Author: Kiron Bondale

A project schedule is a foundation tool. For most accidental project managers, the schedule is the plan. Given this, one would expect that on an average active project, the schedule should be current and accurate. Unfortunately, the quality of many project schedules reflects the value placed on them by their creators – a number of the cardinal issues with such schedules have been covered in one of my previous posts. These project managers may state that they are in control of their timelines and their project teams, and hence, the effort associated with keeping project schedules current is not warranted.

So what are some of the other benefits of an accurate project schedule beyond its primary value as a work management and tracking aid?

1. It is a powerful communication tool – whether you are presenting project status updates to senior management, your customer, or reviewing upcoming work with team members, an accurate project schedule provides an objective method of communicating schedule progress, as well as highlighting the potential impacts of project issues.
2. It is a wonderful medium for knowledge capture – a critical weakness in most organizations is the inability to effectively capture and leverage expert knowledge. A well developed, accurate project schedule can cut down on the ramp up time for new staff and can incorporate lessons such that they are more readily learned.
3. It facilitates compliance with organization policies and procedures – embedding critical steps from operational or quality checklists into a project schedule increases the likelihood that they will be followed. If a checklist or standard operating procedure is documented, filed in a binder and referenced only during initial staff training, it becomes easy to forget. On the other hand, if the key steps within the procedure or checklist are built into a project schedule, not only is it hard to miss by team members, compliance issues become much more visible.
4. It is a fundamental input into risk identification at all stages of the project lifecycle – while a risk register should be developed early in the lifetime of a project, it loses value if it is not reviewed and refreshed at regular intervals. An accurate project schedule can provide an efficient basis for ensuring that all remaining activities are considered from a risk perspective.
5. It can reduce the effort required to analyze change impacts – without an accurate schedule it is difficult to assess the schedule, resource and cost ramifications of a significant project change. Not only can a schedule improve the quality of impact analysis, it also provides a means of simulating the impacts of different approaches to a proposed change.
6. It facilitates project and portfolio-wide resource planning – human resource availability is one of the top constraints and ongoing sources of risk to projects.The ability to forward plan resource allocation through use of detailed, accurate project schedules is crucial to being able to proactively identify and avoid resource bottlenecks.

In summary, a project schedule is merely a model and like any model, it can only bring order and predictability to chaos if it is accurate. While you should avoid the temptation of spending too much effort in the development and ongoing maintenance of the “perfect” project schedule, striking the right balance between accuracy and effort will reap multiple rewards, beyond just knowing that you are “on track”.

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PMOs are frequently portrayed as a panacea for an organization’s project management issues. Evangelists will pontificate that without this organizational construct, the ability to achieve excellence in project portfolio management (PPM) or project management execution is often unreachable. They may also point to the value of a PMO as an efficient means of gathering, normalizing, and communicating project and resource decision support information.

However, PMOs do not come without costs and challenges. PMOs struggle to deliver measurable business value within their first year of existence while at the same time incurring significant costs. These costs might result from consulting services purchased to facilitate the setup of the PMO, the total cost of ownership of tools to support the PMO as well as the recruiting and ongoing internal labor costs for PMO staff. Organization conflicts that can accompany the launch of a PMO can impact productivity and employee morale – if the mandate or authority for the PMO is not well defined and communicated or if there is a shift in authority from functional managers to project managers, a power struggle could occur that reduces perceived value.

Failure rates for PMOs are high (surveys have reported that between 20-25% of PMOs will not survive more than three years) and given the upfront costs and delayed achievement of business value, organizations should be absolutely sure that a PMO is the best way to achieve their PPM or PM-related business objectives. There are alternatives to setting up a PMO to address tactical issues such as project failure – better engagement of stakeholders, true project sponsorship, basic project management training for all staff and having skilled project managers are a few methods of achieving the same desired goal without the need to set up a PMO.

I’ve worked with many clients for whom a PMO was viewed as the “home of project management” – within its walls, project management flourishes and miracles are performed to get troubled projects back on track. However, outside of this utopia, behaviors do not change – governance practices are still afforded only lip-service, resources are still vastly over-allocated and excessively multi-tasked, project sponsors continue to remain invisible and project commitments are made without proper planning or justification.

PMI’s envisioned goal that “Worldwide, organizations will embrace, value, and utilize project management and attribute their success to it” underscores the need for our profession to transcend an artificial construct such as a PMO. I draw an analogy to the evolution of quality in the manufacturing industry – so long as it was viewed as being performed by a quality control or assurance group, it failed organizationally. Only when it becomes a core component of all organization practices does it truly flourish.

Setup a PMO, and you risk establishing a crutch that prevents an organization from truly institutionalizing project management – while PMOs can facilitate improvements within low maturity organizations, I believe that in the not too distant future, successful organizations will look at PMOs as being as obsolete as a mimeograph machine.

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Delivering our profession often requires super-human effort and, as we all know, a super hero is only as good as the super villains they have to defeat.

This article covers three of the super villains that plague project managers and provides some insights into how to deal with them.

1. The Scope Shape Shifter

The scope shape shifter can be identified by frequent changes in requirements and other scope elements. Just when you think you’ve got the shape shifter’s requirements nailed down, they morph into something else resulting in budget overruns and schedule delays. If you try to enforce rigid scope control practices with them, they escalate and complain that you are “nickel and diming” them or are not paying attention to customer satisfaction.

One way to deal with the scope shape shifter is to use an agile project management approach that encourages refinement of requirements over the project’s lifecycle. If you are unable to apply agile practices due to the nature of the project, structure it in a phased approach and focus on delivering the highest priority requirements first, leaving medium or lower priority requirements for future phases (and hence open for change by the customer).

2. The Sponsor from Another Dimension

The extra-dimensional sponsor starts out by being all that you want a sponsor to be -communicating the value of their project to all stakeholders, securing the necessary funding to get the project kicked off, and providing you with a vision of how they see this project benefitting their world.

Unfortunately, the moment you escalate a project issue, or assign them as the owner of a risk event, they have dimension-shifted back to another plane of existence from whence they can observe unscathed the chaos occurring in your world.

The key to keeping these sponsors in our dimension is to engage them only when absolutely necessary and in appropriate “business terms” (so they don’t feel overwhelmed with information that they perceive is of little value to them), to ensure that project success is considered part of their performance evaluation (by appropriately leveraging your influence across the organization), and if all else fails, to have an appropriate escalation path to be able to drag them kicking and screaming back into our world.

3. The Prima Donna

On many projects you may forget that you are the project manager and start to feel more like a babysitter. At least one of your project resources might be extremely reluctant to provide timely progress updates without frequent nagging, may ignore assigned issues, and in general does not “play well” with fellow team members.

To defuse this situation before it occurs, it is very important for project managers to establish expectations for communication and team interaction as early as possible. These expectations should be reinforced on a regular basis during team meetings.

The project manager should also strive to establish good relationships with resource managers, which makes the process of escalating concerns about specific resources easier to deal with. The worst thing a project manager can do is to pander to prima donnas. If their behavior is tolerated, they will go from bad to worse, and other responsible team members will be demoralized.

Have I ignored any of the key arch-villains? Let me know.

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