Top Five Ideas for Project Management

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The Top Five Ideas for Project Management that bring project success

1. Create implementation teams around an attractive, compelling, and motivating project theme – a vision of outcomes with benefits• Teams respond best to a compelling mission

2. Identify the value that beneficiaries will place on outcomes• Maintain priorities according to urgency and importance

3. Accept and internalize the requirements paradox: • Project success depends on complete and accurate requirements

• Requirements will never be complete, and are frequently inaccurate

4. Plan incrementally; Work incrementally; Deliver incrementally • Let the value proposition evolve as beneficiaries adopt incrementally

5. Maintain a management focus on ‘effort-to-complete’ • The best focal point for management is on outcomes

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Create implementation teams around an attractive, compelling, motivating project theme

• Teams are more likely to have successful outcomes than individuals– A compelling mission joins individual agendas into collective effort

– Successful teams are multi-functional, self-contained, and empowered for self-governance

– Performance risks of individuals are mitigated by the redundant and collective efforts of members

• Teams don’t always work– Intolerance of nemesis viewpoints leads to group-think and missed

opportunity

– Leadership and management become confused: people are led; outcomes are managed

– Empowerment uncertainties kill productivity• Awkward and untimely decision chains• Confusion about roles and responsibilities

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Identify the value that beneficiaries will place on outcomes

• Define the community of beneficiaries and stakeholders– Beneficiary’s lives and business’ are made better by project outcomes

– Stakeholders pave the way -- involved but not necessarily committed

• Ask what beneficiaries value– What’s must-have for minimum success?

– What’s most important, and what’s least important?

– What’s most urgent and what’s the timeline?

– Let value evolve as incremental deliverables are absorbed

• Decide what stakeholders need in return for their support– View stakeholders as indirect beneficiaries

– Show stakeholders a return on investment, even if not monetary

– Value the beneficiary where stakeholders and beneficiaries conflict

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Accept and internalize the requirements paradox

• Change is to be encouraged, not suppressed– Users are ‘wicked’ – the solution often defines the problem

– Understand that changes will be offered after the first outcome

– Guide change management with urgency, importance, and feasibility

• Governance keeps the big picture in mind– Ask: is everything consistent with the theme?

• Providing value is preferred to following a plan– Know: beneficiaries care nothing for the plan; they care only for the

benefit

– Plan, even though: planning is everything; plans are nothing … plans never survive the first encounter with reality

– Appreciate value is emergent: outcomes acquire value with application and experience

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Plan incrementally; Work incrementally; Deliver incrementally

• Be incremental– The ‘big-design-up-front’ – BDUF – rarely works

– The ‘big-bang’ at the end rarely works

– Break the time-line down into segments

– Schedule rollouts to a pace that can be absorbed by the beneficiaries

• Break the big theme down into smaller stories– Each story is a feature and/or function with defined value

– Prioritize according to urgency, importance, and feasibility

– Develop each story on its own

• Allow time for reflection– Between increments, solicit feedback from the beneficiaries

– Plan time to reflect, absorb lessons learned, and apply improvement

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Maintain a management focus on ‘effort-to-complete’

• Manage for outcomes rather than to conserve inputs– Only outcomes have value to investors, stakeholders, and beneficiaries

– Keeping the inputs – cost and schedule -- on-plan does not necessarily create any outcomes

– Lead towards the objective: motivate, inspire, and demonstrate by example

• Ask: How much effort to complete the work?– Remaining effort can be equated to required resources

– Required resources can be compared to remaining resources

– Gaps can be addressed once identified

• Never ask: How complete is the work?– It may seem like an enigma, but workers usually have more insight for the

way forward than the proportionality of past and present

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Credit where credit is due

• The requirements paradox: Niels Malotaux• Planning is everything; plans are nothing: Field Marshall Helmuth

Graf von Moltke• Prioritize by urgency and importance: Stephen Covey• People are led; things are managed: Admiral Grace Hopper, USN• BDUF: Scott Ambler