Marketing Project Management Basics

Project Management is a fairly new business discipline that’s gaining traction in more industries and companies every day. Because of its left brain origins, project management is not a natural fit for marketing departments. The reality is that project management can revolutionize the role of creative teams within an organization.
The good news is that project management can be introduced in phases. Start with the basics of time management, collaboration, documentation and communication.
1.Have the team document their time. Although often construed as micromanaging this is actually a powerful time management technique. It’s an eye-opening exercise when employees can see where their time is being spent. This also lays the foundation for you to start documenting time allocations for future tasks and projects.
A couple of key concepts to follow; 1) provide a simple tool for time tracking — there are a number of web-based products, and 2) alleviate stress and avoid inaccurate data by following current research and setting the expectation of five hours of actual project time each day.
2.Encourage collaboration. Break the cycle of employees putting on headphones and disappearing into a document or design for days on end. What’s clear in the mind of one person may be confusing to others and a grammatically correct sentence may lack the flow needed to be easily read and understood.
Through formal or informal collaboration among team members, these issues are brought to light early in the process. This eliminates resistance to making changes after many hours of personal investment in a piece and avoids costly delays late in the process. Bottom line, collaboration improves job satisfaction through the open exchange of ideas.
3.Create project documentation. Do you have conversations in passing only to come under attack days later because the other person constituted that as a project request? Do you frequently run over schedule because of project creep through ever-changing requirements?
It’s vital that you establish a formal project submission process and create a scope document before work begins.
The key to a scope document is to provide as much detail as possible. This ensures everyone involved is clear on their role in the project and outlines exactly what Marketing will deliver upon completion. The scope document should be read and signed by someone as high up the org chart as possible. The project criteria can be changed during production but requires review and amendment of the scope document.
4.Provide consistent communication. Once a project is started, meet weekly or bi-weekly with key stakeholders and team members to communicate progress and resolve issues. The “big idea” people in your company will resist these meetings because they don’t like to be bothered by details. The reality is that these meetings are absolutely critical to keeping projects on schedule.
This is a deal breaker. If a client – internal or external – refuses to maintain these progress updates, you need to walk away from the project because you’re being set up to fail.
Even at its basic level project management can seem overwhelming and intimidating, that’s because you’re changing the culture of the entire organization. I promise you the effort will pay dividends.
Marketing needs to be a driving force in the success and growth of any company. Without the proper documentation and structure, however, marketing becomes an easy target when revenue stagnates or declines. Project management protects your interests and ensures informed decision making at all levels of the organization.

Making the Business Case for Project Management

Organizations Need Effective Project Management for Business Growth and Sustainability
Corporate strategies often rely on project management for business growth and sustainability. As more and more companies recognize the value of effective project management, demand for skilled project managers continues to grow.

What Can Project Management Do for Business?
There are two elements at play concerning the business case for project management. The first is the question of why an organization needs project management in the first place, while the second relates to when to implement project management for business initiatives.

A Means to an End: Project Management for Business Goals
Some companies need to be sold on the benefits of implementing project management for business reasons, and this would be a general instance of making the case for project management as an in-house process.
Companies that start small and subsequently experience significant growth may find it difficult to keep key stakeholders on the same page and ensure the cooperation of all departments involved.
The project sponsor – or the person being held accountable for its key deliverables – should address upper management and explain the importance of project management for business success, as it provides structure and facilitates collaboration toward a common goal
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Securing Project Approval and Obtaining Project Management for Business Initiatives
Once an organization has accepted project management a means to achieve efficiency and ensure accountability, the task remains of identifying which projects will be carried out, and which of those require a dedicated project manger.
Executives often expect to see the potential gain before committing resources to project management for business initiatives.
Projects go through several phases of development, and the first is known as the strategy and business case phase. This is when the individual or group that is sponsoring the project will attempt to “sell” it to upper management, by making a case that the project will yield a positive return on investment.
The sponsor will usually gather the stakeholders who would play a role in bringing the proposed project to fruition and collaborate with them to create an effective presentation that indicates a high potential for the project’s ultimate success.

It begins with a carefully written proposal that details the responsibilities and deliverables of all contributors. Without this, a project will rarely gain the momentum that it needs to move forward. Decision-makers must be convinced of the value of project management for business goals before they will allocate resources to a project.

Making the Case of Project Management for Business Success
Whether you’re a project sponsor looking to secure project management services or a project manager seeking to build a more compelling business case, you can gain the tools and strategies you need through a good project management training program.

Too Much Project Planning Be Bad For Your Project?

Planning a project is vital to its success but some restraint is necessary during the planning stage. If the planning phase takes on a life of its own it can waste valuable project resources.
One of the essential parts of a well-run project is the project plan which will include not only the schedule but various other plans such as a communication plan, risk plan, quality plan. A good plan is fundamental to the success of any project and every project manager will spend a substantial proportion of their time first of all putting the plan together. This will include breaking the work down into manageable tasks that can be monitored easily, assigning resources, obtaining estimates, setting milestones and more. Once the project is underway a large part of a project manager’s time will be spent monitoring and controlling each project task through reference to the schedule and adapting it where necessary to fit a clearer understanding of the tasks as the project progresses.

So if you know that a considerable amount of effort will go into re-working the plan as the project develops, what is a reasonable amount of time to spend putting in place the initial plan? That question is impossible to give just one answer to because all projects are different. Very complex projects will, obviously, need a considerable amount of planning up front but it is important to recognize when too much time spent on planning is a waste of valuable resources and that it might be more important for the project to get started and enable stakeholders to see some progress.

If you find yourself in the situation where planning meetings have become a regular part of your weekly activities and at each meeting something new is discussed about the plan so that it needs to be updates then your project is not making real progress.

So instead of trying to achieve the impossible and create a perfect plan at the start of a project, simply plan in revision points at which you can review the plan and make modifications without impacting too much on the progress of the tasks. This will give those working on the project tasks some breathing space at regular intervals to take stock of progress and re-group resources. It is also a good opportunity to re-evaluate the business objectives – particularly on long projects where the initial aims can change over a period of time.
The amount of time spent planning any project should not take up a disproportionate amount of time compared with the estimated time required to complete the project. Just as a project only needs a few stakeholders so the planning phase should be restricted to just a few individuals – if too many people become involved it will become difficult to reach agreement. It is also important to ensure that discussions do not continue to go over old ground – once a decision has been made stick to it and don’t allow individuals to raise issues of contention again and again once they have been resolved.

So next time you find yourself in the position where you are struggling to get the planning phase of a project finalized just take the existing plan, add a review point date to it and get started. Whilst project management methodologies such as APM or PMP recognize the importance of planning documentation as a reference for managing a project it is sometimes more effective to place the emphasis on activities that will produce a tangible deliverable.

The Cost of Bad Project Management

Projects often fail because organizations put more emphasis on rational factors than on employees’ psychological engagement — and the cost to organizations is enormous.
When it comes to project management, most organizations put their practices before their people. They place more emphasis on rational factors — the process itself — and less on emotional drivers that could lead to project excellence — like their employees’ engagement with the project and company.
But forcing team members to adapt to project management processes and procedures makes it more likely that the project will fail. The resulting cost from bad project management is reaching astronomical levels. It represents a significant waste of money, and it poses a threat to organizations that rely on the success of large-scale projects.

Gallup’s behavioral economics research suggests a different, more powerful approach: behavior-based project management. This approach enables project groups to gain higher levels of emotional commitment and performance from their team members — and increased levels of emotional involvement from stakeholders — in a way that improves both engagement and performance.
Behavior-based project management applies the principles of behavioral economics to manage an organization’s emotional economy. More importantly, it uses scientific research on human nature and the workplace to develop more effective project teams and to enable better project delivery.

The High Cost of Failure
Project management is integral to the business world. Milestones, kickoff meetings, deliverables, stakeholders, Gantt charts, and work plans constitute the everyday world of most managers, whether they are called “project managers” or not. Given the vast experience organizations have with project management, it’s reasonable to wonder why all projects aren’t completed on time, on scope, and under budget.
Yet large projects, especially those in the information technology sectors, have a poor record. Multiple studies show that a significant share of projects overrun their original timelines or are never completed. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries, found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects. A study published in the Harvard Business Review, which analyzed 1,471 IT projects, found that the average overrun was 27%, but one in six projects had a cost overrun of 200% on average and a schedule overrun of almost 70%. And we all have heard about large construction projects — the Channel Tunnel, Euro Disney, and Boston’s “Big Dig” — that ended up costing almost double their original estimate.
Cost and time overruns also have a profound effect on national economies. One estimate of IT failure rates is between 5% and 15%, which represents a loss of $50 billion to $150 billion per year in the United States. Another study estimated that IT project failures cost the European Union €142 billion in 2004.
While bad project management comes with an enormous price tag, the costs aren’t always just financial. The seven deaths resulting from the Columbia Shuttle disaster have been attributed to organizational problems, including a weakened safety culture at NASA. The failure of the FBI’s Virtual Case File software application cost U.S. taxpayers $100 million and left the FBI with an antiquated system that jeopardizes its counter-terrorism efforts.
What’s more, it seems that this trend is here to stay. With an ever-growing need for accessible and integrated data, organizations require larger platforms to manage supply chains, customer relationships, and dozens of other crucial systems. Mega-software projects are now common in private and governmental organizations. Development is not slowing down, especially in emerging economies.
Considering the failure rate of these endeavors, a great deal of human effort and organizational resources likely will be squandered. So why haven’t organizations become better at managing projects, especially large ones in the IT sector?
Why Most Projects Fail
A typical project management approach focuses on processes, policies, and procedures. Every task and step is described in detail by a set of rules. Many companies implement rigid processes that dictate behavior and use statistical methods to control quality (such as total quality management, kaizen, lean management, and Six Sigma). Process guides and rulebooks support work practices, while quality control systems assess and improve these practices.
In spite of these approaches, the rate of project failure does not seem to be decreasing. That’s because current project management tools, techniques, and theories account for the rational components of project management, but they overlook the emotional components. And these emotional factors account for a large part of a project’s success.
Project delivery requires quality control, scheduling, and budgeting. Yet controlling for these factors does not prevent project delays or failure. When projects fail, it usually can be traced to one or more of the following causes:
• technical (technology developed, project management techniques)
• individual (project leadership, scope management, communication)
• stakeholder (user involvement, executive buy-in, goal specificity)
Typical project management techniques such as quality control, budgeting, scheduling, and critical path analysis are good at solving the first type of problem. Their record is less impressive for solving the second and third type of problem, primarily because these techniques are less effective at managing the human, emotional, and social factors at play in individual and stakeholder problems.
Open A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and you will see an array of techniques for controlling quality, risk, budget, schedule, and scope. There is a chapter on project human resources management with some keys to select, develop, and manage a team. It shows how to develop a responsibility assignment matrix to define team members’ roles and a resource histogram to manage available hours. It indicates the importance of recognition and performance evaluations and suggests how to use interpersonal skills to resolve conflicts. It’s all spelled out in black and white, often with charts.
None of this is wrong. But again, these techniques mainly address rational factors such as planning and controlling. They only provide more methodologies and processes and more charts and graphs, which is hardly emotionally engaging for project team members — or project managers, for that matter.

Why Project Management Suffers

We’ve all heard the horror stories: the highway that was not going to cost a penny more than a quarter of a million dollars and ended up over a billion. The convention center that opened two years behind schedule. The computer system that doubled its estimates, tripled its schedule, and still didn’t work properly.
What’s going on here? Why do so many projects run into so much trouble? Why can’t companies and governments, that have had years of experience in projects, seem to get it right? After all, there are professionals, called “project managers,” who are supposed to be running projects and whose job is to keep them on budget and on schedule. Why do so many of them fail?

Project management is management. In many ways, it’s not the same as line management, and it uses different tools and techniques to achieve its goals, but its purpose is the same as that of line management: to direct a group of people to achieve an objective. Therefore, those who manage projects need to know how to manage budgets, people, and processes.

Why, then, do so many companies assign senior technical people-who usually have little interest in or aptitude for management-to head up projects? These companies wouldn’t dream of assigning just anyone as an architect, or designer, or developer; they look for qualifications, for some evidence that the person can actually do the job, so why are they so casual when they assign a project manager? The main reason is that companies tend to regard the role as secondary: not as important as line management or technical skills, and certainly not as a career goal for ambitious souls.

The result is that projects founder, destroying schedules, shredding estimates, derailing careers, and delivering results that companies accept out of desperation rather than design. In the longer term, those who have managed these commonplace disasters retreat from managing projects and either return to the technical world or move into “real” management. So project managers are not developed, the cycle continues, and the result is that there are too few experienced, qualified people in industries that are project-driven.
How can organizations escape this trap? How can they create a group of trained people who know how to define, plan, and carry out a project?

Here’s a simple suggestion: Create a group of trained people who know how to define, plan, and carry out a project.
Identify people who have an aptitude for managing and who want to progress. Train them; there are many courses and programs available. Provide mentors; there is no end of consultants who can offer this service. Reward them; recognize their successes, correct their problems, and give them career targets to shoot for. Is this a novel idea? Hardly. After all, it’s the same process that organizations follow to create a group of trained people who know how to carry out any specific skill.

Is it expensive? That’s the wrong question. The right question is “Do the benefits justify the costs?” Most managers would agree that spending a hundred thousand dollars to prevent a cost overrun of a million is a great investment. Create a group of trained project managers. It just takes commitment.

What Is Social Project Management?

Is social just a fad or here to stay? And what does it have to do with projects…
As with all new terminology, whether catch-phrase or otherwise, the concept behind the wording needs to be defined and understood before it’s possible to engage in a real, meaningful dialogue about it. That’s why we tend to see the same trend with every innovation. New ideas, perhaps not yet well-articulated, generate some early discussions. Those initial discussions begin propagating a term or phrase that represents the innovation. This drives curiosity, which drives more discussion and often the repetition of the new terminology, regardless of how well it’s defined or understood. Generally the broader discussion begins to peak with some back-and-forth debate of the meaning behind the words, before eventually reaching a consensus (on either a common definition, or another new terminology).

This is what I’ve found to be the case with the phrase “social project management”. Many bloggers and subject matter experts have a tendency to define the concept solely in terms of the project management software or tools that support it, stateless of any actual business leadership, processes, or approach. Others attempt to define it within the context of consumer social media communications, giving the impression that socializing project management is the equivalent of opening up internal business initiatives to some sort of crowdsourced public input.

The phrase social project management has, to my knowledge, only existed for the past few years. And it most certainly erupted from the roots of web 2.0 software and technology enablers. However, proponents of social project management (myself included) see it as a methodological shift within the project management discipline. From that perspective, social project management takes on a new conceptual definition.

Traditional (historical?) project management embraces a militant-like paradigm. Central command and control processes, driven from the top and dictated to the project resources below. All of whom are stratified on a hierarchical project organizational chart in tidy little boxes, clearly delineating not only who reports to whom, but by extension of the environment, who has the most access to the most information. As with all authoritarian structures, a traditionally managed project requires significant rigor, strict communication channels, and complex processes and bureaucracy, which by necessity, require significant overhead administration.

Enter social project management. Emerging from early implementations of Project Management 2.0, Social Project Management, as an approach, is characterized by the democratization of the project environment. Instead of managing and controlling, the project manager takes on an the important, but less bureaucratic, role of project leader. Social PMs advocate open communications among project participants over formalized communications through pre-defined channels. Social projects stress and promote collaboration as a de facto work paradigm, interacting proactively to support overreaching project goals and outcomes. Information flows freely and frequently on a social project, with consumption limited only by availability.
Unlike Project Management 2.0, Social Project Management is implemented at an organizational level, extending collaboration and communication channels across all projects, to prevent information silos and take advantage of the concept of ambient awareness (more on this in a future article).

Early project management 2.0 software misunderstood the power of collective collaboration, and often implemented the “collaboration” tools at an individual project level. Which, I suppose, works well within organizations that never have a resource involved in more than one project at a time. For the rest us, it was largely useless and often drove us back to our ineffective but learned behaviours - communicating via email, voicemail, meetings, or not at all. The other challenge that tripped up PM 2.0 was the tendency to offer collaboration capabilities only, in lieu of any project management support tools. Here’s an activity stream, or wiki, or document storage space and that’s your project software. Even small projects need guidance, scheduling, and oversight. Have you ever set a personal goal without figuring out the steps you need to achieve along the way to reach that goal? Doesn’t work very well.

So what is social project management? It’s the amalgamation of tried and true project management techniques like schedule management, milestone setting, task dependencies, and issue and risk analysis, but applied within a collaborative and democratized project environment. Social project management empowers teams and wraps them with these techniques, providing true visibility and distributed ownership and investment among all project participants, regardless of role.

Essential Project Management

If you get in a car in Chicago with the intent of driving to Los Angeles, the GPS rarely plots the California portion of the map while you are in your driveway. Rather, the GPS methodically and sequentially plots each road to take in order to reach the desired location. Project Management follows the same logic of a series of key tasks or steps that have to be completed in a systematic process in order to meet the desired outcome. Traveling to Los Angeles from Chicago can only happen if the tasks of traveling through the Midwest and the Rockies are met first.

This type of thinking seems elusive when it comes to business project management. Ask someone to “map” out the many steps required to achieve a desired result of managing a project and many times you get resistance as in “overkill” or simply a “deer in the headlights” look. Yet, the dollars at stake as well as the operational disruption to the organization seem secondary to the tedious task of mapping the process in advance. No one would jump in a car and start driving without a map nor should they start a project without a plan.

Lacking a plan almost assuredly locks in failure as much as putting the wrong project manager in place. There is a specific skill set that is required from project managers that enables them to manage to an on-time, on-budget conclusion. It is critical for the organization to identify those key people to lead projects or as an alternative, outsource to industry experts.

Below highlights the key components of project management:
On-Time, On-Budget: This should be the mantra of every project manager There should be nothing more fundamental in the mind of the project manager than completing the project on-time and on-budget. All too often, project managers view their projects in a vacuum but rarely are these tasks within an organization, mutually exclusive. Failing to comply with an on-time, on-budget philosophy not only causes the project at hand to fail, but risks the failure of other reliant projects.

Know End Game: Determine in advance, what a successful project conclusion looks like. The most successful projects have a clear vision in mind from the onset. Poorly managed projects fall victim to duplicative resource allocation and cost overruns known as “capital creep”. Capital creep can be crippling to an organization since it not only “sucks away” future dollars to be invested back into the company, but layers on added expense that diminishes the overall return of the project
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Resource Management: Let the fighting begin! Project management is all about organizing systems and processes in a sequential fashion in order to efficiently complete the task at hand. Implicit in that mindset are identifying key resources that are necessary to knock out the work. The challenge is, resources are finite and competent people are always in demand. There can be some intense competition for solid resources - overallocation of their time is an ongoing concern.

Practice “War Gaming”: Imagine if you could anticipate issues in advance of them happening - that is what “war gaming” is. Play out possible scenarios and anticipate “broken pipes” in advance of them actually happening. Scheduling a resource for a task to be completed only to find out that they are going on vacation is an avoidable “broken pipe”. By lying out as many steps as you can against a time line, a project manager should be able to recognize obvious “hiccups” to the process in advance and devise alternative solutions.

Be Realistic: Rome was not built in a day and your project will not be either. Setting realistic goals not only for the project but especially for the approving committee, is paramount to managing expectations. The project cannot be built for free nor can it be completed in an afternoon. Realistic goals and time tables need to be continually communicated and are crucial to the overall perception of the project. It is vital to manage the expectations all along the way.

Daily Business Impact: The challenge managing new projects for an organization is that they still have a day-to-day business to run. Rarely do they have an idle body to be able to manage a project exclusively. Prudent organizations are the ones that identify this in advance and either outsource the management of the project or re-adjust internal teams to minimize disruptions to daily operations. Organizations that fail to recognize this impact will not only see their project fall short of expectations, but run the risk of their daily operations slipping.

Deliver The Goods: At the end of the day, the project manager has a fairly clear-cut task at hand: Deliver a completed project, on-time and on-budget. Managing the project can be fraught with missed tasks and time challenges but the prudent project manager will attempt to minimize those to exceptions only. Leaving the entire project to chance will guarantee only one thing - a failed project. Prudent capital management is one key element to maintaining your operation ongoing profit stream.

SWOT Analysis in Project Management

SWOT is an acronym of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and as these titles suggest it is not purely a method used for controlling areas of planning and risk but it is also used to highlight areas of the project that could be maximized to the benefit of the whole project or individual areas where some competitive advantage may be gained. It is used to evaluate particular activities of the project in order to optimize their potential as well as to evaluate risks in order to determine the most appropriate way of mitigating those risks.
SWOT analysis is normally performed during the initial project start-up phase so that the elements of the analysis can form the basis of the project plan, but it can also be used later in the project if the project is running into difficulties with scheduling, deliverables or budget and needs to be brought back on track.
For example, if a certain key activity in the project requires new software, a SWOT Analysis can be used to assess the risks and the opportunities of purchasing the software and training staff in its use in order to help with the resource planning.
Performing a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis session should always have a clear objective and it is the Project Manager’s responsibility to communicate that objective to all those present at the session. A typical session will include all stakeholders, where possible, and key members of the project team. If the analysis is being performed at the start of a project, the objective is likely to be fully identifying all required activities and potential risks so that a proper plan can be put in place. However, if it is being conducted during an ongoing project, the objective may be to re-assess the budget or schedule.
Because the objectives of a SWOT Analysis can vary so too can the questions used to elicit the required information. For this reason there is not a standard set of pre-defined questions that will meet every situation but every session must have a set of questions written down before the session to ensure the attendees remained focused. This, again, is the project manager’s responsibility. Depending on the urgency of completing the analysis and starting the project planning phase, it may be necessary to send out the questions in advance to allow attendees the opportunity of gathering any relevant information in advance.
Typical questions for each part of the SWOT Analysis are listed below:
Strengths
Does the company have the necessary skills in-house?
Has a budget been assigned to the project?
What are the business benefits of completing the project?
Will the project require new technology or equipment?
How experienced is the project team on similar projects?
Weaknesses
Is there a reliable estimate of costs available?
Does the company have the budget to provide contingency funding?
What are the drawbacks of the project?
Will parts of the project need to be outsourced?
Is the proposed schedule realistic?
Opportunities
Can a local project be leveraged nationally or internationally?
Do the competitors have any weaknesses?
What are the latest industry trends?
Are there any new, or imminent, technology developments?
Threats
Is there well-established competition already in the marketplace?
Are experienced staff difficult to replace?
Has new technology been fully tested?
Could national or global economic conditions affect the project?
The list of questions to use in a SWOT analysis could, obviously, be much longer than the basic questions listed above, but using these in your own particular project will provide a good starting point. Performing a thorough SWOT analysis at the beginning, or any stage, of a project will provide you with detailed information to help you in the planning and decision-making processes of a project.

Integrity in Project Management

As Project Managers, we encounter opportunities around every corner to be men and women of integrity. Depending on your organization and/or the project you are working on, you may have a tremendous amount of authority and latitude to make decisions…which idea to use, which vendor to leverage, how to present the data and so on. While this article is not a ‘how-to’ (creating a WBS) or a emotional take on some leadership technique (conflict management), it is one article that I feel every project manager, leader….well everyone, should read and reflect on whether or not they are leading with integrity.
In recent years, one of two things have happened within organizations. Either the competition has become so fierce in the face of pending resource actions or the resource action has already occurred and the workload being pushed on you is insane. Even more so in the PM space is that many of you are being thrown into Project Management without any training, mentoring, etc. So you are taking on a role without the skills/training.

Whether you are a seasoned PM in a thriving company with carte blanche or an overworked Office Manager taking on your first project, you will be faced with choices. Do you award business to your old supervisor who is at Vendor X? Do you adjust the dates in hopes that the team will pull it together and no one will have to know you are two weeks behind? Or do you present an idea as your own in that Executive Meeting, when you know John in Accounting came up with it.

At the end of the day, you just need to make sure you are full of it…Integrity that is.
Here are 3 guidelines for Success:
1.Get ahead of it - If a job is offered to you and you have no idea what it is they do, how they do it, or what a single acronym means then you have got to let the hiring manager/current manager/partner know. You may be surprised at their response. “John, thank you so much for letting me. The last 2 folks said they could and wasted weeks of my time. What do you say I have you go to that local boot camp for 2 weeks and train you. I can’t teach integrity, but I can train you on our business”. I had an old company participate in an RFQ to become one of our national providers and told the team right up front “Everyone, I want you to know that I worked at Company X for 3 years”. No one seemed to care because I was up front. The Director of Procurement said “had you not told me, it would have been a mess even if you were fair. Thank you!”
2.Be Organized – Many of my articles refer to the importance of planning and being organized. When you drop the ball, you create an atmosphere where you need to get ‘creative’ on the schedule or the budget. However, if you have planned it out and remained organized, then you won’t feel so much pressure when things go wrong. There won’t be a need to cover up sloppy work. Things happen: requirements change, new stakeholders rotate through the organization, etc… If you are organized and can show the work, then there is no reason to be sneaky or to cover anyone’s tracks.
3.Be a man! (or Woman) – Don’t try and put lipstick on a pig. If the schedule blew up or your budget just tripled, then get in front of your executive team or sponsor and explain 1) What was expected 2) What happened 3) What is the action plan to correct. You may not even need the answer at that point.
You may get away with the occasional “get ‘er done’ attitude or sweep it under the rug approach, but your career is a long one and this is a small world. If you aren’t a person with integrity, then I can’t tell you that you will meet your maker or sleep better at night because it just doesn’t register with you. However, here are a few things that can, do, and probably will happen at one point or another. That team member who helped you cover that overspend 5 years ago, may become the next CFO and will remember the ‘Slick PM’. The idea you stole from John…someone may reach out to him one day “Hey John. You worked with Slick PM a few years back. I am thinking about bringing him into my department for Larry’s old job. What do you think?” How about that interview you go a few years down the road and the same hiring manager you told that you could do the last job is now at this company?

Ethics in Project Management

Below is a list of some commonly known ethics in Project Management. Project Managers should abide to this list at all times.
Treat the money like it’s your own. If you make financial decisions as if it were your own money you’ll always make the best decisions for your client.
Care for your community. Your project affects a diverse range of stakeholders. Know who they are and how you’ll change their lives. Know how you’ll explain your project to your families and friends.
Account for the full product life cycle. Today’s new product is tomorrow’s landfill. Understand the true cost of ownership by full lifecycle costing, from sourcing materials to disposal.
Do the best you can first time around. When you turn up for work, remind yourself that you are there to do the best job you can. Be proactive, be creative, and be efficient.
Deal fairly with your suppliers. If you can’t deal fairly and openly with them during the project phase of the product, what chance does the client have of working with them during the operations phase?
Honesty all the time. Never lie by omission, never lie by vagueness, never lie by delaying, never lie by clutter, never lie by jargon: just never lie.
Help others along. Projects are not just delivered by teams. They are delivered by communities, workforces, and professions. You have a place in these groups; there is always someone to learn from and someone to help along. Share what you know and receive help when you need it.
The golden rule. Don’t just treat others how you want to be treated, treat them how they want to be treated.

Demystifying Project Management

Before studying project management in pursuit of my MBA, I thought of project management as being very technical and complicated. The truth is however, project management is very intuitive. It consists of skills that people use every day, with the addition of… discipline. That’s the rub. Discipline is the key to success in business, and, what many of us fail to realize, our personal lives as well.

Project management is all about managing four variables: time, money, resources, and scope (defined outcome). What is a project? A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique result (I will make sure to provide this definition in each post to drive home the fact that our lives are full of projects). So, whether it be your child’s first birthday party, painting a room in your house, landscaping your yard for the spring, or planning your family vacation; the discipline of managing the allotted time, money, resources, and scope is necessary to ensure successful results. Let’s look at each variable individually, to ensure we have a clear understanding of what they mean:

Scope: As mentioned above, scope is, in a nutshell, a description of what the outcome of the project should be. The definition of scope in simplified terms is the work required, and only the work required, to complete a project successfully. Therefore, managing scope means that you are ensuring that your outcome in nothing more, or nothing less, than originally identified as being desired. If you are planning your family vacation, the scope identifies who is going, where you are going, and how long you will be there. Once you have identified what the goal is, you can proceed in managing each aspect of the planning process, with your scope, or end result in mind. The scope is critical. If anything changes in your scope, it will most definitely have an effect on the variables of your project – time, money, or resources.

Example:
Let’s consider the family vacation again. If it was originally planned that only your immediate family would go on the vacation (consisting of four people), but three weeks prior to the vacation it was decided that a cousin would accompany you as well, that would have a direct impact on one, some or all of the project variables – time, money and resources. The number of people on the vacation has increased, so that is an automatic adjustment of resources, and if you don’t want to impact the money you have to spend, you will have to shorten your time on vacation. You can’t change the scope of the project without impacting at least one of the variables.
• Resources: Resources are very simply, the people, equipment, or material that you have available to complete your project.

Example:
In a landscaping project, who are the people that would assist? Possibly a family member or hired help. How about the equipment that you would use? Perhaps you would require an aerator for your grass, a spreader for seeds, a hedge trimmer? And then what materials would you need to make your yard look the way you want? Red lava rocks, weed blocker, or maybe landscaping bricks (speaking from my own landscaping experience). All of these components are considered resources in a landscaping project.
• Money: We all know what money is…. And in the context of project management, money refers to costs.

Example:
If you are beginning the project of painting a room in your house, how much money do you have set aside to complete the project? Considering the cost of paint, brushes, painters tape, floor/furniture covering, how much will the project cost you? This cost, and the management of it, makes up the money management aspect of project management.

Time: Every project involves a limited amount of time. If you are planning a 1st birthday party, your time limit is from the time you decide to have the party, to the day of the party. Whether it is two weeks, or a month, your project cannot extend past that birth date or party date. Within that limited amount of time, there are tasks to be completed to achieve your scope, or the party that your envision. Each task will have a duration, or required amount of time to complete. The tasks will also likely have to occur in a specific order with some tasks requiring completionI before other tasks can be carried out. The subsequent tasks are therefore considered to have dependencies (meaning they are dependent on other tasks). All of these aspects of time, including tasks durations and dependencies, need to be considered in your time management

Example:
It is September 2nd, and your son’s birthday is October 18th. You want to have a party to celebrate his 1st birthday (scope). So, you have 16 days to plan and implement this project/party. You know exactly how long you have, and now you have to determine what tasks are necessary to have the party. The duration of each task has to fit within the total time allotted for planning (16 days), and tasks must be carried out in order to ensure there is no delay that would cause you to miss your deadline – more details on this later. All of these considerations fall into the time management aspect of project management.

Now that we have broken down project management into the four main components, it is clear that these are variables considered in juggling our everyday responsibilities….. not rocket science! So, if project management is so intuitive, why aren’t more people using it to drive desired results in their personal lives? That is exactly what I hope to address and change with this blog. Project Management really is an excellent tool For Everyday Living.

Project Execution

After you have carefully planned your project, you will be ready to start the project execution phase, the third phase of the project management life cycle. The execution phase involves putting the project plan into action. It’s here that the project manager will coordinate and direct project resources to meet the objectives of the project plan. As the project unfolds, it’s the project manager’s job to direct and manage each activity on the project, every step of the way. That’s what happens in the execution phase of the project lifecycle; you simply follow the plan you’ve put together and handle any problems that come up.

The execution phase is where you and your project team actually do the project work to produce the deliverables. The word deliverable means anything your project delivers. The deliverables for your project include all of the products or services that you and your team are performing for the client, customer or sponsor including all the project management documents that you put together.

The steps undertaken to build each deliverable will vary depending on the type of project you are undertaking, and cannot therefore be described here in any real detail. For instance engineering and telecommunications projects will focus on using equipment, resources and materials to construct each project deliverable, whereas computer software projects may require the development and implementation of software code routines to produce each project deliverable. The activities required to build each deliverable will be clearly specified within the project requirements document and project plan accordingly.
Your job as project manager is to direct the work, but you need to do more than deliver the results. You also need to keep track of how well your team performed. The executing phase keeps the project plan on track with careful monitoring and control processes to ensure the final deliverable meets the acceptance criteria set by the customer. This phase is typically where approved changes are implemented.
Most often changes are identified through looking at performance and quality control data. Routine performance and quality control measurements should be evaluated on a regular basis throughout the execution phase. Gathering reports on those measurements will help you determine where the problem is and recommend changes to fix it.

Change Control
When you find a problem, you can’t just make a change, because what if it’s too expensive, or will it take too long? You will need to look at how it affects the triple constraint (time, cost, scope) and how they impact quality. You will then have to figure out if it is worth making the change. Change control is a set of procedures that let you make changes in an organized way.
Anytime you need to make a change to your plan, you need to start with a change request (Figure 1). This is a document that either you or the person making the request needs to create. Any change to your project needs to be documented so you can figure out what needs to be done, by when, and by whom.

What Is a Project?

The starting point in discussing how projects should be properly managed is to first understand what a project is and just as importantly what it is not.
People have been undertaking projects since the earliest days of organized human activity. The hunting parties of our prehistoric ancestors were projects for example; they were temporary undertakings directed at the goal of obtaining meat for the community. Large complex projects have also been with us for a long time. The pyramids and the Great Wall of China, were in their day of roughly the same dimensions as the Apollo Project to send man to the moon. We use the term project frequently in our daily conversations. A husband, for example may tell his wife, “My main project for this weekend is to straighten out the garage.” Going hunting, building pyramids, and fixing faucets all share certain features that make them projects.

A project has distinctive attributes, which distinguish it from ongoing work or business operations. Projects are temporary in nature. They are not an everyday business process and have definitive start dates and end dates. This characteristic is important because a large part of the project effort is dedicated to ensuring that the project is completed at the appointed time. To do this, schedules are created showing when tasks should begin and end. Projects can last minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years.

Projects exist to bring about a product or service that hasn’t existed before. In this sense, a project is unique. Unique means that this is new, this has never been done before. Maybe it’s been done in a very similar fashion before but never exactly in this way. For example, Ford Motor Company is in the business of designing and assembling cars. Each model that Ford designs and produces can be considered a project. The models differ from each other in their features and are marketed to people with various needs. An SUV serves a different purpose and clientele than a luxury model. The design and marketing of these two models are unique projects. However the actual assembly of the cars is considered an operation, i.e., a repetitive process that is followed for most makes and models.

In contrast with projects, operations are ongoing and repetitive. They involve work that is continuous without an ending date and you often repeat the same processes and produce the same results. The purpose of operations is to keep the organization functioning while the purpose of a project is to meet its goals and to conclude. Therefore, operations are ongoing while projects are unique and temporary.

The project is completed when its goals and objectives are accomplished. It is these goals that drive the project and all the planning and implementation efforts are undertaken to achieve them. Sometimes projects end when it’s determined that the goals and objectives cannot be accomplished or when the product or service of the project is no longer needed and the project is cancelled.
A formal definition of a project

There are many written definitions of a project, however, all of them contain the key elements described above. For those looking for a formal definition of a project the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. The temporary nature of projects indicates a definite beginning and end. The end is reached when the project’s objectives have been achieved or when the project is terminated because its objectives will not or cannot be met, or when the need for the project no longer exists.

What is Project Management?

“Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. Project management is accomplished through the application and integration of the project management processes of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. The project manager is the person responsible for accomplishing the project objectives."

Managing a project includes:
Identifying requirements
Establishing clear and achievable objectives
Balancing the competing demands for quality, scope, time and cost
Adapting the specifications, plans, and approach to the different concerns and expectations of the various stakeholders.

Project managers often talk of a ‘triple constraint’-project scope, time and cost-in managing competing project requirements. Project quality is affected by balancing these three factors. High quality projects deliver the required product, service or result within scope, on time, and within budget. The relationship among these factors is such that if any one of the three factors changes, at least one other factor is likely to be affected. Project managers also manage projects in response to uncertainty. Project risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on at least one project objective.

The project management team has a professional responsibility to its stakeholders including customers, the performing organization, and the public. PMI members adhere to a ‘Code of Ethics’ and those with the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification adhere to a ‘Code of Professional Conduct.’ Project team members who are PMI members and/or PMPs are obligated to adhere to the current versions of these codes.

It is important to note that many of the processes within project management are iterative because of the existence of, and necessity for, progressive elaboration in a project throughout the project’s life cycle. That is, as a project management team learns more about a project, the team can then manage to a greater level of detail.

The term ‘project management’ is sometimes used to describe an organizational or managerial approach to the management of projects and some ongoing operations, which can be redefined as projects, that is also referred to as ‘management by projects.’ An organization that adopts this approach defines its activities as projects in a way that is consistent with the definition of a project There has been a tendency in recent years to manage more activities in more application areas using project management. More organizations are using ‘management by project.’ This is not to say that all operations can or should be organized into projects. The adoption of ‘management by project’ is also related to the adoption of an organizational culture that is close to the project management culture. Although, an understanding of project management is critical to an organization that is using ‘management by projects,’ a detailed discussion of the approach itself is outside the scope of this standard. ”

Definitions:
PMI

‘a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product or service. Temporary means that every project has a definite end. Unique means that the product or service is different in some distinguishing way from all similar products or services’

Turner

‘an endeavour in which human, or machine, material, and financial resources are organised in a novel way, to undertake a unique scope of work, of given specification, within constraints of cost and time, so as to deliver beneficial change defined by quantitative and qualitative methods’

Burke

‘a beneficial change which uses the special project management techniques to plan and control the scope of work in order to deliver a product to satisfy the client’s and stakeholder’s needs and expectations’