According to KPMG's International 2002-2003 Programme Management Survey, the average cost of project failure world-wide for the past 12 months was 10.4 Million US dollar. One top reason for project failures is poor project management. It is very evident that successful projects cannot happen by chance. We definitely need to design and organize projects for success. Based on our experience, here are the Ten Golden Rules of Organizing Projects for Success.
Golden Rule 1: Start with the Real Business/Organization Needs
We believe that no projects should start without a real business/organization needs. Effective executives only launch projects when they see true opportunities or real problems/issues the organization is facing. A good way to identify problems or opportunities is through measuring the gaps between your organization’s goals and your current status. If you see there are significant gaps between these measurements, there is a good reason to launch projects to close those gaps.
Here, we urge you to speak with data. Don’t say our market share is declining, but say our market share is declined by 20% in Asia Pacific market. Don’t say we want to capture market share in digital personal entertainment market, but say we want to capture at least 30% market share in digital personal entertainment market for “Generation i” consumers worldwide. Those gaps (between your target vs. actual) will objectively indicate the areas that you have to pay your most serious attentions.
Golden Rule 2: Formulate Creative Solutions (Projects) to Close the Gaps
We define projects as “Project is a unique solution delivered within a defined time to address a specific need (problem/opportunity).” Therefore, one of the prerequisite of successful projects is that the solutions (projects) must be unique and creative. Creativity plays a big part in project design. Take for example; Apple Corporation has successfully launched a series of innovative iPod mp3 music players to seize opportunities in digital personal entertainment market. The more unique and creative your project is the more it is staging for success.
It is also important that you really address the underlying issues/opportunities that can give you maximum pay off. For example, if you want to improve your order lead time – you may either change your manufacturing line layout or implement a better order scheduling system. Carefully evaluate first, which options shall better address your needs and select the best option (project).
Golden Rule 3: Conduct the Feasibility Study by Measuring both the Project Achievability and Benefits
It is extremely important to measure both the achievability and benefits when you select the options (projects) to address your business needs. It is also called doing the project feasibility study. Basically, it simply answers two key questions: “Can we do it? (achievability)” and “Should we do it (benefits)?”.
There are a number of ways that we can measure the project benefits. The most common methods are financial indicators like Net Present Value (NVP), Benefit/Cost Ratio (BCR), Pay Back Period, Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and Return on Investment (ROI).
As for the achievability, do an overall project risk analysis. Critical project parameters like financial commitments, stakeholders’ readiness, project complexity, and availability of capable resources should be carefully assessed. If your project has high benefit and high achievability, then you should give a green light and go ahead with your project.
Golden Rule 4: Know Your Project Stakeholders and Engage Them Early
Project stakeholders are those who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected by execution or completion (outcome) of the project.
We recommend that you identify all your project stakeholders and classify them according to their influence and interest to the project. If both their influence and interest to the project is high, they are project key stakeholders.
As a golden rule, we must engage project key stakeholder early and get them involved in project requirements definition. Requirement surveys, interviews, prototyping, focus group meetings, management walkthrough, project discussion forums (blogs), project boot-camp and other stakeholder engagement methods can be utilized as necessary to ensure that you have captured the needs, wants, and expectations of your project stakeholders as early as possible.
Golden Rule 5: Define Clear and Measureable Project Mission/Purpose
All projects are launched for a purpose – that is to address problems or seize opportunities within a specific timeline. Define a clear and measureable project mission/purpose. A good project mission answers both what and why of the project. The project stakeholders must be able to visualize “What is the final project outcome?” as well as “Why we are doing this project?”. For example, a good project mission could state as “Launch three-liter car that runs 100km on three liters of fuel by 2010 to improve fuel economy and cut green house gas emission.”
Golden Rule 6: Have a Capable and Committed Project Team in Place
A project mission is just an empty statement unless you have a capable and committed team in-place to carry out the mission. The project sponsor, project manager and core team members who have shared goals and commitments are absolute necessary for the successful completion of the project. The organization must ensure that the project team has the capability, budget, time and other necessary resources to plan and execute the project. Develop a project team charter to ensure the clarity of project purpose, roles & responsibilities, accountability and ownership.
Golden Rule 7: Do Project Planning, Use Manageable Project Phase Approach
There is a saying that “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Get your project core team involved in the project planning activities. Make sure you answers 5Ws (What, Why, Where, When, Who) and 2H (How, How Many) after the project planning is completed. Key components in the project planning are: measurable project objectives, strategies or approaches to achieve them, detailed list of deliverables and tasks, resources needed to perform the tasks, assigned list of owners who will carry out the tasks, tasks’ duration and cost estimates, a workable project schedule showing the inter-dependencies among various project tasks, list of major risks and associated response plan to mitigate them, and an executable communication plan. Remember there is no shortcut to success.
As a golden rule, we suggest that you structure the project, especially for complex projects, into more manageable phases to minimize risk. You don’t have to plan the project rigidly all the way to the end – it is especially difficult to do when you are dealing with highly novel and uncertain projects. On the other hand, it is always possible to achieve project end goals in phases. This means keeping each project phase more manageable, trying to deliver specific results in less than 90 days, and evaluating next steps at the end of a project phase. With large projects, often project stakeholders’ needs change during the middle of the project. If that happen, relevancy can be impacted, focus lost or other issues can impinge upon the ability to deliver the project. In other cases, the initial implementation provides new information that may influence the final project outcome. In all cases, breaking projects up into something easily digestible allows one to maintain focus on final project mission while delivering tangible results for project stakeholders every 90 days.
Golden Rule 8: Manage Schedule, Cost, Risks, Issues, and Change
One of the big challenges that the project manager face is to keep the project on-schedule. To overcome this, first project managers must have a list of tasks with reliable duration estimates and committed task owners. A good planning will always pay-off in managing your project schedule. Project manager must also aware of inter-dependencies among various project tasks and manage closely on all those tasks that are on the longest path of the project (we call it the Critical Path) because when one delays the task on the critical path, it will delay the project. Don’t let your project team members put individual task buffers (they call it contingencies) to their respective tasks jut to be safe for themselves. Instead, pool those individual buffers into a project buffer – cut it down to 50% of the total and place it at the end of the critical path (we can call it a realistic project contingency for Murphy or Risks). This is the best way to manage schedule uncertainty and you will see that your project can complete faster with this approach.
Project manager must also monitor the project risks throughout the project and execute risk mitigation actions to reduce the project risks. There are a thousand things that can go wrong in project and it makes a good management sense that those risks with high impact and probability must be proactively identified and managed. Project must have an active risk log to manage all key risks. Appoint risk owners by risk category.
Another good tool that is very practical in managing projects is to list key project issues in an issue log. Anyone who is doing the project in a real world knows that projects are bound to face issues and problems. Identify all those key issues as they happen and list them down in the issue log. Prioritize the issues (using Important and Urgent matrix) and assign the owners with specific deadlines to address them.
Projects are bound to face changes. Project customers/sponsors requesting a change here and there is something that always happen. The first good step in managing change in project is to assess the impact of change on project objectives. Identify both positive and negative impact of the change and accept only those changes that are beneficial to the project and reject all changes that will give negative impact overall. Putting in-place a change control process and making it known among the project key stakeholders will definitely help in preventing unnecessary changes and keeping the project schedule and budget under control.
As for managing project cost, identify major cost drivers (for example, it could be a major piece of equipment and associated shipping charges) of your projects and have reliable cost estimates. Project costs are best tracked and managed at the individual work package level. Make sure individual task/work package owners are aware of the cost budget and mange to complete their assign work within the acceptable cost tolerance. Putting in place change control processes always help in managing your cost since we are preventing unnecessary and costly changes from happening. Last but not least, have a contingency budget for your project for those unknown risks that could happen. The project contingency budget could typically vary from 5% to 30% depending on the types and complexity of projects. Basically, the more unknown/uncertainty factors are there in projects, the higher the needs for contingency budget.
Golden Rule 9: Continuously Manage Project Stakeholders
The project involved many stakeholders with differing interests, personalities and motivations. Project manager must continuously engage and mange the project stakeholders especially when they are the project key stakeholders. One of the biggest pitfalls in project management is treating project stakeholder management process as static and unchanging. In reality, project stakeholder management process is dynamic and changing. You could have new project stakeholders appear in your project radar or old stakeholders/supporters disappear. Another factor is both the interest and influence level of project stakeholders could also vary throughout the project. Previously identified as unimportant stakeholders may become very important stakeholders because either their interest or power level has changed.
The key to stakeholder management is Engage, Communicate, and Deliver Benefits! The needs and expectations of project stakeholders must be proactively identified and their issues/concerns must be addressed promptly.
Golden Rule 10: Measure Results, Capture Your Lessons Learned, and Institutionalize
Congratulations! You have finally arrived at a successful project completion since you practice the above nine golden rules. Well, don’t jump to your feet and go home yet! The last and most important golden rule in project management is to systematically measure your project results against your stated goals. Evaluate your project results to capture lessons learned so that you can continuously improve your project management capabilities. As a golden rule, we suggest that you capture three types of lessons, The Good (things that you do really well and should be repeated in future projects), The Bad (things that you could have done better and will be done differently in future projects), and finally The Ugly (things that went so wrong that you shall never ever repeat them in your future projects). Capture and review those invaluable lessons that you have learned in your project and share them with key stakeholders for organizational learning. These lessons learned should trigger improvement actions that you can do to improve your future project performance. A wise man is not the one who never makes mistakes but the one who learn form his/her mistakes and take improvement actions. Make sure that project sponsor or customer has officially accepted your project’s product/service/results and committed to sustaining and further improvement of it. Appropriate training, education, ownership and reflection on improvements are all very important steps in project closing. This process is called “I - institutionalization” stage of the project. Proper execution of “I” stage will make sure that the project’s end results will be sustained and continuously improved further.
Well, the above are ten golden rule of organizing projects for success. We hope you found them useful in managing your projects. Wish you all the best with your project endeavors!
Naing Moe Aung, PMP, M. Eng.
PROJECT DECISION
About the author
No comments:
Post a Comment