It’s the third week of October. In the Philippines, host economy for Apec 2015, many organizations are busy preparing for the Apec Economic Leaders Meeting in November. As November nears, project management skills become more important for these organizations.
There is a difference between the day-to-day work of managing operations and the long pull of a major project. Perhaps the key difference has to do with endpoints. Projects have a clear beginning and a clear end. Operations management, on the other hand, continues as long as the organization exists.
Starting
The endpoints are incredibly important in projects. The foundation of a successful project are laid down even before the project actually begins.
Because every project is unique, often the most important question that needs to be answered even before the project begins is the question of objective—what we think of as the desired outcome. As a consultant, one of the first things I learned was to ask that single question: “Imagine it is the end of this project. Imagine it is successful. What would that be like? What could we measure that would tell us we had a successful project?” Every successful project really begins by envisioning the desired end.
Once the objective is clear, project planning can begin. In a consulting engagement, this is the point at which the proposed approach and the project scope is developed and eventually agreed upon. The project plan is like an organization plan in one thing—it essentially describes how you would get from point A, where you are today, to point B, where you want to be in the future.
In order to create this plan, it is essential that the project team first understand what the underlying logic of the situation is. In strategy class, we like to say that every plan is essentially a theory. That theory says we believe that: if we do this (strategy), then that (desired outcome) will happen. In development projects, which are often complex, the underlying logic of the project plan is contained in a logical framework document, which most practitioners refer to as the “logframe.” The logframe documents the underlying assumptions of the plan and explains the rationale for the proposed approach. For example, the underlying assumption of required nutrition labeling, is that consumers purchase, and hence consumption, decisions would be affected if they had easy access to nutrition information at the point of sale.
Once the underlying logic is clear, the task of real planning can begin. This involves plotting out all required activities, developing staffing and resource requirements, and creating a timeline and budget.
When the project involves multiple individuals and especially when it involves multiple organizations, it is extremely important to be clear about roles. At each phase of the project, the deliverables from each team and individual need to be explicitly spelled out. Dependencies must be articulated—for example, we cannot start developing statistics until after the data is scrubbed.
In a consulting engagement, all of these must be specified in the consulting agreement. This is the contracting phase of the project and is possibly the most important part of a successful engagement.
Speed bumps
Of course, in spite of clarity in the engagement contract, there are inevitable speed bumps. If roles are clear and relationships amicable, the speed bumps can be navigated with relative ease, if not without extra effort. However, occasionally, not all parts of the engagement work well. This happens, for example, when not all of the parties are part of the initial contracting phase. This is the case, anyway, with many engagements when project success depends on the performance of third parties, such as third party service providers who control necessary information. Then, the consultant must rely on the client to influence the third party to provide the necessary inputs to the project.
Occasionally, in organizations, a project threatens the power, authority, or influence of a certain group. Then, that group might become passively uncooperative. Before personal computers became widely used in the work place, the information technology (what used to be called data processing) departments of companies controlled access to most corporate databases. That data was a source of power. When personal computers became widely available, users began to ask for access to their own data because the personal computers allowed them to process this data in ways that were most useful to them. Even when the release of the data had been approved by the highest authorities, for a fairly long period of time, there was a struggle over access to the data.
The key to navigating these speed bumps often lie in a few very simple things: clarity of the objective especially the timelines, senior management commitment and discipline in the project team.
Crunch Time
Good project management skills are particularly important for crunch projects—those that are technically difficult and have a tight deadline. For these projects, often what must be deployed is what would essentially be a corporate SWAT team.
These corporate SWAT teams share a few characteristics with military SWAT teams: they are a tightly coordinated group of a very few, highly skilled individuals who are trained to work together towards a very specific task. They have the ability to concentrate completely on the objective and will push through until the very end or until the task is called off.
In time-critical projects, the ability to work towards objective is essential. The last few days of a time-bound project often involve sleepless nights, missed meals and last minute crises. Any person who does not have the ability to plug on will not finish.
The beginning is important, of course, but it is during that last mile when the true mettle of a project team is tested.
Readers can email Maya at [email protected]. Or visit her site at http://integrations.tumblr.com.