Why is it So Hard to Plan Well Up Front? – Part 1

Why is it that time and time again projects end up with bad requirements?  Why do the same project experiences and nightmares seem to happen over and over again?

Imagine this scenario – and it may hit home with you so it might not take too much imagination.  You are an intelligent and confident leader.  Let’s say you’re in charge of the project and you have a leadership role in seeing that requirements get documented well.  You’ve been educated in the ways of project management and understand the importance of good requirements definition.  You started your last project strictly adhering to a textbook method of project planning and requirements definition, only to find that the ideas weren’t catching on with your team.

Before you could figure out why it wasn’t working with the team, your supervisor requests a progress update (since this is a very visible project).  It seems like a career-killer to tell him that you’re still trying to figure out what to do, so realize that you must get something going and you decide you’re too busy to implement a new process designed to help you do things the right way.

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Onboarding with Success

When you’re asked to jump on a new project how do you go about doing that to ensure your best chance for success? That may often depend on why you’re being asked to take over the project … and it can be for any one of the following reasons:

• Previous project manager failed to manage the team and project effectively
• Previous project manager lost the customer’s confidence
• Previous project manager lacked the expertise to lead the project based on new direction
• An emergency necessitated an early departure for the project manager
• Co-management became a necessity due to changes on the project Read more »

How Much Effort Should Scope Definition Take?

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

We’ve looked at how you go about communicating scope, now let’s look at the concept of how much effort should go into defining the scope of your project or product development process. This article is based somewhat on text from the book “Customer-Centered Products” by Hooks and Farry.

Scope definition is one of the most critical aspects of project or product management. Without proper scope definition, a project is destined to experience continual scope creep resulting in ongoing timeline and budgeting issues.

When the scope creep happens, the only way around the timeline and budgeting issues will be to introduce many change orders to your customer which will likely decrease their satisfaction level significantly. You’ll still have the timeline issues and the budget issues, but you’ll be able to justify them with the stack of change orders – assuming the customer actually approves all of them rather than flat out canceling the project altogether out of frustration. A much better route is to spend the proper amount of time up front correctly identifying and documenting scope and gaining agreement with the customer on that carefully defined scope. Read more »

Communicating Project Scope

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

The Scope Document

Once the project scope is defined, it must be documented to ensure that everyone assigned to the project will address the right tasks and work toward the same project goals. A formal scope document is essential to keeping a project on track. The order that these scope items are covered and the amount of space devoted to each in this document will depend on the type and size of the project and the number of scope items that need to be covered. On small projects, needs, goals, objectives, and missions will often be the same thing – easily described in a few statements. Distinguishing between these things is not that important, but establishing a flow from less measurable statements of need to more measurable ones truly is important. Read more »

Maintaining Project Control

This post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

Information for this article is based on a section of Eric Verzuh’s book entited “The Portable MBA in Project Management.”

The Control Process

The project control process is designed to spot problems early, while they are still small enough to correct. It is an iterative feedback loop in which the project manager uses measurement and testing to evaluate deviations from the plan as to cost, schedule, quality, and risk. These deviations may or may not result in corrective action. The key is to monitor closely enough and often enough to spot such deviations before they get out of control. There are five steps in the project control process: Read more »