BASICS OF EFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT

 

A project can involve a single or multiple individuals. Single is not a good idea, but sometimes, and in the last one, I found myself, when I was assigning a resource to a project, sometimes it was me, sometimes it was myself and sometimes it was I. There was nobody else there at the time to do this, and I wanted to play a few different roles, so I did that. We really need to have multiple individuals. How much time it involved those different individuals in this depends on what their role is, what the project is, and what we're gonna need to do. We can also have people from different organizational units.

 

WHY PEOPLES OF DIFFERENT SKILLS INVOLVED IN PROJECT:

They could be all within one organization, one family, one community, or it could scatter them over a bunch of different areas. Obviously, the more that grows, the more difficult you may have in trying to manage that project. We can also have multiple organizations from, multiple units from different organizations, especially when we get into contracted work where we end up having people from different companies or organizations working together.

Even though we're in Orange County, we spent the last few years in Las Vegas. We were there while they were building City Center. Now, if any of you have been over there or have heard about it, it was a major effort with a lotta different hotels and casinos and restaurants and retail, et cetera.

There were over 200 project managers on that task from 200 different companies. Talk about trying to manage just project managers, much less manage the work effort. The enormous effort there. But that's a case where a project can go from a very simple thing, and we always use the basic example of planning a welcome party or planning the Thanksgiving meal to cleaning the garage to building an additional room on the house.

Those are all projects. They're just things that we do, not part of the business. If we look at everything that has to be accomplished, that we have to say, "Okay, we're gonna start this now, and we hope to have it finished by a certain time," we're gonna use some basic project management skills as we go through that. We can consider that a project. When we talk about projects and project management and talk about PMI, PMI is a global organization that supports project managers worldwide.

WHAT IS PMI?

We have what's called "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge." We all call it the PMBOK Guide. This is a guide that helps us understand best practices of ways to do project management. It's a guide. Several volunteers wrote it. I said a lot, it is a lot. We continually update it as new ideas come about, as new people come up with new ideas, best practices to use.

 

WHY BEST PRACTICES?

It identifies best practices, skills, tools, and techniques, not vendor-specific, but more generic types of things. As project managers, our role is to understand a kind of what those tools and techniques bring to the table and whether they're gonna apply to what we're trying to do. The other part of it is it provides a common terminology among project managers.

I'm not gonna use a lot of that terminology today, but we have things like a risk register and a project charter and all these different things that, as project managers, when we talk about these tools and techniques and types of documents, we know what we're talking about. We have a common base of communication. This is absolutely no different from what happens when you are in accounting or HR or marketing.

We use terminology that is specific, and people that are in those functional organizations or within those disciplines know what that terminology means, and they can talk back and forth. The key is, on this, we have a lot of information. This book has gone from probably about less than a quarter of an inch to now where it's a couple of inches thick.

In fact, when we did the latest release, I did a presentation, and I had copies of all the older versions because I've been working with it that long, and I brought 'em and showed so we started here and we keep growing because we keep adding more and more to that. But the key becomes that is not what we must do. That is recommended good practice, and the first thing that a project manager and the team need to do is figure out how much is appropriate for this project. So part of what I'm gonna do today is talk about some concepts that you need to think through and say, "Do I just need to think about this or should I actually do it?

If I do it, how much do I need to do?" When we create a document, do we have a one-page document or do we have three-ring binders full of information? You do what is appropriate for the task that you're doing. So what is project management itself?

 

WHAT IS PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

Project management is addressing the needs, concerns of stakeholder expectations. Let me go back and explain what a stakeholder is, from our standpoint. A stakeholder is anybody who cares about what we're doing, who may be impacted by the work we're doing. It could be the people that could affect us. For instance, I have a project. I wanna redo my lawn and my whole landscaping in the front yard. Do I have stakeholders? Of course. I have neighbors, I have a group of people within the community that says, "You can do this and you can do this." We have a problem in Southern California with water.

WHO IS THE STAKEHOLDER?

I will not plant a bunch of grass if I have to water it. And in fact, in Vegas, there is no longer grass. We don't have water, and therefore, the stakeholder is the water association. Do I need to know who those people are?

Yes. Do I need to know what their concerns are? Do I need to know when to involve them? Absolutely. Those are the things that we talk about when we're talking about stakeholders and their concerns.

It's not just me and my project team, but it's the people that are gonna be impacted by what I'm doing, as well as the people that I will affect as I'm working on this. Noise, cleaning up, all the things that are going to affect the rest of the community.

WHAT ARE CONSTRAINTS IN A PROJECT?

We talk about constraints on a project. Regardless of what project you're doing, you have constraints. You either have money or you have time. In some projects, we have to figure out what is the most important constraint. Is it I have to get this done on a certain date? Or I have to do it within a certain amount of cost? Those are different constraints. There could also be some quality that says I have to have a quality level.

For instance, I've done my landscaping again. I have to know how much water I'm going to have to use for that project. That's a constraint. Therefore, I have to see how I'm going to water. I'm gonna have to see what kind of plants I'm gonna grow. These types of things become constraints.

It's interesting cause most people to talk about the constraint of cost and money being the most important. Unfortunately, when the one was working in the casinos in Vegas, he never, ever even saw a budget, much less had a concern about the cost. Everything was scheduled. You must get it done on a certain date because of certain things that were happening.

If I needed more people, if I needed more equipment, so be it. What it cost, I never saw, and they didn't care. The constraint was to get it done. What you have to understand when you start out is which one of those are your constraints. Which is the most important? Which is the second most?

Because you're gonna have to make trade-offs as you go through. So what we do with the projects is we understand what we need to do and who we need to used to help get this accomplished. We also have this thing off, we have projects, but we have a work that's going on within an organization.

WHAT IS OPERATION OF THE PROJECT?

We usually refer to that as being an operation. It's the day-by-day work that's done. Whether it's in a business where you're registering students, whether you're presenting courses, those are all operations.

They continually happen. Now let's take presenting a course. If we decide we want a brand fresh course, we usually start a project to do that. We figure out when you do, I need to have it done, who needs to be involved in it. When we talk about the two of these, people perform them both. They both are still constrained by limited resources.

They are planned, executed, and controlled as we go through this. So we talk about project management. As I alluded to before, there are basically four different phases or four different chunks of work that need to be done.

We need to start out, and the key to starting out is figuring out why are we doing this project, who is the one that is asking for this, and what do we expect to get out of it? Sometimes this doesn't happen. Sometimes we're not told, so we could go down a different path if we're not understanding why.

Once we figure out why we're doing the project, now we have to be more specific about what do we need to do, who needs to be involved, when do those individuals or resources, as we call 'em, which could be equipment, money, people, when do those people or those resources need to be involved, and how are we gonna do this?

Some of that planning is going to be at a very high level, and as we get closer and get more in tune with what's happening, we'll get more into, oops, I didn't know I had to do that or oops, as I'm digging up my garden to put in my pants, suddenly I'm hitting something.

Ended up being a great big concrete piece that who knows why it was there, when it got there, but obviously, we had to get rid of it. So part of that was a work-around that we had to do. We have to build in the flexibility to say that we're there. Once we get it finished, we need to celebrate. We need to say, "Hey, we did it.

 

WHY WE NEED FEEDBACK?

Excellent work." We need that feedback, that positive reinforcement because sometimes that work we're doing, it's hard. It's a lot of hours, it's a lotta people, it a lotta time. We opened a casino down in Mississippi for the Indian tribe. By the time it assigned us to do it, we had seven months to do the entire thing. We worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day. We actually finished all the IT stuff a month before opening because we had to have it in place to train people with. My staff was sitting there going, "Okay, so now what do we do? 

We have a month before opening." I said, "You sit back and you watch. When that actually opens, we're gonna celebrate because we did it." Part of it is being able to recognize the accomplishments. Let's go back to the starting phase.

I use the term why. I think most project managers will realize this is probably the area we spend the least amount of time on, and it's also the area, though, that bites us later on because if we don't understand why we're doing this project, we may not understand, really, what we need to accomplish.

By definition, with PMI, what we say is that we need to officially authorize the project. We end up developing what's called a project charter. It is a way that we allow the project; we allow the project manager to spend the money. I have seen it seldom done, even though I force it now because I wanna promote this and tell everybody, "Guess what, guys? We're starting this project. Be aware of it. You're a stakeholder. Either you can join us and give us feedback and take part in this, or you may have some concerns.

Voice them now." That's what we need, but we need to understand that. In most organizations, there is something that happened before this project starts. There may have had to be a business case, which could be very detailed as to the return on investment, the objectives, how this fits in with the strategic plan.

Go back and talk about if I'm going to add an alternative course to the curriculum. I'm gonna have to have some preliminary discussions and approval before these get started. I wanna be able to get information from that process and figure out what was the thinking, especially who were the people that we're really excited about this and who were the people that kind of were fighting it because those are gonna be stakeholders I'm gonna have to work with.

 

So I Wanna see how we got to where we've been given the approval to do this project.

 

Let's go back to my landscaping. Do I have to have certain approvals? Obviously, if I'm gonna dig and put some things in, I'd have to have approvals. Do I have the money for it? Where is it gonna come from? How's it gonna be done versus something else?

 These are all projects. We don't formally think of 'em that way, but when we do work, when we do and try to produce something or a result, it is a project, and we need to understand why did we choose this one? Was it a compliance issue that came down and there was, suddenly, everybody had to stop doing what they were because we had a new regulation we had to meet?

In that case, does it make sense to go try to get a copy of the regulation and read it? Absolutely. Figure out why we're doing this, what does it means, what impact's it going to have. At this point in the starting phase, usually about the only person who's on the project is the project manager and maybe a few experts that understand the work we're doing. Obviously, if I'm planning my garden or my landscaping, I'm not an expert in this. I need to go at least to maybe the nursery and talk about what plants I need, what kind of work, those types of things. So those are what we will end up having as we build our team.

 

They're not there every day shoveling and doing work, but they're part of the team, they're giving me the information. I, as the project manager, don't know everything. I am not expected to know everything, and unless this is a project of one, which doesn't really work really well.

We will continue discussion in this topic in the next blog, so keep touch with us on www.israrumar.com

Muhammad Israr Umar An NGO worker for the last 17 years muhammadisrarumar6@gmail.com