project planning

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Project Management: Planning with Purpose

project planning as a competency

What research shows us, when assessing high performing project managers, is that planning as a competency is always present. We know that the process of estimation and planning is critical to the success of any project. The plan will guide the investment decisions, it tells us about the demand for resources, if work is on track and what functionality (deliverables) can be expected.

In addition to planning, high performing project managers are more likely to have extended personal and professional relationships within and outside their organizations. Not only will this give them more expertise to draw upon (by reaching out to your network), but when they need to interact with stakeholders to further the goals of their projects, they were more likely to have pre-existing relationships to draw upon. 

In her book: “Adaptive project planning” by Louise Worsley, she describes it as ‘social capital’ that experienced project managers build up and value in contrast to less experience project managers who are less likely to do so.

Project Management Professional Journey

Project management professional journey

When looking at the journey of a typical project manager who started out as a novice and has progressed to working on large, complex projects, they seem to progress through 3 distinct stages.

#1 Intuitive

At this stage, they able to coordinate and schedule small projects. People are chosen, because of having good organizing skills, an ability to get things done, and they could be relied upon. There is a recognizable aptitude for project coordination, explaining the phenomena of ‘accidental project managers’. 

The intuitive stage is where junior project managers build their confidence, and they begin to understand what works and what doesn’t. With their intuitive understanding and natural coordination skills, managers will perform well initially but are likely to struggle or even fail, as projects get larger and more complex. When more complex projects are given to them, they may feel ‘stressed,’ unable to cope. They often find the work-load is higher than they can manage.

#2 Methodological stage

At this stage they able to use a publicly repeatable process and plan medium-to-high complexity projects.  

These are processes like PRINCE2 or Project Management Body of Knowledge, from PMI. It is important to take note that applying a specific method to the project, does not guarantee success in its own right. It needs to be accompanied by a build-up of project knowledge and skills and the exposure and learning from experiences in a much larger variety of projects. 

At the methodological levels, for real progression to occur the range of experiences and responsibilities taken on starts to expand. A breadth of experience appears to be the basis upon which judgment is developed. 

#3 Judgmental Stage

At this stage they are able to structure and appropriately select from a variety of approaches to manage complex projects.

With larger and more complex projects, the critical skill is the ability to mix and match approaches. To have the common-sense to use tried and tested practices whenever appropriate, but to have the confidence to step off that path and structure new ways of working when these approaches are just not right.

During this stage, you will focus on big picture understanding and planning becomes part of shaping the engagements.

Matching Project Managers with the Right Projects

Organisations need to attempt to match the skills of the project manager to the complexity of the project. 

At the advanced level, change in behaviors and attitudes are necessary to run more complex projects. At this level, it’s about having experience, conviction of actions and perhaps even bravery. These project managers are working on high profile projects and must be able to face the challenges of operating under the very public scrutiny of many and senior business stakeholders. Their approaches must be backed by the experience and professional understanding which allows them to make judgments about how best to structure the project for successful delivery. These project managers understand that the structure of the project must be adapted to the characteristics of the project. 

One more essential ingredient, based on research, that seems necessary for experienced project/program managers to be successful, is the opportunity to work with a senior manager in the organization (taken under their wing) and having a mentor in the organization in the development of their career.

In conclusion, it is important to remember that project managers need a planning armory which include techniques, tools, tips and tricks. Keep working on using your judgment, and adapting to change in every situation to come up with the best approach to use for each project.

Resources: The Lost Art of Planning Projects, by Louise & Christopher Worsley

The Lost Art of Planning Projects
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10 Ingredients to a Great Project Plan

10 ingredients to a great project plan

When it comes to project planning, I have three beliefs that I adhere to on all my projects. They are:

  1. Always be planning – that means you should be continuously planning
  2. Always be communicating – use consistent communication practices
  3. Always build relationships – team alignment is very important

However, there are more elements to great project planning. That’s why Wrike, a project management software company, is bringing us the right ingredients to cook the perfect project plan. Enjoy!

10 Essential Elements for the Perfect Project Plan (#Infographic)
Infographic brought to you by Wrike
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Review: Tool to Make Project Planning Fast and Enjoyable

By Victoria Zhlobich

Project plans made easier to do and to share

If you are in the market for a software that helps to make project planning and the sharing of those plans really easy, you may like GanttPRO.

GanttPRO is an online Gantt chart software used for project planning, task management, collaboration, team and resource management as well as cost management. The software is highly estimated by professionals thanks to an intuitive UX/UI design, a short learning curve, and robust features. Worldwide 350K+ managers and other project participants already tried the solution and made sure that project planning and management can be fast and enjoyable.

The software is mainly used by teams. However, managers and individuals use it for personal projects and purposes too. The tool has a 14-day free trial with all the features available so that anyone can decide whether GanttPRO is a good fit for them.

The software is able to become a powerful and affordable alternative to Microsoft Project. In case you already planned your project in MS Project, you have a chance to import it to GanttPRO and see for yourself all the advantages.

In GanttPRO, there are ready-made Gantt chart templates designed for a variety of professional spheres: software development, construction, marketing, design, manufacturing, etc. They include typical tasks and offer a typical structure for an easy start. However, templates are fully customizable.

The main benefits of GanttPRO

Transparent task management

Task management in GanttPRO

You can create tasks literally in seconds from one menu defining:

  • Their start and end dates
  • Assignees
  • Dependencies with other tasks
  • Deadlines
  • Progress
  • Status
  • Priority
  • Duration and estimation
  • Completeness
  • Milestones
  • Requirements
  • Colors

All this information is available directly in the task settings menu. In the project grid, you can add columns or hide those you don’t need.

One of the most useful features in GanttPRO that distinguishes it from competitors is the possibility to add Custom columns. They do not limit project participants to certain settings and allow working with personal information available through Text, Number, Date, List, Checkbox, and Color columns.

Team and resource management

Resource Management in GanttPRO

GanttPRO online Gantt chart maker allows working with real team members and virtual resources. Team management is available via email invitations only on the Team plans. At the same time, virtual resources are created just in a few clicks and available even on the Individual plan. If you are not deeply engaged in team management, virtual resources can be a working way-out. The tool offers the following time working units for team and resource management: per hour, per item, and cost.

  • Per hour means that the cost is calculated per hour for a labor resource
  • Per item means that the cost is calculated per item for a material resource
  • Cost is a fixed value with no connections to time and items

GanttPRO makes provision for the following roles: an Owner, an Admin, and a Member.

  • An Owner of a project is in charge of billing and has all the rights on it: he/she adds or removes people, grants rights to edit a project or see costs.
  • An Admin has almost the same rights as an Owner but he/she can’t pay for the subscription.
  • A Member can work only on those tasks that he/she is assigned to. All the rest is not available

Collaboration

Collaboration in GanttPRO allows team members to be fully aware of current updates in tasks. Project participants can:

  • Comment tasks
  • Attach files to them
  • Describe requirements for tasks
  • Mention people
  • Get real-time notifications about changes in tasks they are assigned to.

Export and sharing

Export and sharing on GanttPRO

The Gantt chart software allows having a physical project at hand thanks to the advanced Export feature as well as showcasing plans to third parties thanks to Sharing via URL feature.

Export in GanttPRO is very powerful. On the screen, you can see how your chart will look like after exporting.

You can choose the following options:

  • Format: PDF, PNG, XML, Excel
  • Paper size
  • Orientation
  • Filter
  • Zoom
  • Critical path
  • Today marker
  • Workload
  • Type of columns

Sharing via URL allows presenting to third parties, even not registered in GanttPRO, two states of a plan: a dynamic and static ones.

The dynamic option means that a plan is updated even after sharing when changes happen in a project.

The static option means that a plan remains the same as it has been at the moment of creation. It does not reflect changes.

Conclusion

GanttPRO is a tool for everyone who needs powerful planning, team management, and collaboration. It is all combined with an intuitive interface and an affordable pricing policy.

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What’s Happened to Project Planning?

By Louise Worsley

Appropriate planning of a project is the hallmark of a professional project manager—good planning is what sets apart great projects from failed initiatives. It is what ensures that the executive actions undertaken remain connected to the goals and outcomes expected by the stakeholders. A project plan is a framework for decision making throughout the life of the project. It is hardly surprising then that the significance of planning in projects is much greater than in any other management discipline. 

Is planning still an important skill?

adaptive planning in Agile

Today if you ask a project manager what the most important skill they require for their job is, they are likely to refer to areas such as stakeholder management, communications, leadership, or behavioral competencies. Is this because it is assumed that planning is obviously important and does not need to be mentioned or is it that project managers believe that with the right leadership style, communications and engagement they don’t need planning? Do approaches such as Agile, which expound people over process, deliberately or inadvertently promote the obsolescence of planning? 

After more than 70 years of experience in project management, and working with hundreds of professional, high-performance project managers, we know planning in projects is essential, but have also found the planning discipline to be both underused and misunderstood. Three factors we believe are responsible:

  • Planning is tricky to teach and to learn. Methods and frameworks such as PMI and PRINCE2 discuss processes involved in planning, but neither gives real insights into what a good plan is and what proper planning feels like. The purpose of the planning process is to structure the controllable factors to make the project achievable within the set of success conditions (constraints and critical success factors).
  • Planning is confused with scheduling. We do sometimes wonder if this is deliberate! We note the frequent and common substituting of the one word for the other, and the way sponsors accept Gantt charts when they ask for the project plan. Microsoft Project may or may not be a useful scheduling tool. What it most certainly is not, is a planning tool. What is so saddening is that while every project benefits from having a plan, it is less evident that all need a schedule, and many that have one don’t follow it. 
  • Templates are introduced to standardize and simplify planning. Possibly, in a well-intentioned effort to ease the learning curve for junior project managers and inexperienced sponsors, project management offices provide, promulgate, and sometimes mandate the use of a planning template. While without a doubt there is a single idea behind the need for a project plan, the impact of the differing contexts of projects frustrates the ambition for a single ‘silver bullet’ template. 

There is no single approach to planning

In our research into what makes project managers successful, planning, along with monitoring and control, are the two areas where high-performance project managers spend most of their time. What is also clear from the findings is that the most distinctive characteristic is their ability to use their experience and know-how to adapt their planning approach to meet the specific challenges of the project they were managing.

There is no single approach to planning a project, but neither is project planning a free-for-all. One consistent finding is that the context— the environment within which planning takes place—determines the approach that is most appropriate to use; which techniques and tools are most suitable; and what factors to consider. 

About the Author:

Louise Worsley, with her husband, Christopher Worsley, are the authors of Adaptive Project Planning, published in February 2019.  This book prepares you for many of the common project planning situations you will meet. It addresses how planning and planning decisions alter, depending on the constraint hierarchy: how resource-constrained planning differs from end-date schedule planning, what is different between cost-constrained plans and time-boxing. It also discusses the challenges of integrating different product development life cycles, for example, Agile and waterfall, into a coherent and appropriate plan.

Adaptive Project Planning

Readers of Virtual Project Consulting who buy the book now, will receive a discount of 15% – use buying code WOR2019. Click on the image!

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Are you on a Time-Critical Project?

By Louise Worsley

Time-critical project

Time-constrained projects arise from four external drivers.

  • Window-of-opportunity—the value of completing the project is severely compromised if delivery is late, for example producing a game for the Christmas market
  • Compliance—meeting a legislated delivery date, for instancebecoming compliant with new privacy laws for personal data
  • End-of-life—increased risk of unprotected catastrophic failure caused by using systems and products after their predicted shelf-life, for example using obsolete switching gear
  • Public commitments—exposing the organization to public ridicule or genuine reputational risk, for example, the opening event of the Olympic Games

Sponsor View

In each of these cases, the significance of meeting the end-date varies depending upon the sponsor’s view of the risk exposure, or loss of benefit, they are prepared to countenance. Missing a legislative compliance date may result in a fine, but the sponsor may decide that this is preferable to the additional costs associated with speeding up the delivery of the project. In a time-constrained project, the project manager must understand the sponsor’s position about the date.

Timeboxing

There is a fifth cause of time-constrained projects. It’s called timeboxing.

Notice the often-useful management effects of rigidly maintained time constraints on projects where some software development methodologies—in the old days DSDM and RAD—and now, Agile approaches – deliberately adopt the imposition of rigid time constraints on the product development process.

In the right circumstances and for the right products, a time-boxed approach works. Its value arises from the impact on what management is obliged to implement to meet its obligations driven by the temporal constraint. Done well, and using the time constraint as a driver for innovation in tasking and resourcing, it is a powerful productivity tool.

Implemented poorly, the time constraint becomes an excuse for de-scoping with disappointing results. There are many circumstances where the imposition of an unnecessary time-constraint leads to trouble, including situations where incurring the associated technical debt is unacceptable. Whatever else it may be, timeboxing is not a panacea for every project.

Is your project really time-constrained?

The truth is that less than 20 percent of projects are genuinely end-date driven. Project end-dates are often not deadlines but more like these:

  • Estimated dates: baseline finish dates that have been calculated based on a task-sequencing tool. These vary over the life of the project as the level of certainty around what is to be delivered and how long the tasks will take, fluctuates.
  • Target dates: a date agreed with the sponsor as a target, but with the understanding that it can be renegotiated should it become necessary to do so. Targets are not constraints—–unless, of course, the sponsor makes them so.

And this is important! The target date may be regarded as a deadline, but it is not treated as a drop-dead end-date. It is not the primary driver for the project.

Strategies for Planning Time-Bound Projects

Where an end-date must be met, the planning process changes. For a start, planning under time constraints always demands more effort in planning, not less. It is essential, therefore, that the project manager engages with the stakeholders so that they become aware of this and in so doing resists the just “get on with it” pressure so often applied by them.

If “time is of the essence” for your project; if you need to bring in your project in tight time-scales, then here are just some of the actions you could and should be considering:

Strategy

“Crash” the schedule by adding resources. Remember, more resources and more tasks mean greater monitoring.

Strategy 1

Identify elapsed time delays, those activities which are not compressible using existing processes.

Strategy 2

Identify delays which may be introduced because of decision-making processes.

Strategy 3

Fast-track the schedule—look for ways of breaking dependencies between activities. Remember, parallel tasks increase resources and risks, so increase monitoring.

Strategy 4

Identify resource skills gaps up front

Strategy 5

Communicate and re-communicate the purpose, objective, CSFs, and value of the project throughout the project’s lifecycle

Strategy 6

Identify foreseeable problems (risks)

Strategy 7

Be prepared for unforeseen problems

Tactics

Working with larger numbers of resources influences the way work is structured, scheduled, and communicated. Remember the bigger the team resources; the less productive each member will be.

Develop new processes, which allow products to be delivered faster. Remember new procedures will create new types of errors, and you won’t have prepared ways to correct them. So test and monitor more.

Ensure clarity on who makes what decisions and stick to it. Factor in decision-making; bring governance closer to the project. Delayed issue resolution can kill your project.

Evaluate and manage the additional risks associated with changing the standard dependency structures. Identify management actions; include in plans. Remember to investigate Start-to-Start with lag times sequencing rather the Finish-to-Start serial sequencing.

Whenever a task demands effort from a specific resource, try to eliminate it—it is a significant risk on time-constrained projects. If not possible, make the attaining and managing of that person as a CSF for the project.

Find ways in meetings and one-on-ones to rehearse the mission of the project with every project member —and in the steering group—and keep checking back with the sponsor that nothing has changed.

Log each risk statement with at least one management action associated with it. Most “fix-on-failure” solutions will cost more in time and money than the other four risk strategies. In time-constrained projects, making good is the least favoured option.

Schedule milestones, even inch pebbles. Only schedule at the level of detail that reflects your level of uncertainty. The less you know, the greater the detail! Remember schedules are the most volatile project document. Expect to change it frequently to account for the unplanned circumstances.

Time-constrained Projects are less complex

Time-constrained projects can be tough on teams; they may involve hard work and lots of overtime. However, our research suggests that managerially, they are often less complex. With an understood, agreed and, most importantly, an immovable constraint—a genuine drop-dead deadline end-date—the compromises that have to be made are clear-cut. Either you meet the end-date—or you fail. It is much easier to manage when the conditions of success are clear!  

Adaptive Planning Techniques

In our research into what makes project managers successful, planning, along with monitoring and control, are the two areas where high-performance project managers spend most of their time. What is also clear from the findings is that the most distinctive characteristic is their ability to use their experience and know-how to adapt their planning approach to meet the specific challenges of the project they were managing.

There is no single approach to planning a project, but neither is project planning a free-for-all. One consistent finding is that the context – the environment within which planning takes place – determines the following:

  • approach that is most appropriate to use
  • which techniques and tools are most suitable and
  • what factors to consider. 

The project-planning environment is itself a product of the set of constraints that bound the project, and these constraints involve much more than time, cost and quality. To plan effectively and appropriately project managers must take into account both the source of the constraint and their relative significance or priority – the hierarchy of constraints.

About the Author:

Louise Worsley, with her husband, Christopher Worsley, are the authors of Adaptive Project Planning, published in February 2019.  This book prepares you for many of the common project planning situations you will meet. It addresses how planning and planning decisions alter, depending on the constraint hierarchy: how resource-constrained planning differs from end-date schedule planning, what is different between cost-constrained plans and time-boxing. It also discusses the challenges of integrating different product development life cycles, for example, Agile and waterfall, into a coherent and appropriate plan.

Readers of Virtual Project Consulting who buy the book now, will receive a discount of 15% – use buying code WOR2019. Click below!

Adaptive Project Planning
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Purposeful Planning

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: 

  1. Purpose of the project: the problem or opportunity it is addressing
  2. Value of the project: why is it worth doing—and to whom?
  3. Objective: what “good looks like”—how to know the project has completed successfully
  4. Scope: what the project is expected to deliver in terms of physical things
  5. Critical success factors (CSFs): what has to be in place for success
  6. 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

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.

Six faces of a project plan

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

link between plan and execution

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

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.  

Readers of Virtual Project Consulting, click below!

The Lost Art of Planning Projects


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How to Use a WBS as a Team Build Event

Work Breakdown StructureMost project managers will know that compiling a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is one of the key activities of the Project Planning phase. To discover more about the benefits of a WBS, the different types of WBS and how much time is required to develop the WBS, read Project Planning – Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

The purpose of this article is to show you how you can use the WBS as a team building exercise even though it’s considered to be a regular project activity.

Teamwork

WBS as team buildAs a best practice rule you don’t construct the WBS by yourself, you let the people who are doing the work define the work. Let them see how their deliverables begin to translate to assignable activities. This is an excellent opportunity for building trust and relationships through teamwork.

Invite the appropriate participants. This means someone from each group participating in the project. Since this could be a very long work session or a series of work sessions, try to schedule them with an awareness of your team members’ availability and other work commitments. It is recommended to have refreshments that will fuel the brain power!

Review the scope. If this is the first time the team is hearing the formal scope, this will result in lively discussion. Encourage questions and ‘what-if’ scenarios. Have open discussions about the scope to strengthen communications and achieve alignment among team members.

WBS and Deliverables

Ask individuals to work together to identify the key deliverables. Use the ‘sticky note’ approach. This means that you will give the team post-it notes or similar pieces of paper that can be written on and moved around. This allows the team to write deliverables (and next activities) on paper and position them at various locations on the proposed WBS.

Once the deliverables seem firm, have the team work on the lower levels. Have the group or groups that own each deliverable (or a portion thereof) break the work down further. Encourage detail. You want the end result to be assignable and measurable work.

Make sure that good notes are taken during this session. What we construct during one meeting makes perfect sense at the time. Later, details may be forgotten.

Take some time away from the WBS and then revisit it. Walk through it again and make sure it still makes sense.  Have team members present their sections to the rest of the team for review and discussion. This helps build an understanding of the entire work effort.

Now you have built a traditional work breakdown structure that the team understands and through your work together you have a built a stronger team. That is why WBS can also mean We Build Strength!

WBSCoachIf you are starting with a new project and you have a WBS coming up as part of the project planning, I strongly recommend you look into WBS Coach from PMStudent. What to expect from this course:

  • You will end with a proven and repeatable approach to planning and controlling your projects;
  • You’ll be able to translate what your project sponsor wants into what you and your team must do to meet project objectives
  • You’ll discover how to structure every project so it’s clearly defined.
  • It will make creating your schedule and budget straightforward.

 

Don’t delay, try it out today!

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Project Management: Top 10 Tips for Validating your Project Schedule

By Linky van der Merwe

schedule WBS validation
Link to Schedule Validation Template

This article is aimed at existing project managers who use a scheduling tool like MS Project, or similar to plan their projects and then to execute against the plan.

Use the validation template once the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is transferred to a scheduling tool. The purpose is to validate that the project schedule contains all the necessary WBS elements to complete a project successfully.

#1 Deliverables

Are the key deliverables shown at the highest level of the WBS? If you do all of the detail tasks, will you have completely accomplished the summary deliverable?

#2 Scope and breakdown

Does the WBS represent the entire scope of the project and is it set at the appropriate level for the size and type of project?

#3 Milestones

Are there enough milestones identified and checkpoints when moving from one phase to the next?

#4 Governance

Are governance tasks separated out into their own section? Is there sufficient project management time across entire project?

#5 Structure

Does the WBS map to a methodology and does it make sense within that context?

#6 Estimates

Did the person who is most familiar with the task estimate the task itself? Check the accuracy of the task after the work had been performed.

#7 Risk

Did you document any risks for the tasks?

#8 Dependencies

Are the task dependencies implemented with the correct logic? Does the overall sequence of phases/deliverables make sense?

#9 Resources

Have all the resources been identified in the resource sheet? Is there any duplication of resources?  Are all resources named completely and consistently using a naming convention?

#10 Tasks, assignments, durations

Are there any assignments on summary tasks?  Does each detail task have at least one human resource assigned?

Final validation

It is always a good practice to have your schedule reviewed by an independent party or a senior architect not part of the planning team.

Please click here for the validation template that supports the schedule validation steps.

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Time Management: Gantt Chart as a Planning Tool

By Linky van der Merwe

Most existing project managers would know that Gantt Charts are popular tools to use for a visual presentation of a project schedule. Although numerous software tools make provision for Gantt Charts, the most widely used tool remains Microsoft Project.

For new or aspiring project managers, it’s important to understand that Gantt Charts come about as a result of the Time Management activities in the Planning process on a project.

Schedule Creation

When creating a project schedule, the order of the planning activities is important as explained below:

  1. Define activities by identifying all the specific actions to be performed to produce the project deliverables
  2. Sequence activities by identifying the relationships among project activities.
  3. Estimate activity resources by identifying the type and quantities of material, human resources, equipment etc to perform each activity.
  4. Estimate activity durations by analysing the work effort needed to complete each activity with the estimated resources.
  5. Develop the schedule – this is where activities are documented in a schedule (gantt chart) in the right sequence, with durations, resource assignments and constraints

History of the Gantt Chart

Wrike has created an interesting Infographic to display the origins or timeline of the Gantt Chart, the anatomy and how it’s used, as well as the benefits of using Gantt Charts on projects.

What is a Gantt Chart
Wrike Project Management Software

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Project Planning – Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

By Linky van der Merwe

The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a very important tool at the start of your planning phase.

Once you have defined your project scope, it is necessary to create a work breakdown structure. By definition it’s a tool used to define and group a project’s work elements in a way that helps organize and define the total work scope of the project.

There are many benefits to having a WBS as it provides the project manager and team with a task framework that helps with task scheduling and deriving cost estimates. From the WBS you can also identify the Deliverables and Milestones of your project.

It helps to finalise the project scope and plan the project properly. In addition it will help to outline the project budget and to link deliverables to resources.

Types of WBS

There are different types of WBS depending on the type of project. Have a look at some options:

  1. Use project life cycle phases as the 2nd level and deliverables at the 3rd level
  2. Organised based on major deliverables on 2nd level, tasks to be completed on 3rd level

Work breakdown structure

Benefits of a WBS

A WBS will give the project team confidence in that they are clear on the in-scope activities. A well-defined WBS enables resources to be allocated to specific tasks, helps in generating a meaningful schedule, and makes calculating a reliable budget easier.

The WBS will show well defined tasks that can be assigned to a specific individual, who is then responsible for its completion. It will keep the team focused on the project objectives and make them committed to the goals and completion of the project.

Time required

The development of a WBS can take quite some time. Depending on the complexity of your project, the number of people who must provide input and how large the scope is, it can take hours, if not days and multiple workshops to complete. Once drafted, the WBS will require refinement and it may change as the project changes.

However the advantages of having a WBS far outweigh the challenges of creating it. A good WBS makes planning and executing a project easier and lays the groundwork for the schedule, tracking, budgeting, and accountability. It’s considered project management best practice to have a WBS and as such it’s an essential element of overall planning.

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Project Success Story: National Point of Sales System Upgrade

By Linky van der Merwe

Success Story SharedThis project story from project manager, Anwar Rawoot, is about the migration from a legacy Point of Sales (POS) system to a new POS system at 265 retail stores nationally that took three years to complete.

The complexity was in the fact that the project team only had a 12-hour window from the time a store closed until the next morning it opened to do the replacement, which included network infrastructure, shop fitting, POS and testing. A shop’s data would be migrated overnight and once the new system is in, it was migrated back to the new system.

Challenges

The project’s biggest constraints were that when server problems were experienced, it would take 8 hours to rebuild and in the case of till problems, it would take 3 hours to rebuild.

The way it was executed, was to do one store each night. All work had to be done after hours and there was only one team per region to do the work. They had to sleep during the day and work at night which had a family impact.

Working after hours

The challenge was how to work a 5-day week back-to-back and then an additional 24 hours shift. People became overworked, and the quality of work dropped. Some people even became ill over time. It also took three months to train people to the right level of expertise.

Eventually the plans were changed….. Read on

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Part of the Success Stories Shared initiative to collect Success Stories from experienced project/programme managers in order to share experiences and to promote learning across the project and programme management community. If you would like to share your project story and make a contribution to the bigger project management profession, contact me on linky@virtualprojectconsulting.com

Success Stories Shared
Success Stories Shared

Linky

Planning for Project Success

When looking at Project Planning, an important output of the planning process, is the Project Management Plan. This article will discuss what the Project Management Plan is, why fully understanding the Project Management Plan is essential to both project success and PMP Exam success,  what subsidiary plans and documents are, and once approved how changes are made to the Project Management Plan.

What is the Project Management Plan?

project planningAccording to the PMBOK® Guide, the Project Management Plan is “the document that describes how the project will be executed, monitored, and controlled.” Objectives of the Project Management Plan include documenting assumptions and decisions, communicating how the project will be executed, and documenting high level goals, costs, and milestones. The Project Management Plan is much more than a single document that is created and set aside. It integrates subsidiary plans and documents, it is created during the Planning Process Group and is expected to be updated as the project progresses. It is a living document.

Why the Project Management Plan is essential to both project success and PMP Exam success?

That is because it is the “go to” document used to answer questions during the project, and understanding what kinds of questions it may answer is vital to both project and PMP Exam success.

The Project Management Plan should be able to answer why a project was sponsored and what problem it is expected to resolve or what value the project is expected to add. It should describe the work to be performed and what the major deliverables or products are. It should identify who is involved in the project and what their responsibilities are and how they are organized. It should define how the work is to be executed in order to meet project objectives and how any changes will be monitored and controlled. If all of these are included in the Project Management Plan, then you will be able to answer the why, what, who, when, and how type questions that may arise during a project.

What are subsidiary plans and documents?

These are most often outputs of the other Planning Processes. For example, the Cost Management Plan is an output of the Plan Cost Management Process. It describes how project costs will be planned, structured, and controlled. It is considered a “subsidiary plan” to the overall Project Management Plan. Subsidiary plans are all of the “plan” outputs from the Planning Processes that include Scope Management, Requirements Management, Schedule Management, Quality Management, Process Improvement, Human Resource Management, Communications Management, Procurement Management, and Stakeholder Management. The subsidiary plans may be defined at a high or detailed level depending on the type of plan, the specific needs of the project and the requirements of the performing organization.

Subsidiary documents are the baselines developed as part of the Planning Processes. They include the schedule baseline, cost performance baseline, and scope baseline. Don’t forget that the scope baseline also includes the scope statement, WBS, and WBS dictionary.

How are changes made to the Project Management Plan?

Changes to the Project Management Plan are made through a Change Control System. This system consists of methods to request, review, and approve changes. When Requests are done, they are reviewed by the project manager, project sponsor, select set of stakeholders, or change control board. Once a change is approved the Project Management Plan is updated. Changes that are not requested through the Change Control System or approved should not be implemented. Including unapproved changes will let the project go out of control.

The Project Management Plan is a vast topic. There are many other facets such as the other inputs besides subsidiary plans and documents, how it is used to communicate how the project will be executed and controlled, the importance and usage of a Project Management Information System, and the formality of the Project Management Plan all of which are vital to know and understand for the PMP Exam.

A few additional aspects to keep in mind when studying the Project Management Plan are that it is typically a formal written document, that it guides project execution and control, that it is approved by the project stakeholders, and that the project cannot start until the Project Management Plan is approved.

In order to understand this topic completely read the Develop Project Management Plan section in the PMBOK® Guide. Then explain what a Project Management Plan is, how it is developed, and how it is changed to a friend who is not a project manager. Because if you can explain it clearly to them, then you fully understand it yourself; and use a Project Management Plan for your projects because practice makes perfect when it comes to the PMP Exam.