Project Management Basics

For successful project delivery, an organization needs to establish project management standards and processes.  It is key to understand how your organization manages projects today and how they want to manage projects in the future.  The organization or Project Management Office (PMO) must define the steps and roles needed for successful project selection, initiation, planning, execution, control, and closing.  As the organization increases in maturity, selecting best practices to create standard templates will increase project efficiency because you won’t have to create everything from scratch.  A collaborative project workspace, project oversight (Governance or a Steering Committee), and clear paths for communications will also provide more project delivery successes.

The key to providing the right solution is to be able to articulate what goals your organization is trying to achieve, how you want to achieve these goals, the current skills of your personnel, and the environment you are working in.  Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to plan for the future and make the changes necessary to increase your organization’s project delivery maturity.

Project management must be viewed as a discipline in the same way the organization views product management and the organization must understand what is needed for successful project completion.  With this knowledge and the backing of the senior leaders of the organization, the chances for project success increase dramatically.  As your successes grow and your organization increases in maturity, the project delivery processes can be further defined using successes to become more consistent and repeatable; allowing for on time, on budget project planning and execution, increased customer satisfaction, increased employee job satisfaction, and a greater return on your project investment.

The first step for this process is to gather a group of thought leaders to define and document one of your successful projects.  What made it successful?  How was it organized?  Some of the outcomes of the group should be a clear process for project delivery including:

• Defined phases (may vary for different types or sizes of projects)
• Success criteria for each phase.
• Activities needed for each phase (again, may be vary with project type and size).  Keep your methodologies simple and clear.  If you have to provide a lot of explanation for your methodology, you need to change it to make it easier.  It should represent how you achieve project success.  Many times, I have been asked to fix methodologies fashioned after those of a consulting firm or made by high-paid consultants.  Most were way above the maturity level of the organization or looked like the highway system in Los Angeles.  Keep things simple if your want your organization to succeed.  Your project methodology, like your organization vision, should be almost intuitive…keep it simple.  
• Exit criteria for each phase to be given as checklists or gate criteria.
• Defined roles and responsibilities
• Named deliverable by phase, activity, and with role responsibility.  As your process matures, successful documents and other deliverables can be submitted to be used as templates.  Team involvement in this process brings the greatest organizational success.  It is critical to identify ownership for the deliverables along with who contributes to the completion of the deliverable.   

A key criterion for successful project delivery is a clear path for communication and lots of it.  Project team members must be a part of the planning process and know their role for project achievement.  If you have a Governance group for project prioritization and selection, the standards should be communicated to everyone in the organization.  Project status should be communicated to all stakeholders and the opportunity for feedback should be open at all levels. 

Another criterion for project success is training or knowledge.  Everyone in the project team should know the basics of project management and should be comfortable with the terms and processes needed to succeed in the environment.  Knowledge of terms such as requirements, scope, schedule, risks, issues, change management, resource management, and cost management should be consistent and pervasive.  Knowledge of what it takes to gather requirements, validate them, turn them into a scope document, use cases, test cases, and a test plan must be understood by everyone.

The last criterion for project success is the ability to collaborate.  The term is almost overused today, but is still very valid in the project environment.  The team must have the ability to share information, work together on deliverables, increase proximity; either virtually or physically, and operate as a real team with clear goals to achieve success.  In some cases, the only way to have real collaboration is to provide a tool for the team.  If you are going to choose a tool for the team, be sure it is aimed at their maturity level and will provide them the ability to get their work done, not get in the way of completing their work.  I have seen a lot of project management software installed, only to quickly gather dust because of lack of use.  The most common mistakes I have seen are:

• The solutions were purchased to provide information for executives instead of a tool to aid in the delivery of projects.  Executives will get their information if the project team wants to and can use the tool.  
• It takes a PhD to use the tool.  I have seen a number of tools where it was very clear to me the developer had no idea what a project manager or project team was trying to accomplish.  Worse yet, it takes 15 screens to enter a task.  The project team votes on the tool success by how successfully they can use the tool.  If they can’t or don’t want to use it, the tool will not succeed. 

If your organization can sit down and define what I have laid out above, it will succeed.  I will provide more in subsequent blogs.