a clarizen white paper - online project management...

So Your Boss Thinks You’re a Project Manager:7 Things the ‘Accidental’ Project ManagerNeeds to Know.

The Accidental Project Manager

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Copyright ® 2012. Clarizen Inc. All rights reserved

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by Michele Borovac, Clarizen.com

March, 2012

A Clarizen White Paper


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Table of Contents

Executive Summary......................................................................................................................

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................

1: Breaking Down a Project: Milestones and Tasks..............................................................

2: How Long It Takes Depends on Dependencies...............................................................

3: Who Does That? Identifying Resources by Skillset, Availability, or Other Criteria...

4: It Can’t Wait: Critical Path, the Shortest Distance to Your Goal.....................................

5: Not Enough Time, Not Enough Money? Time and Expense Management.............

6: Are We There Yet? How to Tell if You’re on Track...........................................................

7: Can’t Do It Alone? Building an Invested Team.................................................................

Putting It All Together..................................................................................................................

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Executive SummaryProjects happen. You may not be a trained project manager, but chances are, you’re expected to perform like one. Every day you face the challenge of organizing your work and that of others to get the right tasks done on time and within budget. You‘re a professional juggler: tasks, deadlines, and resources; still, you’re looking for the best way to ensure your organizations’ success. Do you need a list? A plan? A spreadsheet? A miracle?

In this paper, we’ll look at seven down-to-earth things you can do to get your project or projects to a place where you can manage the work productively, efficiently and predictably. Even before you pick up a project management tool, we’ll look at how you can break the work down into manageable pieces and understand the relationships among those pieces. With that foundation in place, we’ll show you the questions you need to ask to get a handle on the economic elements as well as the process of prioritization and collaboration your team needs to succeed.

IntroductionA well-functioning team is like a perfectly tuned pit crew. Each person contributes his or her best work in the order it’s needed, keeping the machine moving efficiently, to speed across the finish line first. If you’re like most managers, you’ve seen that getting people to get their best work done together doesn’t happen by itself. Whether you call it “project management”, “herding cats”, or just “the endless to-do-list”, managing a project can seem to be a bigger project than the project itself. Emails, spreadsheets, phone calls and meetings, deadlines and calendars, not to mention things that people actually create, seem to all take on a life of their own, like small children left alone too long. You wonder how anything ever gets done. Often, the only thing that’s not mysterious is the deadline.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You may be part of a large organization or running a small business. You may be managing marketing campaigns, organizing public events, leading a software development project, delivering consulting services, driving a complex major installation or resource deployment, or any of many different non-trivial efforts. Whether or not you think of yourself as a project manager, having the right tools and a straightforward way to break a seemingly insurmountable project or program into achievable parts can work wonders (and, also, make you look really smart). In this article, we’ll touch on some basic concepts that professional project managers use. We’ll then look at some approaches you can take to turn the work you need to do into a well-organized plan that makes the most of everyone working together. It’s a plan that can unlock the full potential of the project, to get the great results that reflect the best work of everyone involved.

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1: Breaking Down a Project:Milestones and Tasks

If you have something to do that takes more than a few minutes, whether it’s grocery shopping or launching a new product, you might start by making a list. The list can include stuff to do, deadlines, people you have to talk to, things you need to get, and more. For simple projects, that list is in your head and you might know exactly what you need to do first; you might jot it down on a piece of paper.

Then again, if you have a serious, complex project on your hands, your list will get really long really fast. Forget trying to keep it in your head, on paper or on your whiteboard. Perhaps you try a spreadsheet, making your list really long, and neatly place all the questions and answers about the project into a big planning exercise of rows and columns. But then, what do you when the questions and answers change during the course of the work?

Before you despair of lists and tables, let’s begin at the beginning. No matter what its scope, what you often do know about a project is that something has to be done by a certain point in time. Deadlines focus the mind. They remind you of the inevitable fact time is anything but infinite, and you need to get from here to there by that point in time.

Even when you don’t know where to start, you can probably say something about how you’ll know when it’s done, partially or completely. In fact, you can probably identify key points you have to pass through, where a clear chunk of the work is complete. You can’t generally eat dinner before the food is ready, and you can’t really get from Stockbridge to Boston without passing Worcester.

In a project, a milestone is a key point in completing some significant chunk of work. Think of it as a top-level collection or category of smaller, more fine-grained items required to complete that chunk of work. Milestones also give your team interim destinations where you can check collective progress on the end result.

There are a couple ways to get started: You can list out a handful of milestones — three to seven major categories of work in the sequence, and then identify more detail within each of those categories. Or, you can create a general brainstorm list of 30-40 items of work that have to be done, and then group them into three to seven categories. In the same way a tree diverges into branches, you can break down the work into something of a hierarchy. The higher-level items form milestones, within which there are more detailed items to be done; those, in turn, have details of their own.


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FIGURE 1: Task breakdown structure for a sample project.

The diagram above shows how you might put together such a project – an online marketing campaign that an advertising and media agency might run. It involves a lot of people, a fair amount of logistics, and an immovable deadline.

This ‘New Client’ project consists of a series of milestones, from Sales Opportunity through Launch of the Campaign and Success Metrics. Each milestone in turn consists of subsidiary elements of work, within which are additional layers of work, down to finer and finer levels of detail.

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NewClient

SalesOpportunity

ClientProposal

BidWin/Lose

CampaignConcepts

DevelopCampaign

LaunchCampaign

SuccessMetrics

...StageOnline

ClientReview

MediaDesign

ProductionKickoff

Storyboard Animation Audio Pre-Production

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2: How Long It Takes Dependson Dependencies

This exercise of categorizing the contents of your to-do list is a vital first step, but let’s not stop there. In harnessing the power of those ‘pieces of work’ tasks, really to the project, you need to clarify when they need to be done, by whom, how long they take, and what each needs in order to be done.

Let’s take this one step at a time. First, let’s ask “when” does a task need to be done? Before you look at the calendar, let’s look at your milestones. Each task has a milestone that depends on it for completion; put another way, each milestone depends on a collection of tasks. What you’ll see pretty quickly is that not only do milestones depend on tasks, but tasks often depend on one another. In the simplest of terms, you can’t serve a

cake before baking it. In our working example above, you can’t launch the online campaign before you develop the campaign concepts; you can’t do the animation before you complete the storyboard; you need the Success Metrics component to be ready at the same time as the Campaign Launch, so you know how well it’s working as soon as the campaign is online.

In project management terms, this kind of coordination between tasks is specified using terms like “Finish to Start” or “FTS” which means which means the second task starts in sequence after the first one is completed. Similarly, “Start to Start” means two tasks that need begin at the same time; “Finish to Finish” means to tasks that need two end at the same time, proceeding in parallel (see Figure 2, below).


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FIGURE 2: Tasks (A) and (B) must begin at the same time, and have a “Start to Start” dependency.Task (C) must be completed before Task (D) can begin, which is known as a “Finish to Start” dependency.

Tasks (E) and (F) must end at the same time, and so have a “Finish to Finish” dependency.

By establishing how tasks fit with predecessors or successors, you are starting to put the system in place that ensures the work gets done, well beyond a simple list of categories.

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Week1

Start toStart

Finish to Start

Finish to Finish

Week2 Week3 Week4 Week5 Week6 Week7 Week8 Week...

Task (A)

Task (C)

Task (D)

Task (E)

Task (F)

Task (B)

3: Who Does That?Identifying Resources by Skillset, Availability,or Other Criteria

If you’re building a pyramid in ancient Egypt and your team calls you ‘Your Majesty’, you probably have a lot of influence over what they do and when they do it. For the rest of us, we depend on others: The expertise and skills of people who know what to do and how to do it best, and often make their own decisions about when to do it.

In the previous sections, we set forth a list of milestones and tasks, figured out what work is required for each of them, and which tasks needed to be done together. This probably seems like a lot of work, which likely has you thinking about who needs to do each particular task. Because you understand how valuable your team’s contributions are to making your project successful, you want to make it easy for them to tell you what they know. In building out the plan milestones, tasks and dependencies, you are creating an easy-to-understand picture of all the moving parts of the project. In assigning tasks or even milestones to individuals, you create an opportunity for them to help define the scope of the task, ensure nothing is missing, and confirm how long each will take. They can also give you feedback on the dependencies you defined earlier.

In the same way you identify who can do the tasks facing your team, you may have also identified who’s missing from the team. Assigning owners to tasks helps you identify what kind of skill or experience is required for the project as a whole and where you might have holes in the project team. For example, the animators producing your online advertising campaign are not the same people you’d ask to develop success metrics, though you assuredly need them both in the marketing campaign example above.

Resist the urge to over-plan without the involvement of your team. Doing this collaboratively leads to an essential benefit of matching resources and skills to the work to be done: securing the buy-in of your team. Getting the same picture in front of everyone else helps ensure that they also share your vision for the destination.

Before we dive into how best to tie all that information from your team together, let’s take a closer look at understanding your project schedule end to end.

4: It Can’t Wait:Critical Path, the ShortestDistance to Your Goal

With your team’s input (and it may be simply their filling in the blanks in your project schedule), or by discussion via emails, meetings, chats, or other forms of communication, you now know how much time in total needs to be invested to get the work done.

You also know, from your definition of tasks and dependencies, that some of the work can be done in parallel: The sum total of hours that are required for the project need not be the sum total of elapsed time on the clock or calendar.

That can be good news, bad news or both. You may have discovered that the relationship between the tasks that roll up to milestones shows that the project will take twice as long to complete as the time available between now and your deadline. How can this be? Let’s say that the Media Design tasks for the Marketing Campaign we described earlier takes three people working for 12 days straight. Does that mean that if you have triple the staff working it can be finished in four days, i.e., one-third the time? Not necessarily.

Don’t panic. There’s a vital piece of information found within those dependencies and relationships between tasks that you defined earlier. It’s called the ‘critical path’. The critical path is that subset within the series of successive dependent tasks where there is zero “slack” between one task and the next. If a task is on the critical path, it needs to be started immediately upon completion of its predecessor: It can’t wait. Tasks off the critical path are those that might be able to wait.

“Slack” is a common notion. It’s the time in the sequence when nothing needs to be done, because you have to wait for something else to complete. There are many moments in anyone’s daily routine where you have such “downtime,” where there is nothing you can do to advance progress. The critical path is the opposite of slack: If you don’t work on a critical path item, the entire project slows down.

What else can you learn by identifying if a task can wait? Consider the task dependencies described earlier: Some tasks cannot be started before the others are finished. Logically speaking, tasks and milestones that must be


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FIGURE 3: Tasks (B) and (D) are on the critical path.

worked in sequence also cannot be parallelized. Once some item on the path to finishing your project can’t move any faster, it becomes a bottleneck. This is a powerful insight.

What happens when a task can’t wait? If there is unexpected down time between tasks on the critical path, the whole project is delayed. In the same way, shortening the tasks on the critical path, or adjusting their dependencies can help make the project go faster.

Let’s visualize the critical path through a new set of tasks from the earlier example. Consider the following four tasks, with dependencies and durations are follows:

Given four tasks, where the longest take three days each, how long will this small project take? Can you finish the project in three days with four people to help you? If you said “No,” you probably noticed that (B) Storyboard and (D) Video Shoot cannot be parallelized! These are the critical path tasks. The project will take 6 days, as shown in Figure 3, below.

Does it have to be 9 days? Look at the tasks on the critical path. Is there any way the task (D) Video Shoot can be done in less than 3 days? What if Task (D) takes only 2 days, and finishes on Day 5? The whole project ends sooner, because you shortened the critical path. Does it help to get task (C) Voiceover done in 1 day? No; it is not on the critical path. You’ve not absorbed any of the slack in the project by doing so.

As we just noted in our example, it can be just as important to see which tasks are on the critical path as it is to know which tasks are not. Tasks off the critical path are not irrelevant to the project; it just means that doing them faster does not necessarily help you get the project done faster. Only the tasks on the critical path have that impact. Conversely, a day’s delay in a critical path task translates directly into a day’s delay in completing the project.

Here’s the catch: changing task durations or dependencies on the critical path might change the critical path itself. Not to worry: if you find yourself calculating the critical path on a regular basis for many projects, you may want to consider a project management solution. A good project management tool can show you where the bottlenecks are, and how the changes you make in the work impact your schedule. Because you always know the critical path, you’ll always know which work has the most impact on your deadline.

Are we there yet? Almost. As you work on the critical path, you’ll also discover that sometimes people on your team have other things to do besides work on your project. They’ll find out too: when all of you input information into tasks and schedules they can see, they’ll tell you they can or can’t be available. While that can be a problem, it doesn’t need to be a surprise: once you know who is available when, you can make the necessary adjustments to the tasks, or even find out where you are missing key resources.


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Start-to-Start: (A) Color Theme [2 days] starts together with (B) Storyboard [3 days]

Finish to Finish: (C) Voiceover [2 days] finishes together with (D) Video Shoot [3 days]

Finish to Start: (B) Storyboard [3 days] finishes before starting (D) Video Shoot [3 days]

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Day1

Finish to Start

Day2 Day3 Day4 Day5 Day6

(A) Color Theme

(D) Video Shoot

(C) Voice Over

(B) Storyboard

5: Not Enough Time,Not Enough Money? Time andExpense Management, and HowYou Know If You Need It

With the clarity that comes from a full list of milestones, tasks, dependencies, resources and deadlines, what’s it worth to get your project delivered on time? Even with thousands of workers building their pyramids, the pharaohs didn’t have infinite time. Think about the results you need your project to deliver: how important is it to keep track of how much time and effort each member of your team invests in the project? Do you want to be able to analyze (and predict for future projects or bids) how much time each component actually took vs. your initial plan? The marketing campaign we described in Figure 1 involves someone is paying a specific amount of money for the completion of the project you’re working on; If you want to stay in business, you probably want to spend less than that amount of money getting the project done.

As you’ve broken down your project into what needs to get done by whom, and when, you probably have a good idea of which elements will involve cost. Perhaps you were handed a lump-sum budget, or, better yet, you’ve got the numbers for all the people and costs that make up the project. Either way, if the economics of your project matter, it’ll be important to tie time, and effort, as well as any other costs or expenses to a budget.

Just as you can describe your project in terms of how much time it takes, you can also describe it in terms of what it costs. You might be hiring some subcontractors to do graphic design who work at hourly rates; tracking their work in terms of time invested helps you see both how well you’ve planned the work, and how well the work adheres to the budget.

In some projects, you might be able to track this yourself, asking people to send you email when they’ve completed some task. With the enablement of the cloud, your team could also log into a project management tool, and update their progress (and yours) directly.

Returning for a moment to the budget, you can now see that the progress of your project is measured both in time and money. The time tracking shows how close you are to your final deadline, or how much of the time you planned for has actually been invested.

6: Are We There Yet?How to Tell if You’re On Track

When we talked about the budget, it served as a benchmark of the overall status of the project. If there are 400 hours of work budgeted, and you’ve completed 200 hours 50 percent of the allocation then ideally, you’re halfway to completing your project. Of course, few if any projects run with a strict sequence of tasks and milestones that all proceed in parallel; some may be frontloaded, others require a lot of effort towards the end.

Since your project is not merely a giant bucket of resources that you drain at a set pace, you will need to carefully monitor the status of its constituent tasks. When tasks are inter-related, with predecessors, successors, and a critical path, you’ll probably want to consider a project management tool that can quickly tell you which tasks are at risk, and which require extra attention. A handy way to look at these tasks is in a dashboard that aggregates them by risk and status, as in the figure below.

FIGURE 4: Monitoring task status helps identifywhere your efforts can have the biggest impact.

As for the finances, you can use your project tool to track both the total hourly costs of the various resources involved, as well as discrete expense items. With all of it tracked in a single place, you have a clear picture of the whether you in fact do have enough time and money to complete your project both successfully and profitably. What’s more, if you are able to track this information over time, and across different projects, you can become far more effective in scoping future projects and making them more profitable.


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6.

You’ll note that not only does it flag tasks that are on or off track; it also flags tasks by importance. This is another characteristic that you can set when you define the tasks, based on your judgment. For example, a task that has high visibility to your boss, independent of its impact on the project schedule, you can mark as ‘critical’. Tasks that might be OK if they don’t get done perfectly can be marked as ‘low priority’.

You can use this to help make adjustments to your plan as work gets done. In some cases, you can take resources off one part of the project, and double down. But sometimes, that just doesn’t work: you can’t take half the cake in put it in two ovens running at twice the temperature to finish baking sooner. Flagging tasks in terms of criticality can help you anticipate and avoid these traps.

Speaking of what work you need to get done, it’s handy to also get a simple picture of daily assignments. As a project grows in terms of tasks and the people involved, it is fundamentally helpful to know where things stand at any moment in time. The project management tool can sift through the many dependencies and resources and bring together a handy snapshot of all the things you need to attend to today.

7: Can’t Do It Alone?Building an Invested Team

As we’ve reviewed the scope of effort you have on your hands in running the project, we’ve touched briefly on the most important part of the effort: your team. Sure, it’s essential to have a good list of all the things you want people to do, or even work they’ve agreed to do. But in project management, the name of the game is making it easier for everyone to do what they’re signed up to, and keep the whole team apprised, up to the minute, of the state of the project.

Lest this seem perfectly obvious, it’s worth noting that not too long ago, the state of the art in project management was giving tools to project managers who spent all their time reviewing and logging what everyone else was doing. The project manager would either talk to team members one at a time; or, hold long meetings where everyone in the project took turns talking about their work; or both.

Today, it’s no secret that the most substantial revolution in collaboration is putting applications in the cloud. Common access to information and resources, with data stored so the right people have the right access at the right time, adds tremendous efficiency. Naturally, putting your project management in the cloud gives you a really powerful tool to get everyone involved in the project, in two ways.

First, every participant in the project can own and control his or her assigned information by logging into a cloud-based project schedule. Each can enter his or her hours worked, status of tasks, availability for work on the project in the global calendar, and more. Through the common platform of the cloud, the project tool takes care of letting them know what they need to do and when they need to do it.

FIGURE 5: A daily regimen of priority reviewhelps keep your project on track at all times.

Finally, recognize that the choices you make in dealing with risks within your project are a balancing act. Tasks on the critical path should get the most careful attention. Spend too much time on perfecting them, and the whole project slows down, as in when the perfect is the enemy of the good. Spend too little time on them, and “stuff rolls down hill”, creating the likelihood that successive tasks will get derailed.


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Second, allowing all this communication to take place in a common cloud workspace turns project control and project management into a group exercise in the best possible way. There’s no reason for your team members to be mystified about the project progress, the status of any particular tasks, or even the relationship between tasks. And in this, you’ve succeeded with the most important part of project management: making it a seamless part of the work that everyone working with you will do. It’s a team effort, and the results reflect the work everyone involved.

Whether you work on one project or many, you can use the same strategies to juggle priorities and manage schedules across projects, and not just within them. Best of all, with the tools to put these approaches into practice, you can ensure that working with your team delivers results better, faster, and smarter.

Putting It All Together

As you’ve reviewed the approaches to harnessing your project tool to the talents and needs of your team, you’ve probably found yourself thinking that your project is not exactly like the examples described, or that the constraints and challenges are more complicated than we’ve touched on here. You’re right, on both counts. No two projects are exactly the same, whether because of the people involved, the timelines and problems they face, and many other reasons.

Despite that infinite variety, successful projects are no accident. They share a common set of approaches to problems that we’ve talked about, so you can build a plan that you can use. These seven things and the tools you can use to support them can be applied regularly within the lifecycle of a single project.


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Break Down Lists of Milestones and Tasks: Go beyond the to-do list by creating categories of project work, and brainstorming successive levels of detail from top-level milestones down to tasks and fine-grained activities.

Understand Dependencies: Not everything has to be done at the same time; make sure you establish the relationships between tasks so you know what comes before, during, and after each point in your project.

Match Resources to Work: As you discover what work is done when, you can also assign who is going to do it to make sure each task belongs to someone who will see to its completion.

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See the Critical Path: Understanding constraints of dependencies and resources tells you just how long your project will take and where you can (and can’t) apply effort to make it go faster.

Account for Project Economics: Time is money, and keeping track of both of them together helps ensure that you, and your key stakeholders, can see how you make the best use of both.

Track Progress: Not all work and all tasks are created equal. Understanding at any instant in time which work needs your attention esures you are on top of the total amount of work across your project.

Leverage Teamwork: Using today’s collaborative technologies, like cloud-based applications, lets people work together faster. The more you can make exchange and access to critical information frictionless, the better your team can collaborate in pursuit of making your project successful.

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