Project management: from apprentice to master

pharmafile | May 3, 2006 | Feature | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing |   

When the three 'Apprentices' enter Mr. Sugars boardroom to explain why they made such a hash of their latest project, are you thinking, along with the rest of the country, how do they keep getting it wrong week after week? Or worse, is this how we are all managing our projects and doing our team-building, but away from the prying eye of the BBC2 camera?

Just think how much better off they would be if they just took 45 minutes after each project to run through a metric to assess their team's strengths and blockages before they go into that boardroom. But no, let's do everything at a gallop, have no time for structured thinking, and then subject ourselves to lots of demoralising feedback.

It's compulsive TV, but is it business? Well, if nothing else, it might send us back to our training manuals to refresh our thinking on how to run a successful project, and not just because we are terrified of being fired by Mr Sugar.

There are two excellent guides-cum-workbooks on project management and team metrics. First, on how to set up and run projects, there's Alan Wren's A-Z of Project Management, and on how to measure team effectiveness, there's Team Metrics by Mike Woodcock and David Francis.

Make a plan

The A-Z provides a planning checklist. Then you can dip into the manual on a need to know basis.

The magic list is:

Pre-Project e.g. feasibility, life cycle, sensitivity analysis, terms of reference

Planning (32 sections) e.g. Approval, Budgets, Milestones, Critical Path, Planning Checklist

During a Project Review, Earned Value Analysis, Filing & Documents Risk Management, Task checklist

Closing a Project e.g. Handover, Post-project review

Project Organisation e.g. Champion, Matrix Management, PRINCE Project Board, Steering Group

Project Finance Authorisation, Budget Control, Earned Value Analysis, Impact Analysis

Projects have an objective. Objectives should be  SMART:

Specific, Measurable, Agreed

Realistic and Time-based.

How not to run a project

In the run-up to the Millennium, the IT department of one large pharmaceutical company was busy looking at its systems to ensure they would make the leap in to the Year 2000 unscathed.

Various other departments were also given the task of seeing that they too would be in good shape. A middle manager was put in overall charge of operations, in addition to his own job in business development. Six months into the Millennium Project, the chief operating officer realised that not only was he not getting any feedback, the different departments, IT, manufacturing, HR etc, were all pressing ahead with their research and strategies, but not communicating with each other.

The Millennium Bug was perceived as predominantly an IT problem. But IT is not a replacement for planning. There were other inter-dependencies at play that should have been thought about. What, for instance, would happen if a chief supplier of pill coatings did not get its IT right, and supplies were interrupted?  This could result in a whole brand disappearing from the chemists shelf. Should alternative suppliers be identified, or should the vital supplies be stockpiled ahead of Bug Day? These were just some of the ramifications for purchasing or manufacturing that a master risk management analysis would address.

The chief operating officer appointed a full-time project manager to retrace the previous six months, find out what was going on, and take the whole process forward in a more structured way to meet the various 'encounter dates'.

Project management is often deemed by bosses to be an unnecessary overhead, but in this case it would have saved both time and money. In fact, it could be termed risk management, or avoiding mistakes. As Alan Wren, author of the A-Z of Project Management, quotes: 'He who has burnt his mouth, blows on his soup'.

The A-Z is an aide memoire for anyone embarking on a project, small or large. For the project manager, the key to success, we are reminded, is to stay in control of events.

The need for a champion

We talked to Alan Wren about some of the must-haves for successful project management. Wren considers that every major project needs a champion, preferably at board level so that the project becomes an integral part of the ongoing growth of a business, and not just something at the fringes, which nobody really understands and worse, no-one respects.

Wren cited a bank that had adopted the methodology approach to projects, favoured by one of the big management consultancies. This approach didn't seem to be working and the bank couldn't understand why.

But a little probing revealed that this training was only given to those executing the projects. The senior managers were outside the loop. Consequently they didn't understand what was going on and just told the executives to get on with it. Had the managers been privy to the new methods, they would have been able to make sense of progress or the lack of it. Without committed champions, the projects either withered on the vine or got pushed through against the odds.

Make a plan

To manage the last SMART ingredient, time, you need a schedule of tasks, allocated among the project team plus outputs and dates. Two working schedules are suggested: one in outline for the whole project, one in detail for the first stage. This allows for changes along the way, and stops you trying to plan yourself out of existence.

"Major variations or exceptions will inevitably occur in the best laid plans, but the original plan should stay as the baseline against which to measure progress," says Wren. "Otherwise if you try to track progress against plans that are changing regularly, how will you ever know where you are in relation to where you should have been on a particular date?

Start and finish dates

"It's a sad reality of the Project Manager's role that you can wait months for a go-ahead, but woe betide a delivery that is one day late."

Closing a project also requires planning to ensure closing and disposing of tasks, and bringing matters to an orderly end, not a 'will the last person out turn off the lights' syndrome. "For instance, if you close a project and then one of the stakeholders asks you whether the project is still running, something has not gone as it should."

The people factor

Behind any project there are of course people. And they can be pretty unpredictable. One of the earliest investigations into motivators of productivity was Elton Mayo's Hawthorne experiments at GEC in the US in the late 1930s. The studies among factory workers were originally intended to see if productivity increased with better lighting.

What the researchers in fact found was that if you turned the lights down, productivity improved; if you told the workers that you had turned the lights up, the productivity still improved. Whatever the researchers imposed, the productivity went up. Psychology, as opposed to physiology, had entered the workplace. The workers were simply responding in a positive way because management was taking some notice of them.

The lesson from Mayo's studies was that team culture affects performance and morale, so managers need to develop a positive set of norms in teams, which will result in support for the organisation and an orientation towards efficiency.

Team building

Team-building is so much a part of the workplace today that instruments are needed to build productive teams and to measure their performance against agreed objectives. Enter Team Metrics.

Woodcock and Francis produce loose-leaf workbook, which manager and teams can use to  round up the key elements in team building, but its chief focus is as a practical measuring tool of performance.

There are five metrics, consisting of questionnaires and score grids as well as useful background notes.

The metrics are:

• for auditing generic team effectiveness
• for assessing team leadership
• for assessing team strengths and blockages
• for assessing top team performance
• for facilitators

The questionnaires can be used quickly as a barometer during a particular project. For instance, the High Energy Teamwork Assessment is designed to see if enthusiasm levels are holding up.

Each member of a team can complete it in about 10 minutes. Results can be reviewed in five, and then the team are called together for 45 minutes to analyse the results.

These instruments are useful as ongoing assessments of say board performance as well as performance in one-off projects. The notes include a bit of psychoanalysis of different styles of working. Apparently there are ten major roles you can play in a team, and the descriptions will help you understand what you personally contribute to it.

Are you for instance a critic or a harmoniser, a politician or a radical? A radical is a 'free spirit' who sees new possibilities, adopts unconventional approaches and refuses to accept traditional wisdom. The 12 components of effective team working include shared values and explicit roles. Explicit roles; now they would come in handy for Mr Sugar's project teams.

Finance

There is nothing more demoralising than putting your energies into a project for months only to run into the buffers because of overspending.

Getting the costing right is of course contingent upon several factors, one of which is how long things take to get done. Where business tasks are repeated on a regular basis, you can draw on experience for likely timelines and therefore costs. But it is also possible to use analogous estimating by looking at past projects. Or there is a formula that can be useful. Those familiar with PERT will know it:

Te = a   4m   b

    6

a = most optimistic duration

b = most pessimistic

m= mostly likely

Te = estimated duration, statistically 50% chance of achieving

This could then be used as follows, calculating in days

Te =  4   (4×6)   7

6

This gives Te as 5.8 days

If you add in one deviation, such as 5.8 + 0.5, statistically you have an 85% chance of achievement, and so on up to three deviations, i.e. 5.8 + 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.5 = 7.3 days, when you are at almost 100% likelihood of achievement.

The suggested durations of course have to have some bearing on reality for this formula to have any use.

These estimates are then translated into your schedule. Then at agreed points comes the acid test. Are you keeping to schedule?

Earned value analysis

The US military developed something called earned value analysis to enable them to track very large projects with multiple suppliers, each of whom might be using different methods for tracking and reporting progress. Earned Value is putting a value (in currency or work units) on work to date in a project.

Earned Value Analysis is a technique for assessing whether that earned value in relation to the amount of work completed is ahead or behind plan. The system has now become mandatory in the forces and has also been widely adopted by industry.

It works by looking at the budgeted cost of work scheduled (BCWS), then the actual cost, and arriving at the budgeted cost of work performed (BSWP). For example:

Task A was estimated to cost 450 pounds to complete (BCWS). Completion date was 1 August.

On 1 August your tracking system indicates that the job is 80% complete, so it has an earned value of 360 pounds or 80% of 450 pounds (the original estimate).

But in fact the work has cost 400 pounds. You therefore calculate the Cost Variance by the formula BCW Performed minus ACW Performed, in this case: 360 pounds minus 400 pounds = minus 40 pounds.

So this is a negative result indicating you are 'over budget'.

To calculate the Schedule Variance, the formula is:

BCW Performed minus BCW Scheduled

Or 360 pounds minus 450 pounds = Schedule Variance of minus 90 pounds.

Again, a negative indicates you are behind schedule. Seems easy but it's just a quick ready reckoner that can, and should, be applied throughout a project if you are going to stay in control. Too many negatives, and you need drastic action.