Journeyman Project Manager » planning

4 Classic Planning Proverbs

Bert — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:42:45 +0000

“The more you plan the luckier you get.”

“The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.”

“If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.”

“Murphy, O’Malley, Sod and Parkinson are alive and well – and working on your project.”

The Key Method to Prioritizing Efficiently

Bert — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:52:05 +0000

Chances are high that you and your team have a lot of things to do at the moment and a long list of tasks is currently on your plates.
There’s a cool way to find out what’s the smartest thing to do first by putting each task in one of 4 group in terms of saving time.

Have a look at my sketch drawing in the picture …

important things that are urgent
important things that are less urgent, but not less important
not so very important things that are urgent
unimportant things that aren’t urgent

You can put everything you have to do in one of those 4 groups. Groups 1 and 4 are the obvious ones, do stuff in 1 now, never do anything that gets into 4, easy. But the things in groups 2 and 3 could trick you in wasting your time if you don’t pay attention.

This isn’t rocket science, you already know this but I think it’s a good way to visualize the choices you have to make.

It takes discipline and courage at times to focus on the tasks you put in group 2, but often they are the ones that help you grow out of hard situations. Stuff that goes into group 2 for a PM for instance could be making a detailed planning or a strong risk log, or something strategical like writing out a new process and presenting it to your own project office or to your executives.

Have a good look at what your project teams are doing, it’s the job of a PM to indicate the urgency and the importance of different things for them but also to help them make the correct assessment and maybe the drawing can help you with that when things get fuzzy (like they do).

I got a lot of things like this explained to me in far greater detail by Inge De Bruyn from De Groeipraktijk and use the advice quite a lot, they do training workshops and seminars on all kind of soft skills. This post isn’t endorse by them but I’d recommend them to you if you’d ask me.

3 Tools to Make Work Breakdown Structure

Bert — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:37:24 +0000

After making a preliminary scope statement and some high level planning, most contracts can be signed and actual production can start. The direction of the project is clear but more details are needed to efficiently control the work. For this I get the project team together and make a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), it’s a detailed scope description where you try to put everything into that’s needed to finish the project. I found a few fun ways to do this:

Make a mind map. You can use a tool like Freemind for this. A mind map has a tree structure just like that of a WBS. Most mind mapping tools are made for brainstorming so they allow you to work fast.
Work with Post-Its. Sit together at a fairly big clean table or whiteboard and group the elements of work in columns of Post-Its. Use at least 2 colors, a color to write group names on and a color for work elements. Take a picture of the whole thing after you’re done.
Use SCRUM user stories to find and define the tasks. SCRUM is a methodology for agile software development, but most of it can be applied to just about any industry. SCRUM calls a collection of tasks a project backlog, which are derived from user stories. This video I found at Agile Software Development explains everything you need to know in about 8min.

Most of the projects I manage are a bit too complex to make a WBS on a presales budget but if it’s possible for you to do this exercise up front it’s an excellent basis for estimates. You need the full team for this unless you’re a complete domain expert yourself.

How does a project get a year late?

Bert — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 07:41:47 +0000

One day at a time.

This little piece of wisdom is one of my favorite project management proverbs. It’s number 40 in a long list of PM jokes and proverbs I found the other day. Interesting stuff, but be warned, you’ll notice about 95% of it is horribly corny.

Planning the Perfect Deadline

Bert — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:00:03 +0000

Here are some important things you can use as a checklist when thinking about deadlines.

Check to see if a deadline is on a Friday, this happens all the time and it’s probably a bad idea because people make plans for the weekend and if something should go wrong you’re in for a challenge. ~~I like deadlines on Mondays.~~ As David points out, midweek is probably a lot better, that lowers the risk of having to work in weekends even more.
Are you responsible for another project that has important events at the same time? Act proactively and early if this happens, reschedule or ask a colleague to help out.
Take a look at the vacation planner, just maybe that key stakeholder or that rockstar server administrator the project depends on will be off rock climbing in the Alps that week. Ask HR.
Is the deadline on an official holiday? For other countries (when working with offshore companies) you can probably find an official calendar at iCalShare (compatible with a lot more than just iCal)
Does the delivery process take a long time? Think about this, some deployments or integrations take a long time to prepare or execute.
Make sure you have the correct acceptance criteria in your hands. Call you client some time up front and tell him what the status of the project will be at the moment of the deadline, even if it’s already in the project charter. If something is still ambiguous at a late moment it should be defined better, right away.

A classic example of last minute ambiguity is the “time of day” discussion, aka “we meant ready by morning on the day of the deadline, not 6pm because our VP needs to sign off the campaign for the final go live”.

Remember, you can ask all vital planning information you need from any stakeholder once you own the project.