Project Management

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Project Management

• April 26, 2005

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Between Now and Lunch

• Before we begin.
• What is Project Management?
• The Project Management Triangle.
• Project Methodology
• The Project Life Cycle
• The Movie
• Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline.
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Where Do Projects Fail?
• Is IT Really Different
• Questions?

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Before We Begin

• Project Management usually takes between 4 and 8
  weeks of intensive training.
• Another 2 3 years to apply that knowledge.
• The information given here in the next 3 hours is
  an abridged version, covering the basics.

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What is Project Management?

• Project management is a set of principles,
  practices, techniques, and facilitation of the
  planning, scheduling, and control of all
  activities that must be done to meet project
  objectives. It is a disciplined way of
  organizing a job and leading a team to help
  control costs, manage scope, performance, and
  outcomes and also to mitigate risks.

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Project Management (Cont.)

• There are two aspects of Project Management
  What and How.
• The What is the task to be performed.
• The How relates to the process used to reach
  the desired outcome. Process includes both the
  solving of the task itself, and how the team
  functions in total how they interact, solve
  problems, make decisions, run meetings, and every
  other aspect of team performance.

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Project Management (What)

• The What -- every project has three primary
  goals
• To create something (like a product, procedure,
  process or other deliverables).
• Deliverables are those clearly defined results,
  goods or services produced during the project or
  at its outcome.
• To finish all tasks within an agreed upon
  schedule.
• To complete the project within an established
  budget.

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Project Management (What cont.)

• Secondary goals are goals other than the primary
  goals that must be specified to actually define
  the project, sometimes referred to as objectives
  and/or outcomes that are mutual expectations and
  define the scope of work.

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Project Management (How)

• Process (How) will always affect task performance
  (What).
• In manufacturing, managers have studied every
  step of their process to eliminate
  non-value-added steps, to reduce scrap and
  re-work, and to optimize the process as much as
  possible.
• This same kind of scrutiny can improve
  non-manufacturing processes as well, to allow
  faster, smoother processes that can drastically
  improve task performance and produce a more
  consistent process.

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Project Management (How cont.)

• Most projects fail from the beginning because
  they are not clearly defined and poorly planned.
  Processes are ignored in favor of speed to
  complete the project The drive to just get it
  done.
• If we do not have good processes, any tools used
  will only help us to document failures with great
  precision.
• Organizations and project teams consist of
  people. Yet so much time is used for managing the
  physical resources, inventory, tools, schedules,
  status reports, and other activities which takes
  time from the project, that the "people" part is
  easily overlooked. And, if people do not perform
  well, neither will the processes and the
  project's outcome suffers.

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Project Management (How cont.)

• All the people within a project (programmers -
  for an IT project, Sponsors, business personnel,
  etc.), their performance, and their communication
  are part of the Businesses culture.
• Culture comprises accountability, communications,
  ownership, learning, and embracing change.
• Culture is related to people. It describes the
  sum total of the values, attitudes, traditions,
  and behaviors that exist in an organization. One
  way to know when people are talking about their
  culture is when they say, "We don't do it that
  way here."

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The Project Management Triangle

• Project management control can only be achieved
  when cost, time, performance objectives and scope
  are clearly documented, realistically derived,
  and deliberately managed.

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The Project Management Triangle

• When managing any project, there are four
  constraints you must take into consideration.
  These constraints apply to both large and small
  projects.
• Performance (P) refers to the project's
  requirements and objectives and the quality level
  of each. What results must the project produce?
  What features should it have? What will be needed
  to meet the customer's satisfaction? What are
  the deliverables and outcomes?

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The Project Management Triangle (cont)

• Cost (C) refers to the labor cost to do a job.
  (This may or may not include capital equipment
  and material costs which may by accounted for
  separately.)
• Time (T) refers to the time required to complete
  the project.
• The area of the triangle adds another constraint
  scope (S). Scope is the amount of work that must
  be done to complete the project it is the
  magnitude of the job.

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The Project Management Triangle (cont)

• When one of these constraints changes, at least
  one of the others must change, too, to
  compensate.
• For instance, if the time to compete is reduced,
  you must either reduce the performance
  requirements/objectives or increase the cost
  (meaning resources).
• Also, if new tasks are added to the project,
  increasing the scope, then one or more of the
  other pieces performance or cost or time must
  be increased to accommodate the change.

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The Project Management Triangle
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Project Methodology

• Documentation about the consistent way of running
  projects is called a methodology. It prescribes
  what kinds of steps must be taken, what kinds of
  documents must be produced at each step, what
  kinds of approvals are needed for certain aspects
  of the project, how changes will be handled, and
  what records must be filed when the project is
  closed out.
• It must also specify what approvals are needed
  for various actions, such as procurement, changes
  to plan, budget variances, and risks.

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Project Methodology (cont.)

• It should tell who is responsible for various
  aspects of the project, and it should spell out
  the roles and responsibility of each member of
  the team and their accountability and also the
  limits of each stakeholder's authority, .
• The project methodology spells out how a kick-off
  meeting is to be held, who should attend, what
  they are required to have ready for the meeting,
  and when it is to take place. The same is true
  for status, data model, business process model,
  and design review meetings.
• The methodology documents the project
  requirements and also the entrance and exit
  criteria for each of the phases of project
  development life cycle.

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Project Life Cycle

• Projects have a life cycle. A complete
  development process that takes each project from
  beginning to end. Life cycles are divided into
  phases to help structure and manage the project.
  
• Different businesses may use different life
  cycles, with differing numbers of phases and
  differing phase names, but they are all similar
  and all contain the same essential activities.
  This training will use the following life cycle

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Project Life Cycle (cont)
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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline

• Before you can develop a project's baseline you
  must complete the following tasks involved in the
  Definition and Planning phases
• Identify the major stakeholders
• Establish feasibility based on priority and goals
• Define the projects performance, time, cost,
  scope constraints, and clear understandable
  requirements.
• Develop a Risk Analysis
• Identify an overall strategy for accomplishing
  the project results.

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• The first priority during implementation planning
  is to identify all of the tasks that have to be
  completed to meet the goals of the project and
  put it into a form that is easy to view and
  quickly understand.
• The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a method of
  subdividing work into smaller and smaller
  increments to permit accurate estimates of
  durations, resource requirements, and costs.

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• The WBS plays a big role during implementation
  planning because it is the foundation upon which
  other project elements are based.
• As a detailed portrait of all the work involved
  in a project, a WBS also illustrates the scope
  (or magnitude) of a project.
• This is important because stakeholders are
  sometimes surprised at the cost estimates, and
  the WBS helps to see why the project is going to
  cost as much as you have estimated.

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• Because the WBS lists all project tasks, it also
  provides the basis upon which resource
  assignments and task durations can be made. The
  task duration estimates are used to calculate
  labor costs for all work so that a labor budget
  and schedule for the project is developed.

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• A finished WBS looks similar to an organizational
  chart.
• It is a graphical listing of the hierarchy of
  work to be accomplished.
• A finished WBS, sequences the tasks using a
  technique called a network diagram, break
  identified tasks down into greater levels of
  detail .

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• The final step in developing the WBS is to
  distribute the final draft to key stakeholders
  for review.
• Using a ski trip as an example, you ask you
  develop and review the following WBS.

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• Further a network diagram is developed
• It represents project tasks in a logical order,
  going left to right and allow you to put the
  tasks (from the WBS) into a graphical
  representation that shows the work flow and the
  relationships between project tasks.
• It is the roadmap for the project and identifies
  the critical path for the project.
• The critical path is the longest path it takes to
  complete the project, from start to finish.

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Planning and Establishing the Project Baseline
(cont)

• The illustration pinpoints what tasks must
  precede others, those dependent on other tasks,
  which are parallel and also those tasks which can
  be completed at the same time.

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Roles and Responsibilities

• Project Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Project Programming Team
• Focus Group of Customers/Users
• Stakeholders

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Process Review

• The purpose of a process review is to learn from
  experience so that we can avoid those things that
  were not done well and continue doing those
  things that were done well.
• It is not a witch-hunt. If we go about it in a
  "blame and punishment" way, people will hide
  their faults. If we go on a witch-hunt, we risk
  creating witches where none existed before.

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Where do Projects Fail?