailing trip, then you’ve got your plan and destination, all your supplies are on board, your crew is ready, and you’re ready to do the final checks you need to do before you set sail.

Pulling the Plan Together

Integration

In project integration management, we deal with four issues:

How do changes in one area of the project affect the rest of the project?

What if the plan changes or needs to change?

How do we keep track of what’s going on and keep the project moving?

What if we need to think about canceling the project?

Let’s look at the first question: How do changes in one area of the project affect the rest of the project? Let’s use our example of a sailing ship. If getting supplies goes out of control, then we depart late and the whole project might run late. If the size of our cargo is out of control, people could keep throwing more on until too much is loaded and the whole ship could sink. That would be like scope creep causing project failure.

The point is that if any one of the nine areas goes in an unexpected direction, we have to bring that back under control. Otherwise, we’re in uncharted territory, off our map, and the whole project could go out of control.

This is why the process (p) areas, the ones that are hard to measure, the ones that don’t have an easily definable single result, are so essential to the success of the project results, the (r) factors. Procurement, communications, quality, risk, and human resources (teamwork) are all essential to ensure scope, time, and quality. Once we understand how important that is, we don’t hesitate to plan for all nine areas on every project. Once we plan it all, we’ll have to keep everything under management throughout the project, and that is the subject of Chapter 13, Keeping Everything on Track.

Right now, we’ll look at what to do if the plan changes and how we decide if we should go ahead with the project or cancel it, using review gates.

What if the Plan Changes?

We’ve completed our plan. But what if the plan changes, or someone wants it to change, or it needs to change? As we’ve already noted, because of the 1:10:100 rule, any changes after the preparation stage will be very expensive. So we need to be ready for the possibility of change. In particular, we need to be ready with a clear process for keeping these situations under control:

C atch problems early, before they cas-

cade into disaster.

T hings change. Manage that

change proactively.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

Someone on the project wants a change.

The project gets changed before you hear about it.

There is a real need to change the project, either because of a big error in the original plan or because reality has changed and what we are planning to do won’t work or won’t be valuable to the customer any more.

We can think about each suggestion or request for a change to the project as a project change request. We handle change requests by creating an integrated change management system that:

Has a standard form and a standard process for handling every change request.

Ensures that everyone on the project knows that all ideas about changes and all change requests must come to you as the project manager.

Gives you clear criteria for deciding whether to change the project or not.

In general, if we have educated all team members and the customer about the 1:10:100 rule and how good planning keeps costs down, then we should run into relatively few change requests. Still, if people do want change, it’s your job to know that they’re thinking about it, to hear the ideas and reasons and get them written down early, and to bring the change request under management.

Changes are rare in short, routine projects. The longer the project, the more people involved, and the more rapidly changing the field in which the project is working, the more likely that there will be a need for project change. Also, some situations are simply harder to investigate during planning. Then, when we encounter something unknown, we have to find out what is happening and change the project to take care of the problem. Here are two examples of that:

The town I’m living in spent a year fixing old sewer pipes. Most of the fixes were done by pumping chemicals through the system to coat the pipes. But, when there was a lot of decay or leaks showed up, they had to dig into the ground and replace the pipes. They knew that pipe replacement would be necessary, but they couldn’t know how much or where it would be needed until they were doing the work.

Any error still in the plan now will cost ten times more to fix

later.

Each end-of- stage review is

a safety net. By taking the possibility of cancellation seriously, we save the company from wasting time and money on something that won’t work.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

The Preparation Review Gate

If you’ve been building a project plan while reading this book, you’re ready for the final review of the plan before declaring the plan ready, confirming you’re prepared, and launching the doing stage of the project. If this is a one-person project, just read the plan over and you’re ready for the review. If the plan has been prepared by a team, then have each member read over the plan and then ask everyone, “Is there anything we’ve left out? Is there anything we thought of, but never wrote down? Is this exactly what you plan to do?” When everyone agrees on the plan, the plan and preparations are ready for review.

Review is a process, which means it has an input and an output:

The input is the plan plus all the preparations to date.

The process is reading, questioning, checking details, and cross-check- ing parts of the plan.

The output is one of these four things:

–Approval that the plan is complete and all preparations are ready, so that the doing stage is launched.

–Provisional approval pending small changes. Here, the statement is “Take care of this list of things, make sure they’re done right, and then go ahead.”

–Required rework of all or part of the plan, followed by a second preparation gate review. We do this if big changes are needed to the plan and those changes will take some time. For example, if we discover in the review that the project result isn’t what the customer

wants or that some major element of the project is unworkable or too risky, we call for rework and a second review.

–Project cancellation if we discover the plan just isn’t doable or isn’t worth doing.

Of course, we hope for success. But our review should be independent and should ask, “What’s best for the company?” Don’t say, “But we’ve already put in so much time, we should go ahead.” Time and money spent are sunk cost and should not be considered when deciding what to do next. Even if we do find a major problem, we don’t dive into doom and gloom. If we can, we fix the problem. If not, we appreciate the fact that we’ve just protected the company from a big mistake, we learn our lesson, and we set a new direction.

Pulling the Plan Together

Put Preferences Aside and Make Sure

Your Project Is Safe to Go

Of course, we hope that the plan is good and it can go ahead with few or no changes. And every trapeze artist hopes to catch the trapeze at the other end. But most trapeze artists perform with a safety net anyway. The review is our safety net—don’t cut it out from under yourself by pushing through a plan with a problem. Go ahead only if the project is safe and sure.

The Lesson: Review your project as if you’re preparing for a circus stunt. Your safety and that of your team may not actually be on the line, but your time and money are—and maybe your company, too.

Running the Review

The two biggest things to look for in the preparation stage review are assumptions and misunderstandings:

Assumptions are dangerous because, if an assumption is wrong, the project is going to get into trouble. Behind most big problems, there’s someone saying, “I assumed ….” Every assumption in our plan should be identified, written down, and verified during planning and preparation. If it hasn’t been, then it should become a work item required by the review team. If an assumption cannot be verified—if, for example, it’s a possible alligator in the swamp—then it should be included as a risk item on our risk list and kept under management.

Misunderstandings cause people to have different ideas about what we are making on a project, in spite of all our planning and commu-

nications. Include everyone on the team and key customers in the review. Then make sure that everyone sees things the same way. If not, identify the differences. If the misunderstandings can be resolved easily, then write down the clarification and agreement and move ahead with the updated plan. If not, then make time for rework and, if necessary, consider project cancellation.

Let’s take a closer look at the review process steps mentioned above:

Reading. Everyone on the team should read the whole plan before the review meeting, highlight any questionable items, and note any concerns.

E liminate assumptions

and misunderstandings.