These systems may or may not have been designed with the needs of the project manager in mind. If weaknesses exist in these systems, they may need to be corrected. For this reason, it is important for a project manager to understand the requirements of a project information reporting system. Quality on projects requires the identification of standards and criteria to be set in each phase of the project life cycle for both the product and the process. Quality means making and meeting agreed to commitments with a constant eye for improvement.
Plans must be more than schedules in that they address all nine elements of the project management process. Planned Commitments includes:. Planning aims to reduce the unknowns and uncertainty and to increase the likelihood of the project succeeding.
If there is not enough information to produce a plan, then the planning should focus on how to learn enough to plan the next stage. The following are the components of a project plan:. Scope and mission define project boundaries establish goals and objectives. This includes the business case and provides a basis for decision-making. Scheduling requires the evaluation of activity sequences and duration plus resource requirements to create the project schedule.
Budgeting is the development of an overall cost estimate based on individual work items. This can then be used as a cost baseline for measuring project performance. Personnel needs are specified based on project activities. Determines recruitment, selection, and training of project team members.
Evaluation and control is required during all phases of the project. Risk and problems must be systematically identified, assessed and managed. Proper risk management implies control of possible future events, and is proactive rather than reactive. Scheduling is an essential element of the planning process. Project requirements and the WBS are used to create network diagrams and Gantt charts.
Fast tracking and crashing are used to compress schedules. Project cost, schedule and performance are highly dependent on available resources. The project owners have a responsibility to provide the necessary resources to support the project and to maintain ongoing surveillance over the use of those resources.
Project planning estimates the resources to tasks. However, there must be flexibility in assigning resources so that they can be used in the most effective manner.
Budgeting extends the concept of resource allocation to include estimates of equipment, overhead and contingency. The project budget is the total financial plan for the project. Accurate budgeting is critical because it provides management with an understanding of the return on investment ROI from a project. In addition, a project budget establishes the foundation for effective project control. Any other way is inefficient. An effective project management process requires regular reports and regular meetings of the project team to identify when things are off target.
Schedule slips, cost overruns, open issues, new risks and identified problems must be dealt with as early as possible. Earned value is a highly regarded technique for measuring project performance. Earned value is important because it integrates cost and schedule performance simultaneously. It is the budgeted cost for work performed and represents accomplishment. This technique can be applied to work elements in the WBS or any units of project work.
The following measurements are used:. This is determined by the data provided by the company accounting systems. This is the budgeted amount for the tasks that have been scheduled as of a given date. This is what was budgeted for the work that has been completed as of a given date. This figure represents how much the project is expected to cost when it is completed.
This number is calculated at a point in time during the course of project execution. The WBS can be a foundation for rigorous tracking and control of a project. However, the most important requirement for effective tracking and control is the establishment of a baseline.
Once a baseline has been established for a project it is possible to measure the completion status of project tasks against it. The comparison may produce a variance that is simply the difference between planned and actual values at a point in time.
The issue becomes what variances should be calculated to ensure that the performance of the project can be understood for the project manager to make corrective action decisions. Without a clear procedure corrective action can have many outcomes, not all consistent with corporate objectives. Some tradeoffs must often be made, increase cost to save time, decrease scope to save time, etc. As a last resort, the project performance baseline can be reset, perhaps causing the sponsor to challenge the original business case.
A fundamental job of the project manager is to manage these tradeoffs. An effective escalation procedure requires issues and problems to be worked first by the lowest appropriate level. If the issue cannot be resolved and closed, then it must be elevated to the next highest organizational level, and so on until the issue is closed. A formal process needs to be in place, similar to dispute clause in a contract or a grievance procedure in a labor contact, to escalate issues before they become fatal to the project cost or schedule.
A formal system of change control and change management must be in place. Changes caused by scope creep must be resisted and change control is needed to prevent these problems. A critical challenge to project managers is to ensure that control is established over both the ways work is authorized and the way changes are approved.
When it comes to configuration change control, the project manager is at the center of communications. What is important is that the project manager is in the loop to make timely decisions. A Project Change Request is necessary to properly evaluate a change in project requirements or commitments. Since changes will occur, it is important that a change notice log be established. This will enable the project manager to properly evaluate proposed changes based on the latest information.
The first application of the Nine Element of Project management is training. The mission of Keller Graduate School of Management is to provide high-quality education, practitioner-oriented graduate management degree programs with emphasis in teaching and service to working adults.
To that end, the faculty members at Keller are practicing professionals who face challenges of a complex competitive and rapidly changing business environment every day.
They bring expertise to the classroom, emphasizing theory and practices most beneficial to the students. Keller Graduate School of Management offers a graduate degree in Project Management and certificates in project management.
But, students and their companies wanted even more. The result was the development of several training courses from two to five days using the Nine Elements as the foundation. As an added feature, depending upon a needs analysis, a company can have a customized version of the Nine Elements to fit their particular business or industry.
Participants will be expected to learn how to make and meet realistic schedules and control costs using the basic techniques of project management. By the end of the training classes the participants, in the near term, will be able to perform project work more effectively and efficiently, specifically they will be able to:.
The second application of the Nine Elements of Project Management is project management organizational assessment. The feature for a company to have a customized version of the Nine Elements to fit their particular business or industry was the catalyst that led to the development of the Project Management Organizational Assessment Model. Clients were eager to discover how they compared to the best practices.
The comparison produced where and how much project management training was needed. Management, project teams and project managers were surveyed independently. Results were tallied and training recommendations were made.
Regardless of the maturity level, a consistent pattern that emerged in all cases was the differing opinions of the project teams and management. Typically management perceived the Nine Elements at higher level of achievement than did the project teams. Below are actual survey results of two project organizations. Their names have been changed to preserve confidentiality.
The ABC Company is a government agency with a high profile project office and matrix project organization. As you can see from their survey results, ABC Company appears to use the best practices of project management effectively. Most of their projects are competitively bid using federal and state acquisition regulations, which adhere to strict rules and procedures for managing project work.
ABC Company project management training focused on specific procedural training, tools and techniques for project team members. The XYZ Company is a heavy equipment manufacturing organization competing in a global market.
The company has an excellent reputation for manufacturing reliable, high quality equipment. However, schedules were forever being extended and costs were eroding profit margins. The key to this strategy was a project management initiative, but how, where, and how much?
High priority training sessions focused on life cycle methodology, scope stabilization, and planned commitments. Training was conducted top-down starting with executives and division managers learning the basics of project management. The difference between the manager training sessions and the project team member sessions was workshop time and practice. Project team members spent many more hours in the classroom and had hands-on practice using the project management tools and techniques on simulated projects.
Project communications improved almost immediately with everyone using the same project language. Both companies benefited from the Nine Elements assessment. ABC Company learned that they were already using the best practices of project management and only modest improvement was warranted. Failure in these transformation projects results in cost overruns, loss of competitive advantage, and less-than-expected returns. The impact of these failures can be so intense that many organizations fail to recover from the financial setback and are forced to shut down business.
According to a report by McKinsey , 17 percent of failed IT projects pose such a risk. But why is it that so many companies fail to avoid transformation-related pitfalls? There are several reasons that companies meet this fate, including lack of vision, poorly-defined and managed scope, insufficient understanding of requirements, lack of senior leadership involvement, and misallocated resources. As varied as these problems may appear, all of them result from ineffective program management.
A program without clear alignment to business strategies or a technology road map often takes detours to set new targets and takes new approaches to achieve its objectives, delaying the project and increasing the cost in the process. Seven percent of them fail to adhere to the timeline. Fifty-six percent provide value that is lower than what was estimated at the outset of the project. In our experience, there are four program management practices that make a real difference in large-scale transformations.
These practices build on each other and guide organizations to avoid consequential pitfalls. Many program management teams focus heavily on these first two steps, tracking and acting on information. The real differentiation comes in predicting and preventing scenarios that will jeopardize success.
Predicting and preventing situations that are grounded in trends measured across the program, arms program leadership with insights to make data-driven decision making. The need for proactive program management supporting large transformations is increasing with every passing day. A day spent pondering over its benefits and drawbacks is a gift to a competitor. Although the journey to operationalizing business processes with digital technologies is full of roadblocks and potential perils, it is achievable with a focused approach and diligent program management capabilities.
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