Use Pick and Mix To Manage Your Project

Every project is unique.

A project manager needs to recognize what is unique about the project they are managing and adapt their project management to the uniqueness of the effort.

The wheel exists.
A project manager should have a selection of wheels to choose from and the tools to adjust them. Pick your project management tools for the job. Mix elements from different methodologies. Adapt the existing and use a pick and mix methodology for your project.

What is the personality of your project?

  • Is your project large or small?
  • Is highly visible project, e.g. followed by upper-management.
  • How urgent are the project’s results?
  • How many people are involved?
  • How many people are affected?
  • Who are the sponsors? What are their reporting expectations?
  • Who are the key stakeholders? What are their reporting expectations?
  • How many teams are involved? for, example: a business team from accounting, another business team from accounts payable, a project management team, a development team… More teams means more documentation, more communication and a more formal project environment.
  • Have project team members worked together before? In projects? How long?

Use personality of the project to choose your tools. Is it a conservative project expecting a very formal environment? Is it a quick moving, exciting project that likes simplified processes and quick decisions/approvals?

Do not forget project management!
Simplifying processes does not mean eliminating them all together. Small informal projects still need some formal processes. Your relationship with the project is formal regardless of its personality. You are the project manager!

What are the management constraints of your project?
Almost all projects will have some imposed tools  These can come from corporate methodologies, department reporting, Project Management Office standards, contractual obligations etc.

Even with imposed tools, the project manager can often choose how the tools are used. For example: Your organization requires you to submit and get approval for changes with a specific template. Will you ask for approval with a formal presentation to a steering committee? Or, will you drop by the project sponsor’s office and have them quickly sign-off on the changes? Or?

Pick and Mix.
Manage your project’s uniqueness by picking what tools to use and how to use them according to its unique personality.

The Best Plans Are Incomplete Plans

Use rolling wave planning and plan your near term activities in detail while approximating the activities that are further out.

The project manager is not a fortune teller.
Immediate next steps are easy to see and schedule. The further out you look, the blurrier the view. It is almost impossible to plan and schedule in detail activities that are to take place months in the future.

The first plans are presented at the beginning of the project. The sponsor may even request a plan to establish the project’s budget before the project is officially initiated. The common solution to the challenge of preparing a plan before all the facts are known, is to prepare the plan using high-level estimates of schedule, budget, and scope.

Rolling wave planning acknowledges that the future is hard to predict and uses higher level estimates of schedule, budget, and scope for the activities later in the plan.

Elaborate in waves.
Rolling wave planning is a type of progressive elaboration. There is more and newer information available as the project progresses, and as it progresses, you start new waves of planning, breaking your higher level plan down into more details.

Make the details match your vision.
Your planning should go beyond detailed and high-level. There are activities in between these two extremes and you should break them down to the level of detail that is visible. Your plan should have a progressive level detail matching the progressive visibility of upcoming activities.

Related:
Rolling wave planning
Progressive Elaboration vs Rolling Wave Planning and Prototyping

What Does Success Look Like?

You cannot achieve success if you do not know what it looks like.

Paint a picture of how things will be when the project is delivered.
Define specifically what you expect the project to deliver.

What are the goals the project is aiming to achieve? What are the benefits if these goals are achieved?

What will change as a result of the project? Look at the difference between what will be and what is; between the ideal and the actual situation.

What processes will change? Are there new processes?

What are the effects and impacts of the project’s results?

Are you succeeding?
Too often project managers define success as on time, on budget, and meeting the requirements. It is just as important to understand the expected value of the project. Measure progress in terms of the success picture.

Include metrics and measure the value the project is delivering.

Compare what you are delivering with the “will be” that you defined?

Look for the changes to the processes.

Check if the deliverables are affecting and impacting business in the expected manner.

Blindly delivering the project on time, on budget, and meeting all the requirements does not make the project a success. Your customer will consider it a failure if it doesn’t deliver the expected business value.

How To Plan A Project With One Question

“What’s next?” is a question to ask others and a question to ask yourself when planning a project. Ask it and keep on asking it after every answer. String the next actions together and you have a complete project.

What’s next?
If you cannot identify a next action, the problem is not correctly or completely defined. If you do not know what is next, the next action is to find out where to get more information about the problem.

The first answer is not always the right answer.
You are starting a new project and you tell yourself the first step is to prepare the project charter. This is not the next step because you cannot prepare the charter without knowing what the objective of the project is. The real next step is to schedule a meeting with the sponsor. Ask if you can do the next action or do you need to do something before.

What are you doing?
Is there an action in your next step? Do you know who needs to do what? The next step needs to describe someone doing something specific. “Call the sponsor”; “meet the sponsor”; “the sponsor approves the charter” are clear actions describing who needs to do what. “Initiate the project” does not say what needs to be done for project initiation and it is not clear whether its you or the sponsor who does the initiation.

What is the result?
The magic word here is “to”. What is the action going to produce. You are calling the sponsor to schedule a meeting. You are meeting the sponsor to get the objective of the project. The sponsor approves the charter to initiate the project.

When do you do it?
Make a date for your actions. Give them deadlines. “Call the sponsor on Tuesday”; “Meet with the sponsor before Thursday”; “The sponsor approves the charter by Friday.”

Put it all together.
You now have everything you need to plan your project. You have deliverables; you have a list of discreet tasks; you have the resources needed and you have the dates when the actions need to be done.

Don’t Get To The Point, Start With It

Start your communications with the Bottom Line Up Front.

There is a lot of communication in a project. It is only one part of the communications going on in today’s workplace. Put yourself in the place of the reader. They have hundreds of emails, with or without attachments, to read. They have reports to review and all sorts of other communications coming at them.

Have you ever missed the point of a conversation because while you were busy wishing the other person would get to the point, you suddenly realize that they have finished speaking.

How many times have you heard, or said, “I read your email, I missed that question?”

The reader will look at your communication and try to quickly decide if they need to read it completely. They skim through to pick up a few facts. They look to see if there is anything important.

If the objective is buried at the in the middle or lost at the end, there is a good chance your message gets lost. Do not assume that the reader will get beyond the first line. In other words, and using the military acronym for Bottom Line Up Front, begin with the BLUF and make sure the message gets through.

What is the purpose of your communication? Are you asking for a meeting? Do you need a decision? Is it an update?

Start with the reason for the communication and grab your audience’s attention. It’s like a good first line to novel, you read it and you want to continue reading. Begin with “I would like to meet to discuss …” and the reader will read on to find out what the meetings about. “I am requesting your approval for …” will get the person to continue and find out what they are being asked to approve. Put the project status in the first line and the details are needed to put the status into context.

Beginning all your communication with the objective of will help you communicate crisply and business like. You are no longer telling a long stories. Starting with the request for a meeting will help you focus on what the meeting is for. Asking for an approval upfront will make you describe the choice to make and a status needs supporting facts.

Saying that something was said in the project communication may cover your responsibilities. Using BLUF to ensure that your messages are heard among all the noise will help make the project a success.