Fortunately, project management is a learnable skill, like riding a bicycle. It can be divided into a series of steps, each of which you can master, one at a time.
Start with the End in Mind
In managing any project, you begin by defining the ideal desired result of the project. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?
What will the project look like if it is a complete success?
Start by defining the successful completion of the project, the ideal desired result. Write it down and clarify it on paper.
Then, work backward to the beginning of the project. Do this exercise in conjunction with the team members involved when-ever possible.
How will you be able to tell if you have completed this proj-ect successfully? This step, of thinking through and defining your ideal end result, is one of the most valuable of all mental and physical planning tools for any project.
Start at the Beginning
Once you are clear about your desired result, you then start from the beginning. Determine what you are going to have to do to get from where you are to the completion of this project, on schedule and on budget. Determine a specific deadline or target to aim at. Make sure that it is realistic and achievable.
Assemble the Team
Bring together all the people whose contributions will be neces-sary for the success of the project. Sometimes you need to assem-ble the team before you can even decide upon the ideal result and the schedule. Remember that people are everything. Take ample time to think carefully about the people who are going to be the team members. Fully 95 percent of success in everything that you accomplish as a leader will be determined by your abil-ity to select the people who are going to help you to do the work. If you make the mistake of selecting poor team members, you will almost invariably find it more difficult to achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.
Jim Collins, in his best-selling book Good to Great, says:
‘‘The key to success is to get the right people on the bus, and get
the wrong people off the bus. Then, put the right people in the right seats on the bus.’’
Focus on the people before the task. Remember that because all productivity comes from people, the people are the most im-portant ingredient.
Share the Ownership
Instill ownership of the project in the team members by sharing the job with them. There is a direct relationship between how much a person feels a sense of ownership for the job and how committed he is to making the project a success. One of the key jobs of leadership is to instill this feeling of ownership in each member of the team, so that each person feels personally re-sponsible for the accomplishment of the overall project. You ac-complish this by discussing every detail of the project with the people who are expected to carry it out.
Develop a Shared Vision
A shared vision is an ideal future picture of success that everyone buys into. How do you develop a shared vision? You sit down with the members of your team and work with them to answer the question, ‘‘What are we trying to accomplish?’’ You encour-age everyone to contribute, to visualize, and to imagine the ideal outcome or desired result of the project. Once this vision is clear and shared by everybody, you move on to the development of
‘‘shared plans’’ to achieve the vision.
Create Shared Plans
Shared plans are essential to successful project completion. This step requires that everyone on the team work together to discuss and develop the plans. Plans include the step-by-step activities that will be necessary to complete the project. Everyone knows what has to be done, and even more important, everyone knows what each team member is supposed to do. The more time you spend planning with the members of your team in the early
stages, the more committed and creative they will be in accomp-lishing the task once you get started.
Set Schedules and Deadlines
Once you have a shared vision and shared plans, and everyone knows exactly what is to be done and what the ideal result will look like, the next step is for you to set a deadline for project completion based on the consensus of your team. You may re-quire sub-deadlines as well. Achieving consensus is extremely important in building a peak-performing team. Ask people how long they think it will take to complete each part of the task and to complete the task overall. As the result of discussion and exchange, everyone should agree that the project can and will be completed by a certain time. One of the biggest mistakes in project management occurs when the project leader sets a date or deadline that is arbitrary and with which the team members do not agree. In each case where this happens, problems arise and the deadline is not met. If the deadline is met, the result is often so full of mistakes and problems that it would have been much better to have agreed on a reasonable deadline before you began. Set your deadlines based on the consensus of your team, or even a majority decision, if that works for you. Get everyone to agree on the timing and scheduling for each job or task that they will be expected to contribute to the overall project.
List Everything That Must Be Done
List every task, function, and activity that must be completed, right down to the smallest job. The more that you can break the project down into individual jobs and tasks, the easier it is for you to plan, organize, supervise, delegate, coordinate, and get the project finished on time.
Identify the Information You Will Require
Identify any additional information that you will need to com-plete the project. List the acquisition of the information as a
sep-arate task. Assign it or delegate it specifically to one of the team members. Set a deadline. Remember, a decision without a dead-line is merely a meaningless discussion. Nothing gets done.
Identify the Limiting Factor
Determine the limiting step in the completion of the project by answering the question, ‘‘What part of the project—that is, what task or activity—determines the speed at which the project can be completed?’’ In other words, what part of the task is the bot-tleneck that sets the speed for everything else?
For example, when my company decides to do a public semi-nar for 1,000 people, the limiting step that determines every-thing else is finding and booking a hotel or convention facility in a particular city. Finding and finalizing the space for the seminar is almost always the most difficult bottleneck in the whole proj-ect. Once we have confirmed a location, we can then begin mar-keting, sales, advertising, promotion, ticket sales, the shipping of products and materials, staffing, and everything else.
In every project, there is a bottleneck. There is always one task that determines the schedule for everything else. Start off by identifying your limiting step, and then make alleviating that constraint your top priority. Put your most talented and capable people, and even yourself, to work on that task. Nothing can be done until that job is done first.
Organize the Project
Organize the different parts of the project in two ways: sequen-tial tasks and parallel tasks. You organize by sequence when you determine which jobs must be done before other jobs can be done, with each task in order. Sequential organization is neces-sary where a particular task requires that another task be com-pleted before it can be started. In almost every case, before you do anything, you have to do something else first. Organize the tasks sequentially with a logical process of activities from begin-ning through to the end of the project.
The second way to organize the tasks is through parallel ac-tivities. Parallel activities exist when more than one task can be done at the same time. Two or more people can be working on two or three different tasks independently of each other.
A Typical Multitask Job
For example, let us imagine that you are going to be renting and moving to a new building. The limiting factor or constraint is the decision on the space that you are going to rent, the determina-tion of the exact address, and the signing of the necessary rental or lease documents. Once the location has been determined and secured, several other tasks can be done both sequentially and in parallel.
Some sequential tasks are determining the exact requirement for furniture and fixtures in the new offices, packing up the old offices, arranging for a moving company to transfer the furniture, and the actual moving in.
Some parallel activities could be arranging for new tele-phones; ordering new stationery; informing your customers, vendors, and suppliers of the new address; and other activities that can be done independently of each other.
Think on Paper
Create or acquire a simple project management form. Fortu-nately, because of the recognized importance of project manage-ment, there are numerous books, workbooks, planning forms, and computer-based project management systems. They can be used for projects as simple as throwing an office birthday party and as complex as the building of a shopping center or football stadium.
The simplest model is something that you can draw by hand and can carry in your mind as a template for any project that you become responsible for in the future. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Graph paper or lined paper is ideal. Down the left-hand side of the paper, you list every single task that has to be
accom-plished, up to and including the completion of the project, in the order that the tasks have to be done. Across the top of the page, you write the dates of completion for each phase of the project. The times listed across the top may be in days, weeks, months, or even years. You may have one column for each week or one column for each month. If it is a short-term project, you may have a column for each day, with specific tasks to be com-pleted every twenty-four hours.
Planning a Party
Imagine that you were going to have a Christmas party at your home. The most important first step is to book the caterer for the day that you have planned. Once you have a caterer and a date, you can then proceed through the project to select the menu, confirm the prices, send out the invitations, and make arrangements for chairs and tables. Confirming the caterer and the date puts the project into motion.
You make a list down the left-hand column of every step, from determining the date and the caterer all the way through to the final detail in setting up the Christmas party. Across the top you may put in weeks and months. Under those weeks and months you create columns. Now you have a picture of the proj-ect with the first step in the projproj-ect at the upper left-hand corner and the final completion of the project in the lower right-hand corner.
This project planning form gives you a simple picture that you can review and refer to regularly to be sure that each task is completed on schedule. This simple project planning form can be used and reviewed by everyone who is involved in and re-sponsible for any part of organizing the Christmas party. The clarity of this project management process dramatically increases the likelihood that everything will be done on time, with no un-expected delays or glitches.
Developing and using a chart such as this, or any chart that you find in any time management system, will save you more
time and increase your effectiveness more than you can imagine.
This chart will show you where all of the bottlenecks or prob-lems may arise. It will enable you to anticipate probprob-lems in ad-vance and to take steps to ensure that those problems don’t occur.
Delegate Responsibilities and Deadlines
Once you have the project planned, the team assembled, and every task delineated and laid out in the order in which it must be completed, you then delegate each task with a specific dead-line. Build a ‘‘fudge factor’’ into your schedules and aim for the completion of each task comfortably before the deadline. The more important the final date, the more important it is that you build in a cushion of time to ensure that the project is completed on schedule. Most people aim to finish a project at least 10 per-cent of the time before it is due. If it is a project that takes three weeks and must be completed by, say, Friday, three weeks from today, set a goal to have the entire project complete by Wednes-day or even TuesWednes-day of that week. Expect that there will be last-minute mistakes, unexpected setbacks, and unavoidable delays.
This is the mark of the superior executive.
Many of history’s great endeavors, battles that determined the fate of empires and other significant turning points, have failed because a single person did not build in that little bit of extra time needed to ensure success. Don’t let this happen to you.
Practice Crisis Anticipation
One of the most important parts of project management is crisis anticipation. This is what you do when you study the overall project and assess the things that can possibly go wrong. Mur-phy’s Laws were developed by people who worked on projects of all kinds. These laws state that ‘‘Whatever can possibly go wrong, will go wrong. And of all the things that possibly can go wrong, the one thing that will go wrong will be the worst
possi-ble thing, at the worst possipossi-ble time, and cause the most amount of money.’’ Another of Murphy’s Laws is that ‘‘Everything takes longer than you expect.’’ Still another is that ‘‘Everything costs more than you budget for.’’ The key to crisis anticipation is to think through, in advance, the different delays and setbacks that can possibly knock the project off schedule. Where could you have an obstacle or setback that would threaten the successful completion of the project? Once you have determined the worst possible thing that can happen, make sure that it doesn’t hap-pen. Address problems before they occur and take steps against them in advance.
Develop ‘‘Plan B’’
Develop alternative courses of action. Chancellor Otto von Bis-marck, the great European statesman who assembled the many principalities of Germany into a single state, was famous for his diplomatic skills. No matter what happened, he always seemed to have a detailed backup plan as an alternative. This became known as the ‘‘Bismarck Plan’’ or ‘‘Plan B.’’ You should always have a Plan B as well. You should always imagine that something unexpected will happen, and that you will have to do something completely different from what you set out to do. The more time that you take to develop a fully functioning alternative, the greater strength and resilience you will have, no matter what happens.
Continually Develop Options
In life, you are only as free as your options. You are only as free as your well-developed alternatives. If you do not have options or alternatives already developed, you may find yourself trapped into a single course of action. If something goes wrong with that plan or course of action, you can be in serious trouble.
Many of the greatest successes in history were possible be-cause the person in charge took the time to think through what
might possibly go wrong and then made provisions against it.
When it did go wrong, that leader was ready with a second plan.
It is important that you never trust to luck when you plan a project. Hope is not a strategy. Remember the words of Napo-leon. When asked if he believed in luck, he said, ‘‘Yes, I believe in luck. I believe in bad luck. And I believe that I will always have it, so I plan accordingly.’’