Effective project management is fundamental to the success of all businesses, large and small. The process and results have an impact on many key areas – business growth and development, staff motivation and staff development.

The projects management steps do not have to be capital intensive or complex but have a number of key characteristics:

1. response to a business need – obviously, but it is important to be clear about the business need. What are you trying to achieve?

2. a temporary activity – it has a clear start and end point. At some stage (and that needs clarity) the resulting process/product becomes part of the work activities.

3. a unique activity – there may have been something similar in the past but this is not part of the regular work activities.

4. there is uncertainty – risk – which needs to be managed.

5. normally involves other people – internal or external, requiring team and communication skills, and a defined project manager.

There are many training courses and qualifications available to develop skills for the correct execution of project management steps, for example, PRINCE 2 is a well-recognised project management qualification (PRojects IN a Controlled Environment – www.prince2.com). However, for small businesses, the cost of these opportunities is often prohibitive. They also require a level of time commitment which is often impractical for the smaller business. By applying a logical and structured approach to their projects all businesses can achieve the results they require.

The first point to recognize is that project management is both an art and a science:

• Art – the project manager role of leading people
• Science – applying the process with appropriate tools and techniques

Which is the most complicated? Often the ‘art’ because leading people usually poses the most challenges.

But let’s start with the ‘science’ – the process. In my experience of working with large corporate organizations and small local businesses, applying a logical 5 step process will help achieve a successful outcome:

1. Define your project phases – we have mentioned the need to be clear about what you are trying to achieve and that requires identifying the project goals or objectives. SMART is a well known acronym to help you structure your goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timing).

A key problem with projects is managing expectations and the ‘Realistic’ element of your goal setting will be identifying what the project will and will not do. It cannot be ‘all things to all men’ or will lose focus and therefore effectiveness. This is the ‘scope’ element of your project and, in my experience, is the biggest cause of project failure.

Writing down, and getting agreement to, what the project will and will not cover is critical before moving forward. This forms part of project governance

Other aspects of the project management lifecycle to consider at this stage are:

Alternatives – what are the options?

Costs and benefits – depending on the most effective option

Timescales

Responsibilities – who is the project manager and what other resources will be required

Risks – to the project success – identifying mitigating and contingency actions

When the ‘definition’ has been agreed by key stakeholders then you can move onto stage 2:

2. Project Planning and Management – this requires scheduling of activities and resources to meet the agreed timescales. There are a number of tools you can use – Gantt charts and Critical Path Analysis are well known tools – but an Excel spreadsheet is often sufficient. It is important to share and get agreement to your schedule to ensure other people involved know what is expected of them and by when. The Planning stage will also identify ongoing support required after project closure.

3. Implementation – you’ve planned the work, now it is time to work the plan! Regular project reporting updates of progress are a key part of the project manager role. Depending on the project, this is likely to be the most time-consuming stage and will require close attention to the people and process side of project management.

Full implementation may have been preceded by testing and/or piloting to ensure the final product will meet the business needs.

4. Closure – bring the project to a close by handing over to the business ‘owner’. The result becomes part of the regular business process or offering. Part of the project manager role will have been to plan for any training etc.

5. Evaluation – often not done by any business, large or small! Have we achieved what we set out to achieve? What went well? What could we do differently next time? Celebrating success and sharing in the learning so that the business and its people can continue to develop project management skills.

The ‘art’ side of project management is the project manager role of leading people and, as we have seen from the process described above, requires many organizational and interpersonal skills and characteristics:

Effective communication
Delegation
Integrity
Enthusiasm
Team building skills
Problem solving skills
Influencing and persuading
Organising and planning

Project management can be a great opportunity to develop staff and give them additional responsibilities. It can also be an important tool to help identify future managers and key staff to develop the business.

In my experience, leading and managing the project management steps for a successful project is one of the most rewarding activities in the workplace.

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Your boss has asked you to take the lead on a project in your company. Maybe you are a project manager, or maybe you are not. One thing is certain. Very few people know how to report status on a project, even when they are expert project managers. The basic problem?

Most people do not understand the perspective of a manager who is being pressed for information about a big project. Here are some basic rules of reporting status that you can use to further your reputation as someone who knows how to keep management and the project team informed and drive a project to success through the project phases.

THE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE

If your project is important, your boss will be pressed hard to keep his superiors informed of its progress. Smart managers consume status on important projects voraciously. Excellent status reporting means that managers are fully informed of your projects health and overall direction without having to get involved themselves.

There is particular information your boss needs in order to show her boss that she is on top of things and able to run the show effectively. Provide this information in a way your boss can consume it on a regular basis, and you will fall upstairs so fast your head will spin.

Even on relatively less important projects, effective status reporting allows your boss to spend only a few seconds skimming your report to determine what sort of progress you have made.

Excellent status creates clarity from confusion and fulfills one of the important requirements in the project management steps process. Your job as the manager of a project is to take a swirling, chaotic cloud of information and distill it down into its most basic elements and then present them so that hundreds and thousands of hours of work can be understood in 30 seconds.

TO WRITE EXCELLENT STATUS ON PROGRESS WITHIN THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT STEPS LIFE-CYCLE, YOU MUST UNDERSTAND :

The three components of status.
How to write brief details.
What key data is needed by management.

THREE COMPONENTS OF STATUS IN THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT STEPS PROCESS

There are three major components to reporting project status:

Overall: We need to see the overall project health. As managers, we want to be able to detect a project in trouble. We also want to help make that determination sometimes. You might not know everything we know despite our best efforts to communicate. Your project might not be as healthy as you think it is.

Milestones: Your project has major accomplishments which must be completed by specific dates. We managers want to see which milestones are complete, which ones are in progress, and which ones are coming up next. This allows us to analyse the schedule and decide to either feel comfortable with it or challenge it.

Issues: Your project also probably has one or more obstacles to completion which have been discovered. We’d like to see brief details about each issue so that we can make a decision about whether or not to step in and help if necessary.

ORGANISING YOUR STATUS THROUGHOUT THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT STEPS PROCESS

Just as you would clean a kitchen by starting up high and working your way down ultimately to the floor, project status is best when it starts off with the highest levels of detail and works it way down to lower and lower levels.

Thus:

Overall project health comes first. If I like what I see here, I can stop reading the rest. Major milestones follow overall project health. If I don’t like the project health, or if I am in need of further details, I can read a little further and check out the scheduled dates we are driving toward and your progress on them. Issues may be holding up those dates, so when I see a problem in your project schedule, I can read further and see what it is. Really slick project managers report the issues in priority order showing the issue causing the most jeopardy to progress first.

BRIEF DETAILS

Your job is to report on the details of your project in concise, crisp status that we can consume rapidly without having to spend much effort on it. It might take you thirty minutes to write your status, but always remember that your manager does not have thirty minutes to spend reading it. Your manager realistically only has about 30 seconds to consume your status as they may have 30, 40, 100, or even exponentially more projects for which they are responsible.

“Brief Details” may seem oxymoronic to a project manager, but to a supervisor with a team of project managers, it is not. There is enormous value in a project manager who can report status without narrative. My recommendation is that you write as though you were creating an old-fashioned telegram. More information about how to do that is coming.

BRIEF DETAILS?

How can you provide details without being long-winded? It is a formidable task that most never master, but it is not impossible. Here are some suggestions, e.g. Write in bullets, not in prose. There shall be no paragraph anywhere in your status.

Click here for your FREE Project Status Report template, by SKM Project Management Steps.

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