project_management_made_easy

Prepare, Do, Follow Through

In this chapter, you will learn:

Why careful preparation and good project work are essential to your business

How to make sure you have a good plan before you get to work with stages and gates

The nine areas of project management: everything you need to plan and manage a project

To put it simply, when we just jump in and get to work, we’re being sloppy. That costs us a lot more than we think it does. Project Management for Small Business Made Easy takes the best practices of project management from companies that can’t afford to make mistakes and teaches them to you. In some industries—like aerospace and medicine—life is on the line. In others—like Hollywood—time costs thousands of dollars a minute. Using what they know in our own small businesses makes the difference between losing money and making a good living, between burnout and enjoying our work, between shutting down and succeeding.

Businesses, Projects, and Systems

If you dent your fender, your car will still run. But if anything goes wrong with the power system—the carburetor, the fuel line, the engine, the drive shaft, the gears and axles, the wheels—the car isn’t going to go anywhere. That’s because your car is a system. There are some fundamental rules of systems:

When one part of a system breaks down, the whole system doesn’t work.

If we change one part of a system, we change the way the whole system works.

When the parts of a system don’t communicate or don’t work together well, the system fails.

When a system has problems, the symptoms are in one place, but the source of the problem is likely to be somewhere else.

When things around a system change, the system has to change to adapt and keep working.

Plain and simple, planning

pays off.

Your business is like a car: if

one part breaks down, the whole thing won’t go.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

Just like a car’s drive train, a small business is a system. And a project is a system, too. The most common complaint of a small business owner might be “I did almost everything right! How come it didn’t work?” If you do body work on a car, getting almost everything right is good enough. But if you work on the engine, the fuel line, the steering, or the brakes, “almost” doesn’t cut it. In small business—and on our projects—we have to plan everything and take care of all of the details.

There’s a plus side to all of this. When we plan and prepare carefully, our work sings. It sails along smoothly. We’re in the zone and we get even better results than we ever dreamed.

Make sure you’re ready

before you go.

Stages and Gates

Because of the 1:10:100 rule, it makes sense to break every project up into three stages. In Chapter 1, Get It Done Right!, we introduced those stages: prepare, do, and follow through.

Now, let’s take a look at some difficult questions. How do you know when you’re done preparing and you’re ready to go? How much planning is enough? How much planning is too much?

On each project, we can answer those questions by putting a gate after each stage. A gate is a time we set aside to review the work we’ve done so far. And we pass through the gate and on to the next stage only if we’ve done good work and we’re ready to go.

We put a preparation review gate at the end of preparation. We ask:

Was our investigation good? Do we understand the problem correctly and clearly? Do we understand it well enough to fix it?

Was our evaluation good? Is this opportunity worth the effort or is this problem worth fixing? Does the size of the project match the size of the problem?

Is our plan good? A good plan covers all nine of the areas of project management that we’ll discuss later in this chapter.

Are we ready? Do we have everyone we need? Does everyone understand the problem and the project? Does everyone have the right skills? Do we have all the tools and materials we need to start the job? Is anything missing?

Prepare, Do, Follow Through

Are You Ready for the Long Ride?

There is a special kind of horse racing, called endurance riding, that gives us a model for how gate reviews should work. Horse and rider go for 50 miles or more with little rest. At the end of every stage of the race, a few times a day, there is a checkpoint or gate. You win by finishing the race first, but, if your horse is in no shape to ride, then you’re out of the race. So you have to ride well and ride fast, but also take good care of your horse.

It’s just the same on a project. We have to prepare well and do all our planning and all our work thoroughly. But we can’t burn out or let our team burn out. At each gate, we review the work we’ve done. If it’s not finished, we take time for rework. We also make sure that our team and we are ready for the next stage.

The Lesson: Break a project into stages and gates, take the gate reviews seriously, and you’ll make the long haul.

The review process is real, not rote. As you ask each of these questions, fix anything that is unclear or incomplete, if it can be fixed quickly. Otherwise:

Make notes to rework anything that needs more time.

If there isn’t too much rework, schedule a brief review of the changes.

If there’s a lot of rework, do it all and then hold a whole second review.

Be ready and willing to cancel the project if you can’t get the plan right or if the project just isn’t worth doing.

When to Cancel a Project

Not every bright idea is a good idea. Not every good idea is worth doing. Not every idea that is worth doing can or should be done right now. As you plan, and especially at the preparation review gate, you should consider canceling the project. Why? Because it makes no sense to throw good money after bad. If a project can’t be done, the sooner you stop it, the sooner you quit wasting precious time and money.

It’s hard to give up on a plan. It hurts the ego. But, ultimately, we have to choose between our egos and our business. If we are humble enough to admit that our idea is bad or that we are overwhelmed and don’t have what it takes to do a project right now, then we can stop the project and use our

Don’t throw good money

after bad.

Prepare, Do, Follow Through

The Nine Areas of Project Management

Over the last 35 years, the Project Management Institute (PMI) has worked to define the field of project management as an independent profession and certify professionals in the field. You can learn more about it them at www.pmi.org. They offer this formal definition of a project: “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.” Over the years, the PMI has discovered that there are nine areas we need to manage to make a project succeed. It calls these the “nine areas of project management knowledge.” In terms of studying for certification, they are areas of knowledge. In terms of project success, they are areas of planning and work. We need to plan for and work in each of these nine areas as we prepare, do, and follow through on each project. Don’t worry if this introduction to the nine areas is very short. They are covered in depth—and applied specifically to small businesses—in Chapters 6 through 12.

Scope: What and How

Project scope definition answers the questions “What are we making?” and “How will we make it?” The goal is to define everything we need to do to complete everything included in the product or result and nothing extra. Once we’ve defined that, our goal is to keep scope under control. We track our work and correct our course so that we do everything we need to do, we

Spiral to Success

I have taught over 2,000 students in hundreds of project management classes. In every class, I ask for stories of success and failure. I’ve found this universal fact: from the very beginning, a project that has a clear scope definition is headed for success. When we know what we’re making, we get the right people together, and we plan for time, cost, quality, and other project success factors. Then the right people doing the right job get the work done right. We stay focused, stay on time, and deliver the right stuff.

On the other hand, every poorly defined project is headed in a downward spiral. When we aren’t clear about what we’re doing, we’re not sure who is best for the job. No one knows exactly what he or she should be doing. New things are thrown in and plans are changed all the time. Work starts and stops, time and money are wasted, and the project is spiraling toward disaster.

The Lesson: Define a clear goal, in detail, and spiral toward success.

Clear definition of what we

are doing sets us on the path to success.

Track time and money as you

go or your tank will run dry.

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

deliver everything we’re supposed to deliver, and we don’t do anything extra. Scope creep is a danger to any project. We start simple and then we say, “But I could do this, too. And why don’t I do that, as well?” All of a sudden, we’re doing so many things that we can’t finish on time, we’ve blown our budget, and we have nothing to show for our work. By defining our goal clearly up front and allowing changes to the plan only when they are truly

essential, we prevent scope creep.

You’ll learn more about project scope management in Chapters 6 and 14.

Time: Effort and Duration

At the end of project scope management, we know what work we will be doing. In time planning, we prepare activity lists—we decide who will do what and when. From this, we can plan project effort, the number of personhours of work to be done, and project duration, how long the project will take from start to finish. Project time management also includes time estimation and schedule control to make sure we’re getting work done on time.

Cost: Estimates, Budgets, and Tracking

Once we’ve figured out our schedule, we can estimate what the project will cost. We build a budget and then we track the time and money we spend each week. If we don’t track it as we go along, our schedule and budget will go out of control. We will fall behind and not even know it. We keep on top of the project by looking at the work we’ve accomplished, the time we’ve spent, and the money we’ve spent.

Improve your processes to save time, save

money, and deliver the best.

Quality: Make It Good

There are two aspects to quality management. One is in designing the product or service—the project results. We should ask more than “What are we making?” We should ask, “What will make it really good?” If we ask that in planning, we can often get better results—a greater improvement of net revenue— for the same project cost. For example, a smart, savvy advertising campaign is far more successful than a dull campaign that costs just as much. The second part of quality management is about working smarter. Here, we focus on the quality of our process—on how we do the work, manage the project, and manage business and customer value. By improving the quality of the project, we increase the chances of delivering really good results on time and under budget.

Prepare, Do, Follow Through

Risk: Make Sure We Get It Done

Once we have a good plan, we have to make sure we can follow the plan. What if a key worker leaves the company? What if some other urgent project interrupts our work? What if some technical solution doesn’t work or a supply is not available?

“What if?” is the central question of project risk management. We realize that the future is always uncertain—we don’t know what will happen. So, we think about what might happen and write it down. Then we prepare for each thing that might change our project plan or get in the way of success. Once we’re ready for any contingency, we keep risk under control by tracking events weekly and handling things if they look like they are about to happen or when they do.

Be ready for the unex-

pected—and move fast when the stuff hits the fan.

Human Resources: The Project Team

For small businesses, project human resources means getting the right people on the team for the job and making sure they can do the work. For each person on each job, we ask if they understand the work, if they have the right skills, and if they have the time to do the work. Any time one of those questions gets “no” for an answer, we find a solution: we explain the job, we get training or bring in an expert, or we give project work the priority it needs to get the job done right.

Communications: Keep Everyone on Board

In Chapter 2, Small Business Projects, we introduced the idea of all the people in different roles on the project—executives, customers, team members, and stakeholders. Project communications begins by figuring out who all of those people are. Then we figure out what we need to hear from them and what they need to hear from us. We plan, manage, and execute effective communications to make sure the plan includes everyone’s perspective, that everyone understands the plan, and that everyone is on the same page and up to date when changes hit the project.

Procurement: Getting What We Need

For most small business projects, procurement is making a good shopping list and then making sure we get the right thing and that it comes in on time. In some cases, we may do some hunting for best prices. Sometimes, we have to deal with vendor selection and contract management as well.

Management means helping everyone do a

good job.

Change will happen. Are

you ready?

Project Management for Small Business Made Easy

Integration: Keeping It All Together

The eight knowledge areas we’ve just described are all tied together in one system. Here’s an example.

Let’s say our best worker wins the lottery and quits his job. That’s an HR problem. But now we need to put the project on hold until we get someone new. That affects the schedule. The new person has a higher salary and our budget goes up. During the delay, a crucial product component is dropped from the vendor’s product line (a procurement problem), so we have to change what we’re making (scope) and see how that affects quality. All of this, of course, requires good communications. If our new design doesn’t satisfy the customer, there is a risk of project failure.

Our ninth area, project integration management, means that we keep track of what is going on in all the other areas and deal with any changes to the project promptly and fully. This is also called integrated change management.

Conclusion: Tying It All Together

Back in the 1960s, people thought that managing scope, time, and cost was enough to get it done right! We’ve learned it takes more than that. Scope, time, and cost—doing the right work on time and within budget—are results that depend on good process. We can break out the nine areas as follows:

Results: Scope, Time, and Cost. Make the right thing and deliver it on time and within budget.

Focus on process: Quality and Risk. Quality management is about improving processes to make it good and work smart, so that we do a better job at lower cost with less work. Risk management recognizes that the future is uncertain, so we take time to plan and prepare for the unexpected.

Do supporting processes: Human Resources, Communications, and Procurement. Support the team, keep everyone in the loop, and get what you need.

Pull it all together: Integration. Remember: a project is a system. Change one part and all the other parts change. So, when change hap- pens—to requirements, to schedule or budget, or anywhere else—we need to assess the consequences, plot a new course, and steer for success.