Scheduling the PRINCE2 way

Once you’ve done your estimates and understand what tasks are required, you need to prepare your project schedule.  PRINCE2 has some advice on how to put this together.  It says:

A plan can only show the ultimate feasibility of achieving its objectives when the activities are put together in a schedule that defines when each activity will be carried out.

Step 1: Define activity sequence

This is the part where you work out the optimal sequence for all your tasks.  You should know the dependencies, so slotting them together is easy.  Or is it?

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Don’t forget these tasks!

Project managers set out with the best intentions to deliver the best quality deliverables.  That’s nothing new.  But one of the reasons things sometimes go awry is that we forget to include key items on the project plan, and then we need to spend time and effort working on them, which throws everything else out.

A plan is more than just a schedule, so making sure that everything somehow gets on to your Seavus Project Planner Gantt chart is only half the story.  Plans also include the documentation behind each line including quality measures and a definition of the deliverable.  Things that get missed of the list of tasks also don’t get scoped and estimated, and that’s how a project team’s time can get eaten up doing things that aren’t included in the scope of work.

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Doing the Right Things for Your Customer

Customers are a demanding group … that’s a given. When we have all of our regular project responsibilities to deal with on a daily and weekly basis, how do we know when we’re doing the right things for our customers? How do we know we’re managing them well, responding to the right requests, saying ‘yes’ when we should and saying ‘no’ when we should, and ensuring that our actions are not detrimental to the forward progress of our project?

You can’t always base it on customer satisfaction levels. Because attentive ‘do-anything-for-the-customer’ behavior may get a project manager and team high marks mid-way through a project. But upon implementation, if they’ve said yes to too many things that ended up modifying scope and delivering a system to the customer that is ultimately not what they ordered, then that customer satisfaction at the end of the project will be low. The end user community will have a product that they didn’t sign up for and that’s a very bad thing.

In order to ensure we’re doing right by our customers, we first need to have confidence in what we’re doing. And we need to have confidence that we’re doing the right things for the project. We can do that in a few ways, including:

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Scoping the Project for Better Requirements

Good scope before requirements

The earlier you define scope, the more efficient your requirement definition process will be. Work done before scope definition is usually wasted effort. An early scope definition keeps requirements writers from diverging, reduces requirement inconsistencies, and keeps the big picture in view. It also shortens the time required for requirement writing and rewriting and reduces debates.

If you do not give everyone writing or reviewing requirements your scope definition, they are likely to create their own. Imagine listening to a movie without watching it – as I have done many times on trips in the SUV listening to a movie several times but never seeing it as it’s playing in the DVD player behind my head. I have a vision – my own vision – of what’s going on and what the characters look like and what the set looks like, but if no one describes it to me in detail or I don’t see it for myself then that’s all it is … my own vision. And it likely differs greatly from the actual film itself. Read more »

The Importance of Project Management Software

Have you ever wondered how important software is for managing projects? How much time does it save? How much it can help you in delivering a successful project? What parts of it are lifesavers and what parts can you live without?

Having these questions ourselves, our company has conducted a research with a subject “Project management on an enterprise level”, during the past month, supported by Seavus Project Planner and Seavus DropMind™. The main purpose of the research was to identify the needs and requirements of people who are faced with project challenges everyday.

The research has shown some very interesting results that we would like your input on.

Part I

First, let’s share the statistics about the respondents. The first part of the survey was dedicated to analyzing industry the companies operate in, company’ size, location and job title of the respondent.

From the responses provided, most respondents work in companies within Manufacturing (13.40%) and Consulting (11.34%) industries, directly followed by Business / Professional Services (8.25%), Construction / Home Improvement (8.25%) and Government / Military (7.22%). Other industries presented have less than 7 % of respondents.

Regarding the companies size, most respondents work in SME (24.74%) directly followed by companies with 1000-10000 employees (18.56%). However most of these companies have between 1 and 3 offices (51.55%).

The job title of the respondents is summarized in the graphic below:

We believe this reach provides an accurate sample of the PM market, and that the conclusions can be trusted.

Part II

Next part of the survey was connected to the actual usage of the project management software that is chosen within the responders’ company.

We wanted to explore the usage of the Microsoft® EPM within these companies and more or less we were surprised by the answers. It is interesting to see that large number of companies that have been using MS Project Standard are not using Microsoft® EPM and do not even consider implementing this solution within their companies.

However, it was also interesting to see the importance of different parts constituting the project management solutions for the people using Microsoft® EPM (or for those that are considering using it in the future) and for the people who haven’t been using it or are not considering using it in the future. We have divided the most important features in 4 categories: Project Management, Resource Management, Time Management and Collaboration. Follow up the appropriate responses in the tables below:

(The green colored cells are related to respondents who are or will be using Microsoft® EPM and the orange colored cells are related to people who are not or will not be using Microsoft® EPM).

As you can notice all of the features above are important and very important for the biggest number of the respondents, except for the wikis which both groups has indicated as not important feature. Moreover, almost 79% of respondents stated that it is very important or critical for them to track project progress. Assigning privileges/roles is valued with 3, (on a scale from 1 as useless and 5 as critically important), from almost 50% of the respondents and for all respondents is important to know that their project is on budget and on schedule.

Other interesting answers were given on questions such as where the respondents store important documents (.mpp files; general documents and project related documents). The answers were diverse, since this was an open question. However, some of the most frequent answers were: on the Server, SharePoint, Network, and File Server and it is more than obvious that people want to have their pm solution installed on the server in the company (89%) than to have it hosted (10.81%). Moreover, they prefer to install the solution from their own IT department (75.68%) than to have the installation from the solution provider (24.32%), but almost 57% of the respondents are ready to pay for installation and support from third party.

The answers on the question “How the teams update task progress?” were expected. 37.55% of the respondents stated that e-mail is used for updating task progress. Surprising 18.18% of respondents verbally update tasks and 15.58% use MS® Excel. Software programs were mentioned by a small number of people.

Same answers were given on the question “How do you share info about late tasks, risks, or general project related knowledge?” with 75.32% for e-mail, 48.05% verbally and 28.57% MS® Excel.

This survey provided many valuable answers, but as you can notice, there are some conflict areas. We encourage you to share your opinion on the results and moreover your experience in the field. Let’s create together the big picture of this survey.