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Manage the Work Plan - Techniques |
Techniques to Get a Project Back on Schedule
Just because you monitor your project on an ongoing basis does not mean that you may never miss deadlines. The good thing about managing the work plan is that you will know very quickly if you are trending over the end date. This will give you an opportunity to put a proactive plan in place to get back on schedule. There is not a simple process that will do the trick in every case. However, there are some techniques you can apply to get the job done. See for techniques to get a project back on schedule.
Techniques to Get a Project Back on Budget
Just as the project manager may face scheduling difficulties, you may also find yourself trending over budget. If you monitor costs regularly, you should know very quickly if you are trending over your budget. This control process is somewhat more difficult than managing the schedule, because there could be a variety of reasons why your financial information is not as good or as accurate. See for techniques to get a project back on budget.
Make Sure Team Members Know What Their Assignments Are
One of the basic responsibilities of the project manager is to assign work to team members. However, some project managers are not always clear on what needs to be done and who is responsible. This causes uncertainty in the team and can result of some activities running late. In fact, if you have managed projects for a while, you have probably run into this situation. You ask a team member the status of a critical assignment and they tell you that they did not realize that they were assigned to the activity. A good way to test whether your directions and assignments are clear is to ask team members what they are responsible for completing in the next two weeks. This is not something you need to do with every team member every week. However, it can be valuable to ask once in a while, or when a critical activity is due, just to validate whether you are assigning he work effectively. If the team members know what is expected of them, chances are that you are effectively assigning the work. However, if they give you different answers than what you expect, it may mean that you need to work on being clearer and more precise.
Team members need to be clear on what they are assigned and when the work is due. If they understand the work perfectly, but don't deliver on-time, you have a problem. If they deliver the wrong work to you, on time, you also have a problem. When you assign work to team members, be clear about the following:
Activity name(s), from the work plan.
An explanation, if necessary, of what the work is.
Start date and end date. If they cannot meet the dates, they need to let the project manager know as soon as possible.
Estimated effort hours. If they cannot complete the activities within the estimated effort hours, they need to let the project manager know as soon as possible.
Estimated costs. If they cannot complete the work within the cost estimate, they need to let the project manager know as soon as possible.
Deliverable. The team member needs to understand the deliverable or work component (a portion of a larger deliverable) that is expected.
Dependencies. Make sure the team member knows their relationship with other activities - either ones that are waiting on them, or ones that must be complete before theirs can start.
Other resources. If multiple resources are working on the same activities, they must all understand who is responsible for what, and who has overall responsibility for each activity.
Tolerances
When you manage the work plan, you do not want to be accurate to the minute or to the dollar. You also do not want to make a big deal if your project is a day over deadline one week, and a day ahead of schedule the next. Your client does not expect that level of accuracy and they are not interested in an hour-by-hour account of how the project is progressing. As the project manager, you should have some sense for what the tolerance level is for your project. For example, let's say you are updating your work plan and you realize you have overspent your budget by $1,000. Should you raise an issue or a risk? Should you inform your client? It depends on your tolerance level. If you have a $10,000 budget, you should probably be concerned, because now you are at risk of going over budget by 10%. If your project has a one million dollar budget, then the thousand dollars is not material at all. (In fact you would be a hero if you delivered within one thousand dollars.)
Use common sense and work with your client on the tolerance levels for budget and deadline. If you stay within the tolerances, then you are fine. If you go outside those limits, then you should be concerned.
Earned Value
Projects, especially larger ones, are never executed exactly as they are planned. Some activities finish early. Some finish late. Sometimes it is not easy to know if you are ahead of schedule of not. Likewise, sometimes it is hard to know if you are under budget or not. Let's look at a simple example. You have a six month project and you have completed three months. Your work plan says that you should have spent 50% of your budget, but you realize you have already spent 65% of the budget. Are you in trouble?
You could be, but not necessarily. If you only have half of the work done, you might be in trouble. But what if you are actually ahead of schedule? If you are ahead of schedule, it might make sense that you are over budget at this point in the project. If you were 90% done with the work, and your budget was at 65% of total, you actually are in pretty good shape.
This is the purpose of earned value calculations. Earned value is a method for determining the progress of a project, given where you are versus where you expected to be. To learn more about earned value, Manage the Work plan - Earned Value.
Team Resistance to Managing the Work plan
It's one thing to build a project definition and the work plan. It's another thing to effectively manage the project. If you could issue the plan and the work assignments and have everyone complete their activities on-time, the project manager's life would be much easier. However, the process of managing the team and the work plan becomes complicated because of the people element involved. To understand how the project is proceeding and to ensure that it stays on track, controls are needed. You may need to go around and ask people how they are doing. You may need people to tell you in status reports and status meeting how they are doing. You may try to keep updated statistics on work completed, in-progress and not started. These activities make up your overall project management processes. However, people do not always respond well to these processes for a number of reasons.
They may think the processes are cumbersome and keep them from completing their deliverables.
They may feel they will be punished for bring bad news, or doing things incorrectly.
They may not feel the project management processes are effective.
They may have a normal human tendency against processes that feel like controls.
The processes may not be complete or make sense. Team members may have tried to follow the processes, but found they were not complete, or they were not supported by other people.
They may feel that the project manager is not following the procedures.
They may see people going around the processes without consequences.
Knowing and recognizing these normal human tendencies will help design a set project management processes that are appropriate to the project being managed. The project manager also needs to communicate the processes effectively, including the overall value to the project. Once discussed with the team, it is important to apply the processes consistently for them to be adopted successfully on the project.
Who Updates the Work plan?
In most projects the project manager is responsible for the work plan and updates it on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. In most projects the project manager is the only one that is allowed to update the plan. However, there are some options, especially for larger projects.
In some cases, the project manager asks each team member to update the work plan with a current status and effort hours (if they are being tracked). In this scenario, the team members normally indicate whether their assigned work is completed. If not, they identify what percentage of the activity is complete, or adjust the end date to reflect when the activity will be complete. They can also plug in their actual effort hours per activity so far. In most cases, team members are not allowed to assign themselves to new work, add new activities or otherwise alter the work plan. After the team members update the plan with current status, the project manager can begin to evaluate the overall project status.
For very large projects, it is also common for one or more people to be assigned to update the work plan on behalf of the project manager. They can get information from team members and update current status and actual hours worked. They can run a standard set of reports for the project manager and get additional information from team member for anything that looks unusual. They bring this all to the project manager for final analysis and evaluation. The bottom line is that the additional staff perform much of the logistics associated with the work plan, but it is still the responsibility of the project manager to understand what is going on, and make the appropriate decisions to complete the project successfully
Proceed with Caution if Managing by Percent Complete
Most project management tools have an
available field for entering the percentage complete for each activity. Before
an activity starts, it is 0% complete. When it is finished, it is 100% complete.
However, in between can be tricky. On the surface, if an activity is estimated
at 40 hours, and a team member had worked on it for 20 hours, you could say they
are 50% complete. But are they? They may be close to done, or they may be only
10% done. The project manager could ask team members to report on their percent
complete, but in many cases you fall into the 99% complete syndrome. This occurs
when an activity is 90% done one week, the next week it is 95% done, the next
week 99% done, etc.
A better way to get the information you need is to ask 'When will the work be done?’ If the schedule shows an activity should be completed on Friday, and the work is not done, don't ask what percentage complete they are. Instead ask the team member 'When will the work be done?’ Asking when the work will be completed gives you concrete information you can place on your work plan, while also getting the team member to make another commitment to the end date.
Managing by Due Date
In many organizations, project estimates are based on costs, effort hours and duration. However, when the project starts they do not collect the actual effort hours worked on each activity. Unless tracking effort hours is important to your organization, the project manager should feel comfortable to manage the project schedule based on completion dates. In other words, assume you have an activity that is scheduled to take 40 hours and has a two week duration. If the work is done within the two weeks, it is not as important to know if the work actually took 35 hours or 50. It would only be important if the difference in effort hours caused another activity due date to be missed. The effort hours are important in the estimating process since they help set completion dates and help balance workloads. But when the activities are assigned, getting the work done on time is most important.
There is one important exception. If the work is being done by a resource that you are compensating on an hourly basis, it is important to manage by effort hours and completion date. Now it does matter whether the 40 hour activity actually took 50 hours, since there is an incremental cost to your project.
Managing by Milestones
A milestone is a scheduling event that signifies the completion of a major deliverable or a set of related deliverables. A milestone, by definition, has duration of zero and no effort. Milestones are great for project managers because they provide an opportunity to validate where the project is and what the future looks like. In particular, you can do the following activities:
Update the work plan and validate where you are trending in terms of overall project budget and deadline.
Validate that work done up to this point is correct and accurate. The client should have approved any external deliverables produced up to this point.
Make sure that the rest of the project work plan includes all the activities necessary to complete the project.
Double-check the effort, duration and cost estimates for the remaining work. Based on prior work completed to date, you may have a much better feel for whether the remaining estimates are accurate. If they are not, you will need to modify the work plan. If it appears that your budget or deadline will not be met, raise an issue and resolve the problems now.
Issue formal communication and status, per the communication plan.
Evaluate the Risk Plan for previously identified risks, and perform a new risk assessment to identify new risks.
Update all other project management logs and reports.
These activities should be done on a regular basis, but a milestone date is a good time to catch up, validate where you are at, get clear on what's next and get prepared to charge ahead.
The Project Audit
Sometimes the project manager can get too comfortable (or too uncomfortable) in how the project is progressing. In many cases, it makes sense to have an outside party come in to evaluate the project management processes being employed and double-check to make sure the project is progressing as expected. . The project manager or functional manager might call for a project audit as part of an overall quality management program. In some cases, such as a government project, periodic audits may be called for as a part of the overall contract. In any event, an outside audit should provide comfort to the project stakeholders that effective project management processes are being utilized.
When 'Completed' Activities Are Not Really Completed
Sometimes a team member says that an activity is complete when in reality it is not quite. This can happen if the activity should have been completed yesterday, and the team member believes they are just an hour away from completing it. They might rather say it is complete and then finish it up, rather than deal with the consequences of it being late. Usually this is not a big deal. Sometimes, however, activities start to slip because the team member did not start it on time - perhaps because they were finishing up a prior 'completed' activity. Sometimes this can also be caused by deliverables that are completed but not approved. The team member may say the work is complete, but when the deliverable is checked it is discovered it is incomplete or needs additional follow-up work.
To avoid this, make sure that there is an approval process for all major deliverables, and that the work plan leaves time for the approval process and for rework based on feedback. Then there is no question that the deliverable is completed, because it has either been approved or it hasn't. If an activity does not call for the completion of a deliverable, you would expect that when a team member says an activity is completed, it probably is. If you find a pattern of this not being the case, the individual team member might need coaching on how to better report the status of their work.
Action Items
Action items are nothing more than work
that need to be done to complete an activity, answer an outstanding question,
etc. One technique to ensure that action items are completed is to place them in
the work plan.
