What is and is not a project needs to be defined so that we know whether the activities are relevant to "project management". Project management has a fundamental rile in modern organisations and its people.
Basic definitions
Many projects do succeed in delivering what they promised. To do so, it has to have a fixed duration, it involves an array of interlinking activities, it has definable benefits, and it has definable consequences of failure.
It is possible to frame almost any activity as a project. They play significant part in an economic activity of any organisation, its employees and society as a whole.
A project is a task that has beginning and the end, but it is not useful to define any tasks as a project. Some activities would be too cumbersome to go through the project management processes. Sometimes we mix the definition of "operation" with "project management".
Projects are unique, transient endeavours undertaken to achieve desired outcome. Undertaken to create unique product or service. It is an unique set of activities with defined starting and finishing point undertaken by an individual or organisation to meet specific performance objectives, within defined schedules, costs and performance indicators. It is needed to produce an unique predefined outcome at a given time using predefined resources. It creates value based on specific mission, completed at agreed timeframe.
Project is unique, temporary and focused.
PRINCE 2 requires projects to produce specific business case, but a motion of achieving a specific mission is more useful. They are undertaken to deliver benefits and often undertaken of emergence. BS6079 define project as "unique set of coordinated activities, with definite starting and finishing point, undertaken by an individual or organisation to meet specific performance objectives within defined schedule, cost and performance parameters". Many project start from a high-level view and it constitutes to its performance measures.
Uncertainly is also another part of a project. The future cannot be predicted with certainty. Uncertainly covers all of the environmental conditions in which a project has to operate. There might be uncertainly of costs or achievability of some tasks.
Project also usually encounter change.
A project is also a social construction as it involves people and systems of people. We need to integrate the people and process with necessary knowledge that will provide structure and control over the tasks.
For many organisations projects are fundamental to the way business operates. Many engineering, construction, It and governmental activities and revenues are generated from projects. They are central to our economies.
A project manager has a line management role generally in an organisation as it might manage project across different business functions: Marketing, Quality, Finance, Operations, Production, Sales, Human Resources, Purchasing as well as the Board of Directors. He might be responsible for people from each of the functions in the relation to a project in question.
Many managers now have both project-management and line-management responsibility. It is also often counted that projects take up to approx. 50% of their time. They activities involve generally day-to-day operation as well as long-term projects. The most organised organisations will provide their managers with some basic skills on project management. Management of projects provides a route for promotion as it develop their skills, knowledge and expertise in managing projects. Career development could lead to a position of project director, programme manager, senior responsible owner and others.
History of project management
History can provide us with lessons to improve the management of projects. During 1950s formal tools and techniques were developed to help manage large and complex projects, often risky with a lot of uncertainty. Critical path analysis were developed at the project planning phase. The methods survived now and become acceptable practice.
In 1990s there was a focus on development of standards for project management practices. Further developments focused on a strategic approach to the design of the project process. The project manager is responsible for delivering the end objectives to the customers. The project managers would integrate the required resources, knowledge and processes from the project beginning to an end. There have also been considerate development in the project planning tools software to support it.
However, there are still many areas where project management proves big challenges for individuals and organisations. Sometimes projects are started with no clear objectives. This does not bring any success in many organisations. Often, there is also a considerable level of bureaucracy associated with projects these days.
Today a project management is an emerging discipline and is taught exclusively in management, engineering and science schools. There is more teaching, writing and consulting in this area.
In 20th century the main focus of project management has been on product creation (assets, systems and facilities to specification of cost and time). In 21st century the focus is on value creation and the focus on doing the right projects which is much broader and strategic. Projects are also rather unpredictable and complex including social interactions and human actions with individual agendas, politics and power. Organisations need to review their approach to training and development in project management. This will include skills for dealing with complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty, understanding social and political aspects (stakeholders interests and power ), handling multiple relationships in project environment, understanding value and its creation through projects and programmes, pragmatic use of theory in practice and even working with multiple perspectives.
Projects are important issues for both individuals and organisations. Project management is a live subject and a true profession. There are projects ongoing in every organisations. The level of complexity differs and they are used to provide a source of competitive advantage.
Project Structures
Structures and frameworks are necessary to enable us to construct mental modules of complex systems of human activity.
Managing stakeholders is a significant role for project managers and consumers. Producing an immediate product is generally much simpler than making sure that all necessary stakeholders are still happy at the end of the project. Businesses are becoming more complex and the change in competitive environment in which the majority of operations operate provides necessity to the way projects are managed. Time has become a source of competitive advantage. Rates of change in technology development has increased. Organisations having to become customer focused and aspire to exceed rather than just meet customer expectations. There are also trends for openness between customers and suppliers. This cause further pressures on the project management methodologies.
The environment in which projects operate can be classified as 5Cs:
Context - the external influences on the organisation in which the project is taking place
Complexity - the level of difficulty and complication of a project
Completeness - how much of the end requirement the project will deliver
Competitiveness - how many other organisations will be competing to deliver that work
Customer focus - the expectation that customers will have their needs met by the project
The Context, can be descried in many ways. PESTEL analysis is widely used. It considers:
- Political influences - change in government policy
- Economic - the influence of general and local economies, for example struggling to recruit staff during the "economic boom" or obtaining suppliers
Social - social changes, for example methods of communication or needs considerations
- Technical - changes in technology
- Environmental - the assessment of environmental impact and corporate social responsibility
- Legal - for example regulations affecting intellectual property, government regulations, legal pressures
One approach is project structures used is 7S. The framework provides a comprehensive set of issues that needs to be considered. It consists of:
- Strategy - the high level requirements of a project and the means to achieve them
- Structure - the organisational arrangement that will be used to carry out the project
- Systems - the methods of work for monitoring, analysis and project control
- Staff - selection, recruitment, management and leadership of project team members
- Skills - the managerial and technical tools available to the project manager and the project team
- Style/culture - the way of working and inter-relationships in the organisation
- Stakeholders - individuals or groups with an interest to the project process
A project can also be defined as a conversion of inputs into outputs. The inputs include some form of want and need which is to be satisfied through the process.
In each project there will be constraints:
- time - all projects by definition have time constraints, these are also in practise the most challenging to meet
- quality - the standards by which the product and process will be judged
- cost - the value and timing of financial resources required to carry out the project work
- legal - for example a building may not be constructed until permission is obtained
- ethical - major area for concern in today's organisations
-environmental - environmental legislation developed by governments
- logic - the need for certain activities to be completed before a project can start
- activation - actions to show when project can begin
-indirect effects
And there will be relevant Mechanisms:
- people - those involved both directly and indirectly in the project
- knowledge and expertise - technical expertise and management processes
- financial resources
- tools and techniques - methods for organising work with the available resources
- technology - the available assets to assist the work
The project managers become the integrators of the elements: Input, Output, Constraints and Mechanisms. This is the key skill for the project manager.
It is important to use knowledge from previous projects to learn. This will ensure that there is no the same mistakes made over and over again. Making changes to project management processes ensures that there is an improvement to the processes. Each time, an approach to new projects should be based on the opportunity to learn from previous projects.
One approach is to consider a project being structured in four stages:
Define it - organisational strategy, goal definition, answering the questions of what is to be done any why it is to be done
Design it - modelling and planning, estimating, resource analysis, conflict resolution and justification, it answers the questions on how it will be done, who will be involved in each part and when activities should start and finish
Deliver the project - organisation, control, leadership, decision-making, problem-solving, answering the questions on how the project should be managed on the day-to-day basis
Develop process - assessment of process and outcomes of the project, evaluation, changes for future, answering the questions on how the project management process can continuously improved.
There are number of tasks and issues to be addressed in each phase.This provides a degree of complexity for the project manager. There must be general competence across each phase. The activities are relatively low in the early phases and the major amount of work is done in the later stages. Outgoings are also generally low in early stages. In the last phase the team assess the lessons learned. This step allows investment in future performance and would be a business mistake not to invest in it.
"Modest" Framework
The researches show that level of structural complexity give an acronym: Mission, Organisation, Delivery, Stakeholders and Team.
Within the Mission, general issues that make management complex is lack of clarity of requirements. Large scale, high value of the project and high urgencies also have an impact. Additionally, large number of constraints, for example legal or health and safety. Interdependency on other projects as well as high level of uncertainty.
Within the Organisation, general issues that make project management complex could be multiple time zones project team is operating in or linguistic difficulties. Lack of appropriate structure and high level of change also have an impact.
Within the Delivery, general issues that make project management complex is lack of common management method as well as inappropriate human, financial or other resources. Lack of clarity and decision making. Lack of flexibility of the project manager to respond to changes.
Within the Stakeholders, general issues that make project management complex is large number of stakeholders with different requirements and lack of commitment to the project by key stakeholders. Bad relationships and problematic inter-relations.
Within the Team, general issues that make project management complex could be lack of leadership shown by project manager, cultural and other differences between team members, low level of motivation, lack of technical experience and appropriate training.
It is a core skill of professional project manager that they have a range of responses to such complexities.
A complexity profile is also useful to complete to identify particular difficulties and formulate response to them.
Managing Mission
Those who narrow the mission are more likely to succeed than those who try to wider it. In other words, we should not try to be good at everything. We need to ensure that we focus on the right thing. This builds to the strategy process.
Generally the CEO is responsible for providing the vision of the organisation. It is all about knowing the current situation and where we want to be. This requires analysis of threats and opportunities and current capabilities of the organisation.
The approach should be that projects have strategic approach. They are coherent, coordinated, strategy driven, contributing to strategy deployment, strategic project management provides competitive advantage.
Very often, however, in traditional models, project managers are faced to reduce the negative potential of projects.
The process here is simple, by involving the two-way communication throughout the organisation, the strategic process becomes more consensual and people are aware of the realities, capabilities and limitations.
Projects should become an essential tool for turning the strategic objectives into reality. The mission statement of an organisation often reviews the nature of the organisation. Sometimes being the best is not necessary. Sometimes we do not have to be the best quality or the cheapest. Setting the vision shows where the organisation is heading.
In addition to vision a good contribution is the analysis of the environment. For example SWOT analysis.
Deploying strategy results in priorities in which the products and services will be delivered today and what the organisation will be doing tomorrow.
Organisational objectives will determine the goal time, quality and cost.
The task of strategy deployment is well established in few world class organisations. The principle is that the strategy and projects of an organisation should show a high level of coherence. This means that all projects are part of a bigger plan and form a recognisable contribution to that plan.
Strategy deployment provides means for project managers to agree objectives for their projects and agree how these relate to organisational objectives. This is ideal when the organisation has a large number of projects. It is important that the project objective is quantified where possible, particularly a high level objectives.
Managing projects is generally around juggling cost, quality and time. It is not possible to do everything and we have to make choices of what we do. We need to choose activities where we get maximum benefits from.
Many organisations have no mechanism for determining their total workload. Aggregate resource plans can help to keep control on activities in the organisation, both projects and repetitive operations. The aggregative plan is another step of the process in determining what projects can be undertaken and in what order.
The capacity of machines and equipment is finite, we need to work on the most important jobs first. Having assessed the workload of project staff many organisation find that they overload the personnel they have. One way is to keep log of the available persons hours and allocate them to projects. It is easy to underestimate the time required. Keeping track of the workload is an important contribution to the program management can make. This involves keeping the log of persona available hours.
The capabilities and competencies of the persons should also be considered. Many organisations do not think about the main competencies, trying to do everything themselves. Taking on too many projects also can be damaging and stressful for the teams and managers.
Microsoft project management or SAP allows to integrate the vast amount of data, including the number of projects, the resources requirements and the timing of those requirements.
Programme management provides a layer of coordination between projects ensuring that the higher-level benefits are utilised.
Managing Project roles
There are many roles that have been created by organisations in the attempt to facilitate the management of projects. The roles and relationships should be defined by the organisation. This sets out who is responsible for doing what and to whom they are responsible. The "sponsor" would fund the project. The "senior user" provides a high level input to the project, and the "senior supplier" will be the one who delivers the project.
The technical advisory group may be added when the project is of high technical nature.
Experience have shown that having consistent approach to managing projects brings considerable benefits.
Managing Stakeholders
The challenge from achieving total success comes from complexity of the objectives and requirements of many different groups of "stakeholders" Whatever, we do someone is going to be unhappy. The project managers roles is to minimise the critical levels of unhappiness.
Most projects have more than one stakeholder or stakeholders groups which often have conflicting requirements. The key questions we need to ask ourselves are: Who are the stakeholders? What are their requirements? There are also "external stakeholders" outside of the project teams. For instance, customer group, auditors etc.
Te challenge that project managers face with stakeholder identification is not that of making sure all relevant groups and individuals are included but deciding where to stop the process. The right step here is to make the scale of an impact of the stakeholders on the project and the project on the stakeholders. The internal team is always doing to be central in the consideration. The next level are the external people, crucial to the success. The lat layer is the rest of the world.
At the most basic level the requirements of the project may be stated in terms of time, cost and quality/specification. The requirements must also be prioritised to allow for decisions to be made.
There is a set of measures that can be developed:
- Process measures - product development cost, time and performance to quality procedures
- Short time outcome measures - product performance level, desirability to the market, flexibility of design to meet urgent customer needs
Long-term outcome measures - payback period, customer satisfaction, percentage of business being generated by the new product, market share
The project managers have the strategic role, but how do we determine that a project is success? Generally, the timing is the assessment and perspective of the accessor. Therefore, project manager need to focus on the work and management of the project team. During the project, some notion of "control" should be exercised. Set of measures should be put in place to report performance to date, but sometimes it takes longer than expected for the success to be achieved. Often the project managers will act as "mediators" between the stakeholders of the project.
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