Project management has a few core problems that happen to almost everyone in the market. Projects are delayed, exceed budget, and in many cased the projects don’t come out as designed.
68% of projects either fail or are seriously challenged
Everybody knows about it. We’re not telling you anything new here. But have you ever stopped and thought why this is happening?
With over 10 years of experience in the project management industry, and based on extensive research we discovered the secrets to solving these problems.
One of the main secrets to successful projects is knowing the rules of the game.
Think about it as a basketball game. You might have a team of very talented athletes who can pass the ball, dribble and shoot hoops. But if they don’t know the rules and how to play as a team, the changes of winning are not so good.
Their game looks like a game of kids in the school yard. There is a lot of activity, but there is no strategy or planning behind it.
Now imagine these same kids playing against a professional. The score will be something like: 137:2.
Project management is the same as basketball. The secret of product management success is to teach project management principles to all the people who are involved in the process: including developers, testers, management, and even your clients. We call them stakeholders.
We created a series of clips about different project management topics. These clips will teach you and your team all you need to know about project management to allow you to run your projects like a professional basketball team. This program will give you an enormous advantage over your competition. In fact, after you finish it, you will call us and ask us not to sell it to anyone because you want to be the only person with this knowledge.
We all run projects as part of our daily life activities. Let’s say a fun dinner party is a project. This project includes several tasks and people and can be run using common management concepts.
Project stakeholders – the stakeholders are people who are involved or benefit from the project. In this example, the stakeholders will be everyone invited to the party, and the organizers: Bob and myself.
Project scope – the work that needs to be done to deliver a complete project. The scope of our dinner is inviting the guests, cleaning the house, buying grocery, cooking, serving the food to the table, entertaining our guests and cleaning after they leave.
Project objectives – these are benefits that the person that initiated the project expects to achieve from it. The main objective of the dinner party is to spend a nice time with our friends over dinner. The secondary objectives are to have them enjoy the food and leave the house after they’ve been well fed and no one is hungry.
After we defined the concepts of the dinner project let’s move to the other parts that in the development.
First stage this is the project plan we call it Requirements Management – in this stage we define the features that needs to be completed. It is different from project scope because this phase goes into much greater details and defines each feature and component of the project.
We will define the house cleaning activity before the guests arrive. What needs to be cleaned, should we move furniture to make more space? etc. we will define what we are going to cook. The grocery list that we need to buy. The sitting order. The dishes we are going to serve. What we should talk about during dinner. Subjects we should not mention because we don’t want to upset specific friends. What we should do after dinner. Who cleans after the guests leave and more.
Requirements management is an important phase in the project management process. But many companies neglect it and in many cases fully ignore it. Image how many problems we can have in a simple dinner if we don’t define our requirements. Now compare that to complicated projects that involve many people, and a long list of features. There is endless amount of problems you can get into if you don’t complete the requirements phase properly.
After we’ve completed our project plan or requirements lets do some risk management. Risk management is the process of identifying all the things that might go wrong and defining how we are going to handle them in case they occur. This is also something that many companies neglect because at the early stage of the project people are eager to get right to work and risk management seems like a waste of time. But as the project progresses and risks start to become real, the project starts delaying the team members are busy putting out fire instead of developing the project.
The risks that are involved in preparing the dinner are: the grocery store might out of stock of some of the ingredients. For example, the store doesn’t have lemons and you make lemon chicken. Or there is a parade on our street that will make your guests late. These are just two examples. In case of the lemons risk, we might want to go to the store the day before. We should also check the city parade schedule to make sure the streets will remain open.
Scheduling – scheduling is the process of estimating how long each activity will take and assign that activity a date and time as part of the project overall schedule to make sure everything is completed on time.
We estimate the house cleaning will take 4 hours. Cooking 5 hours. Cleaning after cooking another hour. Grocery shopping 2 hours. Dinner itself will take 3 hours. Cleaning after the guest leave 2 hours.
We list the tasks in the project plan according to the order of their occurrence. Some tasks can be done at the same time as other tasks, and some can only start after prior tasks are completed. For example:
Let’s say we decided that we are going to clean the house, buy grocery, cook, host dinner and then clean after the guest leave.
Allison can clean the house while Bob it out shopping for grocery. When they are both done, they can start cooking.
They can also decide to first do the cooking and when finished cleaning the house.
But the cooking task is dependant on having all the grocery. So they have to finish shopping before cooking. This is called “schedule dependency”. We will go into more details on how to define project schedule and manage dependency in our project management formula program.
Now that we finished with scheduling, it is time to go to work. Tasks are assigned to the team members and each one is responsible to complete them as best as possible. They should also report on the progress of the task to the project manager, so she’ll be able to keep track on the project progress.
The Dinner party was a real success. Now that you’ve learned how to run a dinner party, you can discover all the secrets of successful project management. These are simple and easy methods and you can start using them right away. You have the basic concepts, and it will easy for you to learn the rest of the formula. For more details logon to our website at: project management formula.com