Taking control

By Ervin Munir, MD

In these difficult times, it is natural for senior executives to want to take firm control, to tighten the reins, to want comprehensive oversight of what is going on in their organisation.

Portfolio/Project Management

One way to achieve comprehensive oversight is to implement and follow a process which provides visibility of your organisation's project portfolio, and which supports effective decision making.

This article describes such a process. It also looks at enabling technology to support the change necessary to establish the process.

"Often, the larger the organisation, the less knowledge there is, at a senior level of what is really going on in terms of its projects."

The Process

Projects happen in every organisation. That's a fact. The only question is how formally or informally a sound process is being followed. In order to make key decisions regarding funding, staff, investment etc, you need to know what projects are in play and the status of each one in terms of cost-to-date, projected cost, progress against baseline cost and schedule, and likely benefits. Clearly, a formal process is needed. This should cover...

1. Project Governance
2. Project Initiation
3. Resource Allocation
4. Project Tracking
5. Resource Monitoring
6. Project Closeout

This easily administered process, if carried out in a disciplined way, will make up the engine which provides you with the information you need to make good decisions.

1. Project Governance

In this step, the decision is taken for a project to proceed or not. To make an informed judgement, you require project details to be presented in an easy to digest form. This information would typically include: key deliverables, alignment to organisation goals/objectives, risk, estimated costs, estimated delivery date, etc.

If you decide to proceed, a project manager will be assigned to the project.

It is also possible, in this step, for the project to be re-presented following step 2 (Project Initiation).  This could be due to a significant divergence from the original estimated costs or delivery dates being identified following detailed planning and scheduling.

2. Project Initiation

The project is given a number/name. The project manager produces a project brief which, amongst other things, will clarify the aims, objectives and deliverables of the project.  The project brief is signed off and a detailed project plan is produced by the project manager.

In larger organisations this project plan is likely to include "skill-requests" as opposed to real people. For example, in an IT organisation/department the requests could be; Programmer, Business Analyst, Database Designer etc. These "skill requests" will be associated with tasks in the project plan. In smaller organisations, this step and the next (Resource Allocation) are often merged.

Assuming there is no significant divergence from the original estimated costs and delivery dates specified in step 1 (Project Governance), the project moves on to step 3 (Resource Allocation). If there is a significance divergence, then the project moves back to step 1 (Project Governance).

3. Resource Allocation

My experience is that Resource Allocation is often haphazard, carried out informally, often over lunch, and based on the gut feel of a manager as to their resource's availability. Something more scientific is required.

The appropriate role of a resource manager is to be aware of the skills of the people who report to them, and have an accurate picture as to staff availability (given the projects currently underway). They must develop their staff to satisfy future project needs and can do this, in part, by providing them with appropriate work experience.

Having identified people with the suitable skills and availability in the required timeframe, a resource manager will talk with candidates about the project, and present their details to the project manager. Once a choice has been made, the selected candidates will be allocated to the project by the resource manager.

Having done this, the project manager will baseline the project plan. This provides them with a snap-shot of the intended plan and allows them to easily recognise divergence in terms of dates, resource usage and costs during step 4 (Project Tracking).

4. Project Tracking

(The next two steps are repeated until the project is completed.)

I have been in project management for over twenty-years and in my experience project managers rarely keep their project plans up-to-date.  Often, the project plan is produced to get approval to proceed and from that point on, it is used, at best, as a checklist to carry out tasks.  The main reason for project managers not updating their project plans is that they think that it takes too much time, and they believe that they have "better things to do".

Typically, timesheet data (and possibly adjustments to the calculated remaining work) is entered by those people allocated to project tasks. Timesheet approval is carried out by resource managers, project managers or both, and the project plan is updated using the results.

Following this, the project manager has to deal with the impact of applying the timesheet data to their project. They identify divergence in terms of dates, resource usage and costs against the original baseline, they then work to bring the project back on-schedule and within budget.

Many project managers are beginning to see how vital it is that they establish the good habit of keeping project plans up to date. Increased support for this change is provided by implementing simple but effective Project Management software integrated with Time Recoding software.

5. Resource Monitoring

As a result of the previous step, project/task end dates will change, and therefore staff, who were previously not overloaded may become overloaded.  The resource manager's job, during this step, is to "watch the backs" of the project managers, by looking at cross-project use of resources and by providing options for resolution when overloads are identified.

Overloads often go unnoticed in organisations. As a result, projects fail to meet deadlines and, if the overloads are of a significant duration, staff burn-out and leave. The cost to an organisation of either of these two outcomes is often significant.

If the project has finished, it can move on to step 6 (Project Closeout), otherwise go back to step 4 (Project Tracking).

The role of the resource manager is relatively new to many organisations and while there are effective Resource Management software solutions available which provide the tools necessary to carry out effective resource allocation and monitoring, the choice is more limited.

6. Project Closeout

At this stage, the project manager and team carry out a final review of the project against the original 'signed off project brief 'to ensure that all that was expected has been achieved.

Where important lessons have been learned during the course of the project, these should be recorded and any resultant actions initiated.

It is also possible that smaller 'benefits realisation' projects are spawned at this stage to monitor the effect of completing the project and to ensure that the planned benefits are actually realised.

Finally, giving a genuine thank you for those specific aspects of work well done is always appreciated. If particular attention can be paid to those aspects of the work that adhered strongly to the steps outlined here, staff will become increasingly invested in the process.

Enabling Technology Requirements

In selecting appropriate enabling technology (such as  the AMS REALTIME Enterprise Solution (provided by AMS Ltd) you should consider the requirements necessary to effectively support the process described above...

Reporting & Analysis

• The Executive dashboard should allow the user to focus in quickly on projects that warrant attention.
• Cross-project reporting should allow the user to "data-mine" and report on planned, actual and baseline hours and cost information across multiple projects.
• Project reporting should allow the project manager to produce high-quality graphical and tabular reports, from simple Tabular/Gantt charts to Earned Value Management analyses.

Project Management:

95% of project managers only use 5% of project management tools.  The project management functions available in any software solution should be tailor-able to mirror the project management maturity of the organisation, and to promote ease-of-use. Some project managers will need; multiple work breakdown structures, earned value management, and Monte-Carlo risk analysis, but most project managers will not. It is important that all functions are available if required and invisible if not.

Your project management software solution should also be integrated with your time recording and resource management software solutions.

Time Recording:

As many staff will carry this out every week, time recording must be easy to use. It should:

• maximise the probability of people booking to the right task in order to minimise the administrative time spent correcting timesheets afterwards, by providing a list of the tasks specifically assigned to the person booking time
• allow the adjusting of the remaining work (or Estimate-to-Complete)
• allow the entry of notes against time entries
• have a web timesheet entry option

In addition to the above, it may be important that non-project timesheet data is captured (e.g. system support, on-going maintenance, sickness, travel, company meetings, annual leave, etc)

The aim is to reduce the administrative overload and make it a relatively simple task to update project plans with time-recording data. Therefore your time recording software solution should be integrated with your project management software solution.

Resource Management:

This should:

• support the resource manager allocating named resources to satisfy skill requests from project managers
• highlight where resources are overloaded and help the resource manager to find resource overload solutions.
• be integrated with your project management software solution

Database & Extend-ability - The database must be well designed and extendable to support requirements unique to each organisation. It should:

• work with Oracle and ODBC compliant database management systems
• provide straightforward ways of interfacing/integrating with existing client systems.

In addition, it is important that the possibility to extend the system to meet specific unique client requirements is supported via a macro or scripting language.

Security - A sophisticated Access Control mechanism is required in order to support the various roles/people involved in the process. It should be possible, via this, to ensure that each user has access to the features and functions they require and that each user is restricted from doing things that are outside their scope of responsibilities. For example, typically an Executive should be able to open a project from their Dashboard, but they should not be allowed to adjust it.

Executive Decisions

With the above process in place, supported by effective enabling technology, executives should have visibility of their project portfolio. They should easily be able to see which projects are behind schedule or over budget, and the associated impact on the organisation in terms of costs and resource usage.

Now is the time to take control and plan for the future.

Introducing these key processes and streamlining existing ones will make your organisation stronger, more resilient and lighter on its feet. Understanding the status of the projects in your project portfolio will enable you to make necessary decisions and steer your organisation to calmer waters.

Good plans shape good decisions. That's why good planning helps make elusive dreams come true.

Lester R Bittel, The Nine Master Keys of Management