Project Management for Dummies

Chapter 1 Project Management: The Key to Achieving Results AL RI In This Chapter TE ▶ Understanding what makes a project a project ▶ Seeing what’s involved in project management MA ▶ Coming to grips with the Project Manager’s role ▶ Knowing what it takes to be a successful Project Manager D O TE rganisations are constantly changing, and ever faster, as they adapt to new market conditions, new financial conditions, new business prac- tices, new legal requirements and new technology. Running projects often GH creates the change, and as a result businesses are increasingly driven to find individuals who can excel in this project-oriented environment. RI Taking on a Project PY Because you’re reading this book, the chances are that you’ve been asked CO to manage a project for the first time or that you’re already running projects and are looking to see whether you can find easier and better ways of doing things. If the project is indeed your first one, that’s a challenge and may well give you the chance to excel in something you haven’t done before; for many, managing a project even opens a door to a new career. Try not to think of project management as a career death threat, even if others do and they now avoid looking you in the eye when passing you in the corridor. The really good news here, whether you’re completely new or have some experience, is that project management has been around for a very long time. In that time, Project Managers have come up with highly effective strategies and a range of very practical techniques. You can benefit from all that experience, and this book takes you through all you need to know. So, hang on tight – you’re going to need an effective set of skills and tech- niques to steer your projects to successful completion. This chapter gets you 10 Part I: Understanding Projects and What You Want to Achieve off to a great start by showing you what projects and project management really are and by helping you separate projects from non-project assign- ments. The chapter also offers some insight on why projects succeed or fail and starts to get you into the project management mindset. Avoiding the Pitfalls By following a sound approach to the project, you automatically avoid many of the pitfalls that continue to contribute to, or cause, project failure on a mind-boggling scale. You may ask why, if good ways of doing things exist, people ignore them and then have their projects fail. Good question. People make the same project mistakes repeatedly, and they’re largely avoidable. You may have come across the joke by comedian Tommy Cooper: I went to the doctor and said ‘Every time I do this, it hurts.’ The doctor said, ‘Well, don’t do it then.’ A national public project run in the UK to create a database of offenders for use by the Prison Service, Probation Service and others has attracted heavy criticism for poor management. The National Audit Office, which checks up on government departments, investigated and reported that the project was delayed by three years, and the budget was double the original, but the scope had been radically cut back. Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the powerful Public Accounts Committee in Parliament described the scheme as a ‘spec- tacular failure’ and ‘a master-class in sloppy project management’. The following list takes a quick look at the main causes of project failure (we address each of these causes in later chapters in the book). The list makes for depressing reading, particularly if you recognise some elements in parts of your own organisation. Nevertheless, the list gives a good background against which to contrast successful project management and the approach and techniques that we set down in this book. ✓ Lack of clear objectives: Nobody’s really sure what the project is about, much less are people agreed on it. ✓ Lack of risk management: Things go wrong that someone could easily have foreseen and then controlled to some degree or even prevented. ✓ No senior management ‘buy in’: Senior managers were never convinced and so never supported the project, leading to problems such as lack of resource. Neither did those managers exercise normal management supervision as they routinely do in their other areas of responsibility. ✓ Poor planning: Actually, that’s being kind, because often the problem is that no planning was done at all. It’s not surprising, then, when things run out of control, and not least because nobody knows where the project should be at this point anyway. Chapter 1: Project Management: The Key to Achieving Results 11 ✓ No clear progress milestones: This follows on from poor planning. The lack of milestones means nobody sees when things are off track, and problems go unnoticed for a long time. ✓ Understated scope: The scope and the Project Plan are superficial and understate both what the project needs to deliver and the resource needed to deliver it. Project staff (often team members) then discover the hidden but essential components later in the project. The additional work that is necessary then takes the project out of control, causing delay to the original schedule and overspending against the original budget. ✓ Poor communications: So many projects fail because of communication breakdown, which can stem from unclear roles and responsibilities and from poor senior management attitudes, such as not wanting to hear bad news. ✓ Unrealistic resource levels: It just isn’t possible to do a project of the required scope with such a small amount of resource – staff, money or both. ✓ Unrealistic timescales: The project just can’t deliver by the required time, so it’s doomed to failure. ✓ No change control: People add in things bit by bit – scope creep. Then it dawns on everyone that the project’s grown so big that it can’t be deliv- ered within the fixed budget or by the set deadline. That’s ten reasons for failure, but you can probably think of a few more. The interesting thing about these problems is that avoiding them is, for the most part, actually not that difficult. Deciding Whether the Job Is Really a Project Before you start to think too deeply about how to set up the project, the first thing to do is check whether it really is one. No matter what your job is, you handle a myriad of assignments every day: prepare a memo, hold a meeting, design a sales campaign or move to new offices. Not all these assignments are projects. So what makes something a project? You can consider three easy areas to determine whether a job is a project: ✓ Is it a one-off job or something that’s ongoing? If the job is ongoing, like producing bars of soap on a production line or taking customer orders, then it’s business as usual, not a project. ✓ Does the job justify project controls? Project management means incur- ring some overheads, although in this book we offer advice on how to 12 Part I: Understanding Projects and What You Want to Achieve keep overheads to the minimum. But the fact remains that overheads exist and some jobs are so small or straightforward that they just don’t justify that degree of control. ✓ This last one may sound a little weird, and it certainly doesn’t fit with the formal definitions; it’s the question, ‘Do you want to handle the job as a project?’ You may choose to deal with a block of work as a project, but I wouldn’t – so, in some instances, you have a choice. Understanding the four control areas Different project approaches have slightly different definitions of a project; here’s one: A project is a temporary undertaking performed to produce a unique product, service or result. The ‘unique product’ is true, but don’t let that put you off setting up projects that are effectively repeated, such as organising the annual company conference. Although, strictly speaking, the task is unique each time, you will nevertheless find large areas of commonality with previous projects, and you don’t need to go and reinvent the wheel. For example, you can probably adapt last year’s plans rather than starting from scratch.