By Louise Worsley
If you are going on a journey, it’s a good idea to know where you are going and how to recognize when you’ve got there. Might sound obvious, but many projects fail even that simple test. You really do need to know:
- Purpose of the project: the problem or opportunity it is addressing
- Value of the project: why is it worth doing—and to whom?
- Objective: what “good looks like”—how to know the project has completed successfully
- Scope: what the project is expected to deliver in terms of physical things
- Critical success factors (CSFs): what has to be in place for success
- Risks: what are the main threats to the success of the project
These are six distinct and different aspects of the project, and failure is much more likely if one or more of them is not known, or, which is more common, they are conflated and confused with each other. The usual culprit is a statement that purports to be an objective, but which is, in fact, a hotchpotch of scope statements, activities, benefits and other outcomes.
The Six Faces of a Project Plan
The six aspects of the project plan are like six faces on a beachball. If you are close into the beachball then you are only going to see three of the faces. In this beachball we see the faces that the sponsor or client is likely to (or at least ought to!) focus on.
And here is our technical specialist or planners view of the beachball. The tendency to over-focus on some aspects of the plan is an example of the ‘magpie effect’, in which our attention is drawn to those things that matter most to us, often to the exclusion of other views of the world.
One of the critical roles of project managers is to ensures that each aspect – each face of the beachball gets the attention it requires. That means ensuring that each of the stakeholders in the project get the space and time to engage in the planning process.
Effective Project Initiation Workshops
One of the biggest decisions that a project manager takes is who to have in the room and be involved in the early stages of initiation.
To get at the problem-objective-value side of the beachball, the first one or two project initiation workshops (PIWs) are for the key stakeholders. They need to engage. The project manager should attend, of course, and possibly other project team members, but they are observers, not contributors.Now is not their time. Too often we see projects falter as technical specialists drive these early workshops into discussions about solutions – what we can and can’t do – rather than what is wanted and valued.
It is quite likely you will find that despite the best efforts of a facilitator, client stakeholders will drift off into discussing solutions, their preferences, and even how to run the project! All of which is fine and should be recorded, however, the focus of these workshops is the outcomes; a domain wholly owned by the stakeholders. Its purpose is to determine what the project has to achieve. It’s not that other comments and observations will be ignored; necessarily. Such comments by stakeholders maybe fundamental success criteria for the emerging project. So, all ideas should be captured in the appropriate place around the beachball. These will be for discussion and review later.
The process of establishing answers to the three questions posed: ‘Why do it?’, ‘Why is it valuable, and to whom?’, and ‘What does success look like?’ may take several iterations before everybody is happy with the wording. We remember, with some delight, going through this process for a project in Ireland–it was the changeover to the Euro currency in a large bank. After a particularly tense workshop the sponsor, a senior manager in the bank commented, “To be sure, this clarity is a terrible thing.” We like to think he meant it in a good way!
Maintaining the plan-to-execution link
Now we have an agreement on the six faces of the project plan. What the world is to be like at the end of the project is understood, and why it is important to succeed, as well as what it is worth and to whom. In most cases, the basis for the solution is also agreed. All there is left to do, is to ensure that the money and effort expended, is structured, sequenced, and demonstrably connected back to the desired outcomes.
The next stage is to work out how to provide the outputs, what tasks to perform, by whom, and in what order. Now the project managers will be very much focused on another group of stakeholders – those involved in the delivery of the solution. But how to make sure that these agendas, this effort remains connected to achieving the stakeholder-required outcomes.
Connecting the ideas and actions, translating the vision of the stakeholders to the mundane actions of a project is the fundamental purpose of project management. And it is a common source of project failure. To address this, CITI, a UK based Consulting Service, developed the CITI Mission Model™. It is used to capture the six perspectives – the six sides of the beachball, and then links them through a ‘bridge’ to the tasks, resources and schedule of an executing project. Maintaining the bridge is the real role of all the project governance structures.
About the author:
Louise Worsley, with her husband, Christopher Worsley, are the authors of “The Lost Art of Planning Projects”, published in February 2019. Planning to good purpose – planning how to manage successful projects in terms of delivering to the stakeholders’ expectations, is the subject of the book. Based on case studies, it analyses how best to plan under different situations, when and how to plan a project, when you have to use programme planning, and what the role of a portfolio manager really is.
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