Really? With such a preponderance of project management literature it is hard to believe there are only five pillars of practices that a project manager has to engage in to maximize their potential for success. OK. What are they? I’ve got to see them.
The five steps include:
- Project Planning
- Project Baseline
- Reporting
- Change Control
- Project Closure
That’s it. If project managers can do these five things, and the little things behind them, they will see great gains in project management performance and greatly enhance their ability to succeed. Sounds simple enough, but sometimes the simplest things are the hardest ones to accomplish.
Project Planning
Project managers need to stop over-complicating this initial phase. In its basic form, project planning focuses on identifying and documenting items related to a project’s scope, time, and cost. In short, it is the basic process of documenting the understanding each party holds related to the project.
Nothing else should be allowed to creep into this phase. The worst thing that happens at this stage is when project managers take a project plan and start adding little things to it. The project plan must be matched with the project’s size and complexity and tailored accordingly. It is not a one size fits all approach.
Project Baseline
The project baseline captures the project’s predicted scope, time, and costs at the very beginning stages, or anytime thereafter if someone chooses to change them. In other words, it’s a snap of the chalk line. Project teams must treat the baseline as sacred, and only modify it through the change control process as described below.
This is possibly one of the hardest things to get through to project managers, and once again culture is the culprit. If a company’s culture is one where people tear one another down when mistakes are made, then people are always going to hedge their bets. Nobody thinks what they’ve got is going to be good enough, and therefore they overestimate what can realistically be done. Project managers must become good at knowing when good enough is, well, good enough, and have the discipline to tow that line.
Reporting
Reports should be based on variances from the baseline in terms of time, cost, and scope, and they need to be metric-based to ensure people are collecting information on a regular basis. If metric-based reporting doesn’t occur, then managers won’t ever get the data they need because no driver or reason exists for collecting it.
Good reporting ensures all people are collecting important information on a regular basis, and keeps all project managers out of the fantasy world they so often like to inhabit. It keeps them anchored in reality. Most project managers don’t like to report on progress, and yet somehow they continue to believe (i.e., hope) they will magically improve anyway. Reporting provides a snapshot of where project managers and their projects really are at any given time, not where people wish them to be.
