project_management_made_easy

Project management is

easy and it solves small business problems.

IntroductionPreface

Jobs simply take too long, so work piles up.

Jobs cost too much, so you lose money.

Everything seems to be going fine or things are just a bit off, and then, bam!—too much has gone wrong and the deadline is missed.

Unexpected problems keep popping up.

You can’t seem to communicate your enthusiasm for your business to your team. You know if they cared the way you do, they’d be great, but they aren’t invested, so the company just can’t get any momentum going.

For all these different small business problems—and many others as well—project management is the solution. Most businesspeople think project management is either complicated or irrelevant. It’s neither. It’s simple and relevant. In fact, project management includes simple tools that solve small business problems.

Here are some key points that make project management really simple and valuable:

Any dream, opportunity, or problem can become a project. So project management is the way to realize your dreams, seize opportunities, and solve problems.

Project management cuts big things down to size. If you have a big challenge—you know, the one you keep putting off, hoping it will go away even though you know it won’t—make it a project and cut it into pieces. Gather information, make plans, do the work, and the problem will be solved a lot sooner than you think.

Project management works for everyone. If you or someone who works for you is having problems getting work done on time, or taking care of simple tasks, or learning to do something new, project management tools here in Project Management for Small Business Made Easy can help you cut through that problem, manage your work, and get things done.

Project management makes order out of chaos. Sometimes, we are overwhelmed and things get out of control. In Project Management for Small Business Made Easy, you’ll learn what it means to bring things under management, bring things under control. And you’ll learn how to do it.

Project management is easy to learn. It’s a mix of common sense, sound thinking, and getting work done step by step. In fact, there are some

Preface

natural project managers out there. (You’ll learn about one in Chapter 21.) But project management is just like baseball. A natural can become a great pitcher. But anyone with some skills and desire can learn to toss a ball, have fun, and get the ball to the person who needs to catch it. You’ll learn to toss products to your customers, they’ll catch them, and they’ll like what they get.

This book will help you with whatever dreams, opportunities, or problems you have in your business, whether you own it, work as a manager, or are on the team as an employee. It will help you get work done right and it will help your business make more money, satisfy more customers, clear away problems, and grow.

How to Use This Book

I’ve put this book together as 22 short, powerful chapters that each give you all you need on just one topic. Many of the chapters take less than half an hour to read. Each chapter presents just a few key ideas, so you’ll be able to understand, retain, and use these practical tips and tools easily.

Chapters 1 to 5 talk about what a project is, what it means to bring something under management, and how to turn a dream, an opportunity, or a problem into a project that will be completed by a clear date that you set as a realistic goal. When you finish the first five chapters, you can pick a project and then work on it as you read the rest of the book.

Each project is organized into three stages: prepare, do, and followthrough.

You’ll learn all about planning and preparation in Chapters 6 through 12. If you work on a project as you read, then, by the end of chapter 12, you’ll have a thorough, complete, and clear plan and you’ll be all ready to go.

Chapters 13 through 18 will take your project through the doing stage. You’ll keep work, time, cost, and risk under control and deliver high-quality results step by step until everything is done. Then in Chapters 19 and 20, you’ll learn the art of following through to customer delight. That’s right: we project managers do more than satisfy our customers; we delight them. We meet or exceed expectations, we deliver what the customer wants, we express genuine care for our customers and concern for their goals, and we make up for mistakes with a bit of flair.

It is less expensive to solve a

problem once than to live with it forever.

You don’t need to be perfect.

You just need to learn how to manage mistakes.

Preface

Chapters 21 and 22 are two bonuses. Chapter 21 is a case study of a very successful owner of two coffee shops that serve artisan-roasted coffee. You’ll learn how the owners opened four businesses in six years, realizing their own dreams, delighting customers, and providing excellent opportunities for their employees by seizing opportunities and solving problems one after another. And in Chapter 22, you’ll learn how to plan the projects for your own business, lining up a year of problem solving and business growth.

If you know how nails work, you can try pounding them with a rock or your shoe. However, it’s easier and more effective and efficient to sink a nail with a hammer. Similarly, it’s a lot easier to use project management ideas with tools and forms. At the back of the book, you’ll find a section full of forms and tools that will make it easy to put all of Project Management for Small Business Made Easy to work. If you want these forms on full-sized sheets, plus a whole lot more, they are a free download away at www.qualitytechnology. com/DoneRight.

As you learn project management and do your next project, I’ll be with you every step of the way. I know the journey will be rewarding. Make it fun, too!

Learning Project Management Is a Project

If you want to get the most out of this book, then make a project of learning project management. Commit to a goal: “I will be a better project manager by ___________ (date).” Start reading, make a plan, and stay focused on learning project management so that you can eliminate hassles and succeed.

Small business owners have

to deal with change, and good project management is the key to successful change.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

Some jobs we do over and over. We stock up supplies, we make a sale, we balance the checkbook. We can think of these repetitive tasks as production work. But—unless you run a mom-and-pop grocery store—a lot of your work is done only once. The work is unique: decide what to stock for this season, negotiate a deal with one big client, arrange for a loan to open a new office or store. An MBA or any other standard business course won’t help you do a good job at these unique, special jobs. Doing unique work and succeeding takes project management.

If our world—our customers, our suppliers, and our competitors—did- n’t change much, we wouldn’t need much project management. But these days, everything is changing very fast. When I was growing up, there were no computers and almost nothing was made of plastic. More people used butter than margarine and no one knew about cholesterol. Music came on black vinyl albums played on phonographs. The only Teflon was on NASA spacecraft and the only product that came out of NASA’s efforts was Tang® orange drink mix. Now we live in an era of microchips, microwaves, digital music, artificial foods, and microwave dinners. Our parents ate the same food throughout their entire lives; our children are eating new foods every few years.

But it’s not just technology and products that are changing. Communication and transportation are faster and cheaper than ever before. Big business and franchises have taken over a lot of the commercial market. People expect products and services right away, and we can deliver because internet ordering has become part of how we do business.

If we can keep up.

And keeping up means dealing with change. It means setting new directions, revising our plans, and then getting new products, services, and ways of working in place quickly, before things change again.

Given how much things change, isn’t it nice to know that there is a whole special field within business designed just to deal with change? It’s called project management. The field has been growing for the last 35 years, and you can learn from the best and make it your own with Project Management for Small Business Made Easy.

Get It Done Right!

What Is a Project?

A project is:

A dream with a deadline

A problem scheduled for solution

Do you have a dream for your business? Do you:

Want to start a new business?

Want to open a new location?

Want to grow to a certain size?

Want to be the best at what you do?

Small Dreams Are OK, Too

A dream or opportunity doesn’t have to be big. After all the trouble in 2001— the fall of the World Trade Center, the burst of the dotcom bubble, and Enron’s scam—all of my clients didn’t have enough money to pay me for a while. My dream for 2003—stay in business! Keep my company open! I managed that and, in 2004, I chose another small dream—make a little money this year! After that, I was ready for a big dream—write three books in 2005.

The lesson: Your dreams don’t need to be big; they just need to be right for you right now. Do what works for you and your business.

If you’re not sure, then ask, “What is the biggest opportunity for my business?”

When you’ve defined your dream or your opportunity, then you’ve set direction. When you’ve set direction, you head out on the road—and bam! You run into roadblocks. You want to hire more staff, but you can’t find good people, you don’t have room for them, and you’re worried that you won’t be able to keep up with the payroll come August, when the summer slump hits.

Each dream with a deadline or an opportunity we want to realize is a project. And that project defines the problems we face. And when we face those problems and solve them, that’s a project, too.

Projects come in all sizes. In a small business, some might take months— such as launching the business or opening a new store. Others might be fulltime work for a few weeks: creating the fall catalog and mailing it out or

When you know what

your dreams are, you know what your problems are.

Project management helps

by bringing problems under control.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

building a new web site. Some projects take just a few hours: finding a new supplier to replace the one that is unreliable or hiring staff for the summer rush. It is a good idea to think of our opportunities and problems as projects. If we can say, “Here’s where I am now and here’s where I want to be,” then we’ve defined a project.

What Is Management?

Everyone talks about management, but nobody stops to explain what it is. What do we really mean when we talk about managing something? We can understand that best if we look at the opposite of management. In a business, if something isn’t under management, then it’s out of control.

When a situation is out of control, we don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know how bad it is, we don’t know what it’s going to cost us, and we don’t know what to do about it. Here are some common out-of-control situations I’ve seen in small businesses:

The books are not up to date.

You can’t get the supplies or inventory you need.

You aren’t getting the word out—advertising isn’t working.

Your team isn’t getting the job done, and you don’t know why.

You promised work to a customer and can’t deliver on time.

Think: Are any of these happening in your business right now? Or is some other situation out of control? Whatever situation is out of control, that’s a problem. It’s a risk to your business. Bringing the situation under control and solving the problem is a project.

When a situation is out of control, we want to bring it under management. There are three basic steps to taking care of any project: prepare, do, and follow through. Let’s look at these in a bit more detail.

Prepare

Investigation: What’s really going on?

Evaluation: Is it worth fixing? How big is the problem?

Planning: What do we want to do about it?

Getting ready: Get the people and things you need.

Get It Done Right!

Do

Action: Doing the work and fixing the problem.

Tracking: Making sure our work follows the plan and fixes the problem.

Control: If tracking shows us that we’re off track, taking action to keep things under control.

Follow Through

Delivery: Finishing the project, delivering the results, and making sure everyone knows it’s done.

Maintenance: Keeping up the good results through production man- agement—monitoring, control, and improvement.

Whether we’re bringing a situation under control, solving a problem, or making a dream come true, those three steps—prepare, do, follow through—are the essence of project management. In three steps, we get it done right!

Project Management Is Good Medicine

A project fixes your business the way a good trip to the doctor heals your body. Let’s say that you like to walk or run, but you sprain your ankle. Here’s the doctor’s “prepare, do, follow through” plan for you:

Diagnosis and preparation. He takes an X-ray to find out if the ankle is just sprained or it’s broken. Good news—it’s just a sprain. Now he can fix the right problem. He prepares a treatment with a bandage and a prescription.

Do. He bandages the ankle. You learn to use a crutch for two weeks and he tells you when to apply heat and cold. He sees you each week to make sure the swelling is going down. If it’s not, then he’ll do a new diag- nosis—maybe an MRI—to find out what is wrong.

Follow through. After two weeks, you’re up and walking. You see a physical therapist to work out an exercise schedule that will get you back to your full routine without risk of re-injury. You follow it and you’re back in production—doing your exercise and staying healthy.

The Lesson: Good project managers think like doctors. They identify the problem before they run around trying to fix things.

Aproject in three steps:

prepare, do, follow through.

Preventing a problem

through preparation costs onetenth what it will take to fix the problem if you let it happen.

Let’s drop our opinions and deal with what’s

real.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

Prepare: Investigate, Evaluate, Plan, and Get Ready

Preparation is the most important part of managing a project. If we don’t prepare well, either the project will fail or it will take ten times longer than it should. Imagine going on vacation without preparing: you forget things you wanted to bring, you run out of gas on the road, and you get lost. All of these would be easy to prevent with preparation: a packing list, a trip to the gas station, and a map. Preparation is easy. Doing work without being prepared is a hassle and costs a lot.

Investigation means getting the facts before we decide what to do. Too often, we are too quick to say, “The vendor is the problem, let’s get a new vendor,” or “Fire the guy and get someone else to do the job,” or “There’s no way to fix this, we just have to live with it.” Instead, let’s get real. Let’s gather the facts and understand the situation.

Evaluation means fact-based decision making. It means deciding to do what is best for the business, instead of flying off the handle and reacting. We look at the facts and answer three questions:

Feasibility. Can we fix this problem? Most problems have a solution, but a few do not.

Value. Is it worth fixing? If there’s a dent in our truck, it may be cheaper to live with the dent than get it fixed. But if the truck won’t run, we need to fix the truck or get a new one.

Basic approach. How are we going to handle this problem? We decide what we need to do—fix or replace? And we decide who will do it—do we do it ourselves, call on our team, or get someone from the outside? If we’re not sure yet, then we do some more investigation to figure out the best approach to the problem.

We plan by coming up with a detailed, step-by-step recipe for what we are going to do, just like when we’re cooking.

We list our resources, the ingredients.

We pick our team, the cooks.

We list each step of work, the recipe.

We describe the end result.

In project management, everything gets written down. We need a writ-