Managing projects, accomplishing goals, and generating value
A project is known for being a temporal effort for the creation of a product, a service, a competence or a modification with a defined process. Every project is unique and unrepeatable because it takes place during a certain period, with specific resources, including human factor.
Projects are goal-oriented.
Each project has a beginning and an end. The end comes when goals are achieved or if the project becomes obsolete. Any plan for developing a project includes operations; they are continuous and repetitive. Operations keep the organization going while the project is carried out.
As mentioned before, a project includes the involvement of the human factor. A project manager is a person responsible of the planning and execution of the project to direct resources towards the achievement of goals. There are some skills that a project manager must have, they are explained in the following sentences. Communication: it is very important to connect ideas between the team members as well as communicate strategies and project’s status to stakeholders. Planning: developing a project takes more than half of the time in planning in order to generate impact during the execution of the approaches. Conflict management: it is common that during the development of a project, conflicts between team members could appear because working with people is complicated; every person has their own way of working, so a project manager must know how to harness the human factor. Negotiation and influence: they are related with the previous point because they involve mediation of problematic situations to achieve goals. Leadership: it is a very common concept that most organizations use. A project manager needs to motivate and carry the team through a non-hierarchical leadership to incorporate trust and collaboration among them. Teamwork: it is required to motivate the rest of the people, creating sense of belonging to the project and its goals. Decision-making: it is needed for the planning and execution of strategies. Political and cultural awareness: they help with the understanding of team behavior according to the fact that people have different idiosyncrasy. Confidence-building: it is a key factor for stakeholders. Coaching: it is required for the team members in order to stay calmed and focused on the accomplishment of organizational and personal goals. Project managers must be able to demonstrate their performance and to show how to bring their knowledge into practice. Personal effectiveness: it is essential to manage behaviors while developing the project. It includes attitudes, personality, and leadership skills.
Project management is based on the “Triple Restriction Principle”, which establishes that the scope, time, and budget are weighted and one of them predominates among the others. The scope of a project defines what is included in it. Time states the duration of developing the project. The budget describes the amount of money considered to carry out the project. Other important factors of the principle include quality of the project, resource management to perform the goals, and risk management to find the best way of working during project development.
The main causes of failure in project management include:
1. Exceed the agreed budget.
2. Too much changes.
3. Disconnection between the team members.
4. Lack of leadership.
During planning and execution, it is vital to keep record of every step of the project, including the reasons of each relevant decision; objectives and limitations of every role of the team members; detailed instructions of how to execute each planned strategy; and identification of stakeholders. The stakeholders are the people or organizations who are affected in a positive or negative manner with the decisions and activities taken during the execution of the project. Documentation also involves the clear definition of the scope of each phase of the project, as well as the risks and the benefits that will be during the execution.
Work Structure
It is important to hierarchically organize how the work will be executed during project implementation. A breakdown helps the identification of final elements in terms of specific tasks in an assigned job. Responsibilities must be well-defined across the three or four levels of accountability among the team members.
Project schedule is useful to show activities and milestones of the project. Through a visual model, managers and collaborators can understand the relationship between the predecessor and antecessor of each activity, and therefore, the start and end date of the entire project. Gantt chart is an example of project schedule that helps the guidance of work to achieve a better follow-up.
Consideration of time as a limited resource is relevant to define operating methods during a period. Activity time-lapse estimation provides the duration planned through a “Three-point calculation method”, where an expected result is obtained from the consideration of 3 values: (1) Pessimistic, duration in the worst-case scenario. (2) More likely, expected duration. (3) Optimistic, duration at the best circumstances. Through the analysis of the execution process of a project, managers can identify the critical path, which is defined as a sequence of activities with the longest period between them. This route defines the total duration of the project because it embraces the biggest limitations according to availability of resources, including time.
Quality is defined by the client, that is why the project administration includes quality management. It involves the necessary actions to provide adequate trust for the clients. The internal operations are based on continuous improvement, definition of business processes, responsibility, customer focus, resource management, service provision, operational supervision. Customer feedback is also needed in every step of the project development.
Monitoring and control of a project
Defining the baseline of a project including scope, budget and schedule contributes for the measurement of the project progress and plan performance. It establishes a set of activities that will take place for the verification of project execution. The purpose of this step is the understanding of the project evolution in order to take corrective actions where needed.
Changes are inevitable within a project.
All projects are prone to risks that can cause positive and negative effects. Positive effects are defined as opportunities, and negative effects are called threats. Opportunities’ management is a virtue in project administration. To make sure projects take the opportunities, project managers should:
· Exploit: Make sure the opportunity happens.
· Enhance: Increase the probability of success and positive impacts.
· Accept: Take advantage of the opportunity.
· Share: Transfer the impacts to stakeholders who can take better advantage of the opportunity.
Managing threats could be difficult because most of the times they involve feelings and fear. The best way to deal with them is to accept they exist and that they represent an obstacle for the development of the project. After accepting it, project managers should try to eliminate the threats as quick as possible. Mitigation is a method to reduce the possibilities of occurrence or recurrent appearance of inconvenient facts that damage planning or execution of a project.
Continuous improvement seeks to boost every step of a project. It focuses on enhancing activities that generate value for the customer while removing as many non-value activities as possible. Continuous improvement works with recurring activities with the purpose of increasing the capacity to fulfill the project requirements through the steps of planning, doing, checking, and acting.
Communication Management
Project administration requires a clear process of communication management. At the planning stage, it is important to define who will need each type of information that the project will generate. Sometimes, not all the collaborators have access to the entire data, so project managers should define where to record the information, as well as its format and access mode to it. Communication model must be clear among the team members in order to simplify the exchange of information through this process:
1. Code: Identification of the person or area to whom the message is addressed to.
2. Transmit: Oral or written communication of the message.
3. Decode: Understanding of the message.
4. Recognize: Effects of the message.
5. Feedback: Decision-making and actions taken after a message is given.
Information can be carried out in an interactive way, which is transmitted constantly inside the collaborators’ channels according to their daily work and mutual activities in a project. Another method is the push-communication, which consists in sending the information to a distribution list of collaborators and stakeholders in certain stages of the project development. The third way is the pull-communication, where data is protected but could be achievable when a receptor asks for it.
Wrap-up!
When a project comes to the end, the managers must include the documentation and certificates that make it official that the final scope and achievement of objectives are reached. Most of the time, it is needed to build an administrative closure to compare budget and general resources used along the project development.
As a recommendation, learned lessons should be recorded too. Collaborators and managers should learn from their mistakes during the planning and execution of the project. Risk management could be useful in the future in order to develop skills of how to deal with unexpected situations.
Decision-making involves processes and techniques that represent efficiency and effectiveness required to accomplish goals and improve well-being in a company. Leaders direct their efforts to manage their teams in order to achieve what is expected and to bring success for all of them.
Follow Parque Tecnológico Orión for more stories like this.
