project_management_made_easy
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Planning Time and Money
6.Put the tasks in order. Some tasks can be done in any order. Others have to come first. If the output of one task is the input of another task, make sure to put the first task before the second.
7.Include time for testing each output. Never plan to go ahead on a next
step until you are sure the prior step was done right.
8.Allow time for things like paint drying or ovens warming up, where no work is being done, but time has to pass anyway. This is called lag time.
9.Check people’s calendars for holidays, vacation, and other work that might get in the way of the project.
10.Pick a start date and work forward, or pick an end date and work backwards, from the last task to the first.
11.Assign each task to a date. Include time for status meetings, tests, gate reviews, and rework.
12.Review the schedule with each team member, making any changes or corrections.
Aschedule simply describes who will do what
when.
Detailed Budgeting
A budget is actually pretty easy to prepare. On a project, we spend money on two things: people’s time and things we buy. To prepare the detailed budget, take these steps:
1.Assign a dollar value to each person’s time. A good rule is to take his or her hourly wage and add 50 percent for benefits plus cost of the office
and such. If the person has an annual salary, divide it by 1,500 to get the hourly wage, then add the 50 percent. (That’s based on a 30-hour workweek, but we’re measuring productive hours here, so that’s realistic.)
2.Add up each person’s total time and then multiply it by his or her hourly rate. Add up all those totals for the total cost of time on the project. Be sure to include yourself.
3.Review your shopping list against the completed WBS and action plan. Revise it, adding anything else you need to buy.
4.Do some research and get actual prices for your shopping list. Don’t forget to include sales tax, shipping, and such.
5.Check for incidental expenses such as gas, travel expenses, or lunch for the team, and include those.
6.Add it all up.
We spend money for
people’s time and for the things we need to buy.
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We’ve planned
work, time, and money—and that’s the core of the project plan.
Project Management for Small Business Made Easy
You can link your budget to your calendar, so that you know how much money you expect to spend each week of the project. Some projects spend more money at the beginning or the end, while others spend steadily all the way through.
Conclusion: Ready to Stay on Track
We now know what we’re making, when we’re doing each task, and how much time and money each task will take. At least, we have a plan for it. One thing we can be sure of—no project ever goes exactly according to plan. To give ourselves a better shot at success, we’ll plan for quality in Chapter 8, plan for risks and unexpected problems in Chapter 9, and then plan how to work with our team and everyone else in Chapter 10. Of course, these activities take time and money, so we’ll be adjusting our schedule and budget as we improve the plan over the next several chapters.
Once we launch the project, we will use this plan to track progress, making sure we get work done on schedule and within our budget. We’ll track as we go, so that we can make course corrections promptly if we get off track.
Getting Better and Better
The first time you make an estimate for a project, you may not do that good a job. Don’t feel bad: at least you tried. To be honest, many project managers don’t even try—and they end up in hot water.
At the end of each project—or even at each gate review—be sure to ask yourself why your estimate is working or is off target. Write down the answer and keep it with your instructions for estimating a project.
The next time you launch a project, review those notes and you’ll do better.
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Chapter 8
Making It
Good
NOW IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUT QUALITY. IN FACT, THE SOONER WE
talk about quality, the better. Many people think that we have to focus on getting the job done and we don’t have time to get it done right. The opposite is true. When we don’t get a job done right, we get it done wrong. Then either we lose
money and time doing a lot of rework or we lose customers because our competitors did it right when we didn’t. The opposite of quality is error—and error is expensive.
However, if we plan quality in from the beginning, it actually costs less to do a good job than it would cost to do a bad job. There are three reasons for this, three points that are the core of project quality management:
A good design costs no more than a bad design. During planning, it costs very little to get it right. A blueprint costs just the same for a new office we will love as for a new office we can’t work in. But, if we go with the bad design, we’ll pay the price later.
Error is inevitable, and the sooner we deal with it, the better. People make mistakes. The only thing we can do is bring errors under management, so that the mistakes don’t end up in our products and services.
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Focus on quality from the start. Good design plus good process
equals great results.
Project Management for Small Business Made Easy
Quality management brings errors under management. We focus on preventing error. When we can’t prevent them, we try to remove them as soon as possible. The earlier we get rid of errors, the less they will cost us.
Improving process improves all our results. Quality management puts the focus on process—that is, we improve how we do our work. When we improve the quality of our processes, we work smarter. When we work smarter, we do a better job, completing more in less time for less money. So, by focusing on the quality of our work processes, we actually increase the scope we can deliver, improve the quality of results, and reduce time and cost as well. The end result is we deliver a better product on time (or early!) and under budget.
The best project quality management is done in five steps:
Define quality. When we build our scope statement, we should ask, “What makes it good?”
Plan for quality. Using quality control, quality assurance, and effective gate reviews, we find smart ways of working that deliver the best results at the lowest cost on the shortest schedule.
Control quality to make sure that the product is what it is supposed to be.
Ensure quality from the beginning to the end of the project.
Deliver quality to ensure customer delight.
We’ll talk about the first two of these—defining and planning for qual- ity—in this chapter. Quality control and quality assurance will be the topics of Chapter 16, Quality: Eliminate Error. And you’ll learn how to deliver quality in Chapter 20, Deliver Delight. But let’s begin with some simple quality basics.
Simple Quality Basics
Everyone makes mistakes. But we want to bring errors under management and to prevent or get rid of as many errors as we can. How do we do that?
Stay motivated. Believe we can do a good job and find joy in doing it.
Pay attention and teach your team to pay attention. People make fewer errors when we are attentive to our work.
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Making It Good
Catch assumptions. When we assume something and it isn’t true, costly mistakes creep in. Say assumptions aloud or write them down. Check them with your team. Make sure that what you’re thinking makes sense.
Check one another’s work. Since we all make mistakes and it’s hard
to see our own mistakes, we can really do quality work only if someone else can check that work with us. Have your team check your work. Then ask if you can check theirs. Make it an impersonal rule— everything goes past two pairs of eyes before it leaves the office.
Keep the checking independent. If people check their own work or if the systems for checking work are the same as the systems for doing work, then assumptions creep into both the work process and the checking process. Then work passes tests, but fails in reality because our assumptions were wrong.
Review frequently. In addition to doing good work all the way through, create gate reviews to check work frequently.
Allow time for checking and fixing. Build into your project plan time and money for testing, fixing, and retesting.
Quality comes from team-
work plus individual excellence.
Defining Quality
The biggest challenge to defining quality is that people will tell you that you shouldn’t spend so much time planning, that you should just get to work. But the truth is that high quality from the beginning saves money. Many people think that quality is expensive. The opposite is true: mistakes are expensive. When we focus on quality from the beginning, we can make fewer mistakes, reducing total project cost and shortening the schedule. We deliver better results with less rework, sooner, while spending less money.
The basic process for defining quality was described in Chapter 6, What Are We Making? To add the element of quality, we change the question from “What are we making?” to “What will make it good?” We need to be realistic when we do this. We say to the customer, “Tell us what will make it good, and we’ll put as much of that in as time and money allow.” Within that framework, let the customer dream. Take notes so you can plan to make your customer’s dream a reality. There is no more rewarding way to do business than that.
Don’t think for your cus-
tomer. Listen to your customer.
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Define features that add ben-
efits. Then make a product that delivers those features.
Project Management for Small Business Made Easy
Don’t Write a Blank Check
Even with a focus on quality, we can do only so much given the time and money available for the project. If you just ask, “What makes it good?” you can end up writing a blank check and setting the client’s expectations way too high. Instead, create a reasonable frame for the size of the project you are doing. Give the client some options. Then, in that framework, open up a discussion of how to make it as good as it can be.
As you follow the requirements elicitation process from Chapter 6, add these elements to define quality and prepare for successful quality management:
Collaborate with your customer. Cultivate an attitude of working together to do the best we can do.
Keep the team focused on quality. Get each person excited about doing really great work.
Communicate, check, and document. Most errors in quality creep in because we assume we understood what someone meant. Check everything more than once. Make sure you’re on the same page and
you share the same understanding. And then write it down—in detail.
The key to defining quality is to connect the user benefits that have value to the technical functions that make the product or service work. Customers gain value and experience quality when the tool is right for the job and everything runs smoothly from beginning to end. So we design quality in from the top down, defining what adds benefit for the customer and then making sure it works the way it is supposed to.
Everything I’ve said here works just the same way for an internal project inside your company as it does when you’re doing work for your customers. It is even the same if you’re doing this project just for yourself. Treat yourself and your company as a customer. Make sure that any project—even an internal one—will deliver hassle-free benefits.
Make the connection from value to benefits to features to specifications and write that down in your plan. When you’ve done that, you’ve defined quality. Then you’re ready to plan for quality.
When you’ve defined the quality of the product or service—the project results—bring quality definition to a close by doing the following:
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Making It Good
Getting Better at Being Good
There’s an old-fashioned value that underlies quality—humility. These days, humility is a willingness to learn. We can learn from four sources:
Our own successes. If we are humble enough to realize that doing something right once means we won’t always get it right, then we write down our good methods so that we can succeed again and again.
Our own mistakes. If we are willing to look closely at our mistakes without blame, then we can see what we did wrong and change our methods to do better next time.
The successes of others. In every industry, there are best practices to learn. Take other people’s good ideas and make them work for you!
The mistakes of others. If we are humble enough to realize that we will make the same mistakes other people make, then we can learn from where others have slipped and get ahead.
The Lesson: If we want to do better, we can learn from everyone and everything we do.
Write up, review, and get commitment on a detailed product description that defines value, benefits, features, and technical specifications.
Ask, “What will the customer need to be able to use this well?” Include instructions, training, and anything else that will make this work.
Consider project factors other than the resulting product. What delivery date, budget, work schedule, and ways of working will make this a quality experience for the project team?
Add all of this to your plan.
Planning for Quality
Once we have a good design and a basic project plan, we can improve that plan—reducing project cost, shortening the schedule, and reducing the risk of failure—by building quality into the plan. Review the simple quality basics at the beginning of this chapter and then add these elements to your project plan.
Review every plan and document. Make sure everything is clear. Ask yourself, “If I set this project aside for six months and did it later,
Assumptions are the death
of quality.
What doesn’t get written down gets forgot-
ten.
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Project Management for Small Business Made Easy
could I read this plan and know exactly what to do?” If there is a team on the project, make sure every member is equally clear about what needs to be done.
Test everything. As each component is built, test its features and functionality. As you put the whole product or service together, test features. Then go beyond that. Test robustness and reliability. Will this thing work when the rubber hits the road? Will it last a long time? Then, with the help of the customer, test benefits. Are you and the customer confident that the project results will add value for the customer—internal or external—for a long time to come? If not, fix it now.
Design tests before you do the work. If we design our tests after we start working, we increase the chances of letting errors slip through.
Check everything using a buddy system. No one can see all of his or her own mistakes. Part of human nature is to see things a certain way—to read what we thought we wrote and to see what we thought we saw. Make it a policy—with no blame—that everyone’s work gets checked by someone else as the project goes along.
Triple-check everything at the gate. Gate reviews are an excellent way to ensure quality. We catch errors before they move on to the next stage, where they cost ten times as much to fix.
Plan enough time for testing, rework, and retesting. Don’t assume that all tests will go well. Allow time to find and fix problems and then to recheck to make sure everything is good before the product goes to the customer.
Use the right people for testing. Some tests require a technical expert. Others require an experienced customer or user. Make sure the right people will be available to do the right tests at the right time.
Keep getting better. During the project, use every gate review and every error you discover as a chance to find root causes, implement permanent preventive solutions, and add to your lessons learned.
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Making It Good
Conclusion: Taking the High Road
For some businesses, quality is an option. Maybe you want to focus on being the least expensive provider or doing the fastest jobs, rather than delivering the best. If that’s the case, then you still benefit by focusing on the quality of your processes—by working smarter to achieve your goals.
But maybe you just want to get by and do a good enough job, instead of a great job. That’s OK, too. But I think you’re missing out on two things. First of all, you’ll face a real challenge if a competitor comes along who does a better job than you do. And, more important, you’re missing out on what I’ve found is one of the biggest joys in life. There is real joy in doing excellent work and real joy in getting better and better at what we do.
I learned that when I was 16 years old, from a pizza-shop owner named Giorgio. I loved pizza and I went hunting for the best pizza in Washington, DC. It was at Giorgio’s. He used good ingredients. He loved what he did. He made each pizza with care. When Giorgio left the city and sold his business, I learned a valuable lesson. The people who bought his business kept his equipment, his recipe, and his ingredients. But they just didn’t care about pizza. Giorgio’s pizza got better every day, because he kept caring. The new owners made a pizza that just wasn’t worth eating.
I hope you’ll focus on quality, doing better every day for your customer and your business.
Quality brings joy to our
work and success to our customers.
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Chapter 9
Making Sure the
Job Gets Done
BY NOW, OUR PLAN PROBABLY SEEMS PRETTY NEAR PERFECT. AND IT IS
very good—as far as it goes. So now we have to pay attention to the stuff we can’t plan for. In Chapter 8, we saw how we bring errors under control with quality management. Here in Chapter 9, we make sure the job gets done by bringing uncertainty under
control with risk management.
If there’s one thing that we can be sure of, it is that the future is uncertain. That means things will not always go as planned. In project risk management, we face that uncertainty and deal with it.
We could say that project risk management involves expecting the unexpected, but it is more than that. We need to expect the unexpected, but then we also need to plan for it and then do something about it. And we also need to be ready for events that are unexpected in spite of all of our planning. This gives rise to some basic ideas of risk management:
About the only thing we can be sure of is that things will not go exactly according to plan.
We are better off thinking of what might happen and preparing for it than we are being caught off guard.
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