2nd Bac - Project Management

In most jobs today you will probably have to take part in a project or perhaps even lead a project. For this reason, it is very important to understand the principles of project management. It is surprising how easily projects go wrong or fail completely. There are many reasons for this, but it is often because there is no Project Manager with the right level of experience. As this Senior Manager says, many things can go wrong:

‘When I first started to manage projects I made a lot of mistakes. I had very little time to plan because of the pressure to start the project quickly. Some of my projects were late because I had underestimated the resources we needed. And in others, we were over budget because I got the 

scope

 of the project wrong.’

One of the main reasons why projects are unsuccessful is that people do not produce a detailed project plan. The plan should give background information about the situation and it must also show all the deliverables. Project plans also usually include a financial plan or budget. It might take a long time to create a detailed plan, but it is a very important step in project management.

Many people find project planning very difficult and they do not know where to start. Project planning can follow three different approaches. The Project Manager (PM) will choose one of these approaches or a combination.

The first approach looks at the times and dates first. This is called a timed plan. This means that the PM looks at the final deadline for when the project has to be completed and writes a plan that works ‘backwards’ from that date to the start date.

The second approach is a top-down plan. Here, the PM looks at the big picture and plans the main things to do. Then they break down these jobs into individual tasks and create a plan.

The third approach is the opposite of this. A bottom-up plan is where the PM identifies all the small activities first and then groups them together. One example of this approach is when you are planning to move house. You can list all the things that you need to do and then put them into groups for different people. Then on the day, you can assign each group of tasks to a different person. This way, you can be sure that every little job will be done. 

There are two important documents needed for a project. The first is the project plan which gives all the principles and policies for teamwork and defines who is responsible for the key stages of the project. The second document is the project schedule which shows when all the steps from the start to the end of the project need to happen. The schedule usually includes milestones – key tasks which will indicate that the project is going to plan.

One way to start to produce the project plan is to break down the work into a list of tasks and sub-tasks. A work breakdown structure will illustrate this very well. Here is a simple example showing the tasks involved in presenting a company’s new products to customers.

This diagram makes it easy to see all the tasks that you need to complete to meet the objective, but it does not give you any information about the timescales or the best order to do these tasks in.

You can use a Gantt chart to put the steps in the correct sequence and to show how long each one takes to complete. This is an example using the same tasks involved in presenting a company’s new products.

Successful

 projects have several key features: an experienced and confident project manager, a detailed project plan and a realistic schedule. Once these are in place you can look forward to great achievements!