Okay, so maybe you have the large projects nailed in Microsoft Project, but what about the smaller ones that, in reality, make up the bulk of your portfolio? Are you just “winging” those, using status emails and Excel spreadsheets to manage them? If so, you could be making a great mistake.

Small projects, while often overlooked, are still crucial to a company’s success. Since they might not involve large sums of money, many companies do not worry as much about them, but all of these small projects can add up to some major costs if managed improperly.

Best Practices

Top project managers know the best practices for their large projects, but what many do not realize is that these techniques can be applied to smaller projects as well. An article recently published in ProjectSmart affirms this: “Applying the best practices to even a small project can be done without creating too much paperwork or overhead. The best practices are the things which countless project managers have done on thousands of projects and are deemed to be the ‘best practice’ because they tend to help you to achieve the best results. Don’t think that because you’re managing a small project that you can ditch these best practices because if you do, you will regret it later when your project gets in a mess.”

Here are a few of the key best practices to keep in mind for your small projects as well as the large ones:

1) Tracking Actuals

All projects, regardless of size, are executed in order to bring in a positive return on investment, and since project cost today is mainly derived from the cost of labor, tracking time to projects is absolutely essential for measuring ROI. How can an organization know what its true return is without understanding its true costs?

These data are not only crucial in understanding costs, but also in monitoring project status. Keeping tabs on the actual completed work hours at all times allows project managers to identify and address problems early on. For example, if 10% of the project work has been completed but 30% of the allocated budget has been spent, there is a serious problem. Project managers who track employee actuals will find this out early enough to actually do something about it, while those who do not will simply find themselves over budget in the end. The project might be a small one with a small budget, but cost overruns can add up fast and really hurt the organization. Besides, in times like these, can anyone afford to be so careless with their budgets, large or small?

2) Understanding Resource Allocation

When you assign project tasks and deadlines to employees, how do you know if they have the time to get them done or not? Are you sure that they won’t be on vacation, working on a different project, or spending the month in meetings? Project managers must know who is available to do the work before they assign tasks to people (or, better yet, before they decide to take on a project at all). Simply assigning tasks to team members without regard for their current and future allocation, including upcoming vacation time, is unwise. If the person you need on your project is completely booked with non-project work or plans to backpack across Europe all summer, you need to know. Your goal might be to complete the project on time, but it will never happen unless the resources are available when you need them to be.

Not only should resources be available to do the work, but they should be the right resources. In other words, different projects require different types of employees. If a programmer is needed for a project, the project manager must have the ability to search for one who is available for the specific time frame. Managers can also use this information to identify staffing gaps. If there is only one programmer who is consistently overbooked, it is time to hire additional programmers. Yet without insight into resource allocation, management might not know that this programmer is working too hard until he or she burns out and quits.

As I mentioned earlier, status emails and Excel spreadsheets are simply not sophisticated enough to handle project management, even on a small scale. For one thing, these tools lack the centrality and flexibility that a project and resource management system can provide. Let’s say a department manager assigns an employee to a new project, cutting his available time in half, unless this is properly documented and communicated to the entire project team, how will the project manager know to revise his or her timelines? How will the other team members know that their tasks, contingent upon this employee’s work, cannot start until six weeks later?

Resource allocation changes all the time, and project managers need a solution to keep this information up-to-date, and accessible at all times. Not only should everyone on a project team know what is going on, but changes and adjustments like these should also roll up to the general project plan.

3) Managing Work Requests

Do you, as a project manager, schedule projects that your resources will not be able to finish on time? Another important best practice to apply to smaller projects is to give team members a voice. It might be tempting to just create project plans and demand that team members get it done, but that is a pretty unrealistic expectation that will set you up for project failure. It will also lead to low morale among your employees. A better way is to get input from team members on how long it will take them to complete certain tasks. A developer who has performed hundreds or thousands of similar tasks will be able to tell you right away how long it will take him/her to write that new piece of code while you, as a project manager, might have no clue.

It is also important to let team members communicate with you while the project is in progress. Small issues or holdups become big very quickly when unheeded. For this reason, project managers who implement project and resource management solutions should ensure that their team members will have the ability to request more time for their tasks when necessary.

Successful Projects of All Sizes

When project managers enforce time tracking, have visibility into resource allocation and give team members a voice, everybody wins. Applying best practices to your entire project portfolio is one of the best ways to drive success every time.

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Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx (http://pr.journyx.com), a provider of Web-based software located in Austin, Texas, that tracks time and project accounting solutions to guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. In 1997, Curt created the world’s first Internet-based timesheet application – the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource.” Curt authors a project management blog at www.project-management-blog.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/clf99.

We all know that conflict is a difference of opinion and therefore neutral-neither good nor bad. Right? But try telling that to a project manager or business analyst embroiled in conflict. Conflict can threaten to destroy the team and sabotage efforts to elicit requirements. But it doesn’t have to. Having a strong, neutral facilitator and a process for conflict resolution can reduce tensions and bring about a positive outcome.

Early in my career I was a liaison representing the interests of a large branch of a national bank. I was on a committee that met monthly to prioritize requirements. Each month I met with my branch management to determine their needs. Each month I and liaisons from the other branches would argue about which new systems and enhancements should be given priority. There was no formal facilitator. Conflict was rampant and remained unresolved. I don’t remember much being accomplished in these meetings. Each branch came in with its personal agenda and each of us went away unsatisfied with the results. Time after time I was in the unenviable position of having to tell my management that they weren’t going to get what they wanted. Again!

In retrospect one of the things I should have done was to spend time understanding the problem management was trying to solve. That way I could have presented a coherent set of recommendations at the monthly meetings.

Another thing I should have done was to meet individually with key representatives before each monthly meeting to discuss our concerns, find common ground, and build relationships. Instead of returning empty-handed each month, I should have returned with a recommendation that helped not just our bank, but the entire network of branches across the country. Everyone would have benefited.

Finally and maybe most importantly, the meetings would have run more smoothly if we had had a facilitator to tell us where we were going and keep us on track.

Many years later I learned that when conflict is preventing important tasks from completing, having a facilitator and a facilitation process is essential. Such a process might include:

• Find a neutral facilitator. When emotions run high, it is important to find someone without a vested interest in the outcome. Some BAs and PMs take turns facilitating meetings for each other. Some organizations or PMOs provided facilitation services. What’s important is having a designated, neutral facilitator role.
• The facilitator should set ground rules. One ground rule that can be used for conflict situations is that the participants will disagree with ideas and not people. This helps prevent the discussion from turning personal. If the discussion becomes emotional, the facilitator needs to bring the focus back to the issues at hand. If this is not possible right then, the meeting should adjourn.
• Take time to understand the problem. Conflict arises for a variety of reasons. People have personal agendas, they think their way is the right way, they want to be recognized as experts, etc. We need to understand the real needs behind the stated needs, the issues behind the positions.
• It is important for those in conflict to resolve it themselves. Once all participants understand the problem, we need to hold a brainstorming session to generate ideas to solve the problem. This can be done individually or in a group. Sometimes it is useful to have the participants write ideas on yellow stickies. It is important at this point to concentrate on generating ideas to solve the problem, not to evaluate the ideas presented.
• Prioritize the solutions that have been generated by comparing approximate costs and benefits. You may need follow-up action items to quantify both the costs and benefits of the solutions.
• Another facilitated session may be needed to develop a recommendation, or the recommendation can be assigned to one of several of the participants.
• Present the recommendation to a pre-determined decision-maker, such as a project sponsor. It’s important to have a designated tie-breaker to ensure the conflict is resolved.

These steps will not prevent conflict, which is a natural part of a project. But they will help keep the project on track and prevent ruined relationships.

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“How do you pronounce ‘EPM’?” I asked one of our consultants recently.

“Enterprise Project Management?” he replied.

“No,” I said. “You pronounce it P-M-O.”

It has become more and more common in recent years for us to have to deliver this message to prospective clients considering the implementation of an Enterprise Project Management System.  It’s no wonder that most consulting firms who deliver EPM system deployment assistance also manage extensive requests to implement Project Management Offices.  “Do you have a PMO?” has become one of our most immediate watershed questions.  Those who answer no are usually not in a position to take immediate advantage of an EPM system.  Those who answer yes often have established some of the basic pre-requisites that anyone should be looking for before putting down money for their favourite EPM Software.  Here are a few of the key pre-requisites we look for when a client calls and asks us to implement an EPM System.

Do You have a PMO?

I might as well start here given it’s how I started the column.  The existence of a project management office is almost essential to a successful EPM deployment and here’s why.  Every EPM system essentially brings many project managers and project resources together into a centralized project management environment.  All their data will now be centrally stored.  The data may be centrally calculated and analyzed.  The benefits being sought by those who buy EPM systems are typically centralized benefits; things like resource capacity planning and inter-project impact reports and organization-wide project variance analysis and corporate reporting.  All of these things can be wonderful, but they imply some level of coordinated action.  The data must be saved by everyone in the same period of time.  The data must be analyzed in the same manner.  The data from project one must be able to integrate at some level with the data from project two and so on.  This simply doesn’t happen by accident and while EPM tools have the capacity for coordinated action, they can’t make people behave differently. 

What each EPM system absolutely needs is a centralized place where standards and the enterprise project management system can be maintained.  It requires someone who will be looking for others to comply with the central system and will ensure that data received is both complete and acceptable to the standards that have been set.  Imagine if there was no common understanding of how to define resource assignments or even how to name resources.  Some project managers would enter them as skills, others as individuals, others as departments.  It would be chaos.  Imagine if some project managers updated their projects every week, others every month and still others only at the project’s outset and completion; you’d never know when you could produce an accurate organization-wide report. 

A flag-bearer for standards

While we’re talking about standards, there has to be someone central who will be their champion.  Even if these practices and procedures somehow got produced from the end users, who will be their keeper?  Some will say “We’ll all keep them,” but that leaves no one accountable to ensure the practices are being followed.  Standards are essential to an EPM system even if that system is completely manual.  Some people get concerned that this centralized person will have too much authority but this too can be managed within the standards.  The notion that a group of people can be accountable is silly.  People will do whatever they think is best but creation of standards doesn’t happen randomly.  This can only be done by someone central.  Moreover, you’re going to have to think about the future.  Even when standards and practices have been adopted, there will be changes.  When a change must be made, who will create it, update it, get it accepted by everyone and then ensure that it is written into corporate policy?  Again, this doesn’t happen from a random end user, it requires someone whose role it is to support those standards.

Project Management Practices and Procedures

One of the most common things we encounter when we’re called by a prospective client is a lack of centralized process.  When we ask to see a list of accepted practices and procedures for project management, we usually get a blank stare.  It’s not enough to have a PMO and a centralized Standard Bearer for the process, you’ve actually got to bite the bullet and create and agree on those standards.  Our usual recommendation is to start with the most minimal number of procedures possible and then let the list expand over time.  Some clients will try to create the ultimate über-list of practices and procedures and end up with a 700 page tome that no one will ever read because it’s too confronting.  Starting small but getting a high degree of consensus is by far the preferable plan.

One way or the other though, you’re going to have to agree on a few basics:

• First, how you’ll name things. Naming conventions for projects, tasks and resources is absolutely essential
• That you’ll store your projects centrally in whatever tool or repository you’ve chosen. A firm agreement has to be made on what data must be saved and what data need not be. Without this agreement and someone who will monitor compliance, your EPM system is going nowhere fast.
• Frequency of updates. It makes no sense to have some data updated every week and some updated every year. Make an agreement on what the frequency should be for different kinds of data.

Support for the Technical Infrastructure

I can’t possibly list all the weird and wonderful infrastructure problems we’ve encountered at client sites.  We’ve been called in to help with a centralized server-based project management system only to find that it’s not installed on a server at all. It’s been squeezed onto someone’s laptop and every time they reboot, the system becomes unavailable to everyone.  We’ve seen server-based systems that aren’t listed in the IT department’s list of secure servers because some department installed them on their own.  The installation went fine, but the server will never be available because the IT department allows only authorized servers through the firewall.

Whatever centralized tool you select, you’re going to have to make sure that it is supported by the people in your organization who do such things.  Server-based project management tools are not like tools from 10 or 15 years ago.  They depend on a ‘stack’ of technology.  A database server, a web server, a firewall, an internet connection, a browser, the client operating system, an identity or security server and more.  When an update to your EPM system arrives, it may well require updates to all kinds of elements of the ‘stack’.  Someone needs to be accountable for ensuring that the system and all the technology that it depends on is maintained and monitored. There will be regular maintenance and monitoring required and that won’t happen with some random user.  It requires someone who will report back to the PMO that the system is working properly or that maintenance effort is required.

Implementing an Enterprise Project Management environment can lead an organization to a tremendous increase in efficiency.  When the economy is challenging, being more efficient is in high demand.  But, not having the pre-requisites ready or not considering what might be required to make an EPM environment successful can make an efficiency project very costly both in time and money.  Ask someone with experience to make sure that you’ve prepared properly before embarking on your EPM deployment.

Chris Vandersluis is the founder and president of HMS Software based in Montreal, Canada. He has an economics degree from Montreal’s McGill University and over 22 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and is the founder of the Montreal Chapter of the Microsoft Project Association. Mr. Vandersluis has been published in numerous publications including Fortune Magazine, Heavy Construction News, the Ivey Business Journal, PMI’s PMNetwork and Computing Canada. Mr. Vandersluis has been part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council since 2003. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University’s Executive Institute. He can be reached at [email protected]

This is my first blog for Project Times. I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts and experience each month and engaging in a dialogue on project and program management and process optimization. The goal is to help in the ongoing work of optimizing our performance and the performance of our organizations. My orientation is influenced by systems thinking as a means for remaining objective and realistic. I promote open-minded mindfulness applied at the individual, team and organization level as means to optimize performance.


I apply a Zen-like approach, as evidenced in my book The Zen Approach to Project Management.‘Optimal’ means most desirable under the circumstances; the best given current conditions. Attaining and sustaining optimal performance is a dynamic process that takes place continuously over time as conditions change and learning from performance is transformed into process improvements. In project management, optimal performance is being able to consistently meet expectations by delivering useful, quality results within time and cost constraints while maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of resources across multiple projects. When we take a broader view, we include the consistent realization of the benefits that motivated project performance and the ability to sustain and improve optimal performance.

Who doesn’t want to operate optimally? The real question is what time, effort and resources will you commit to do it?

Project management and performance optimization are intimately related. Project management is a process that is both a means to the ends of process optimization and a target of it. Project management (PM) operates within other processes such as product development, finance, engagement management and construction. At the same time project and program management are critical success factors in optimizing the performance of any process. Optimization implies managed intentional change and continuous improvement. These are brought about by way of projects and operational processes performed within programs.

Over the next months we will explore optimal project and program management performance. Among the factors that are critical to optimal performance are process (quality) improvement, methodology, project management, organizational change management, communication, expectations management, conflict management, decision making and problem solving, knowledge management, collaboration and leadership. These are combined with specific knowledge and experience in organization, technology, policies and procedures. The result is a complex system in which engineering must be balanced with an openness to let things evolve.

How do we address the blending of agile, lean and traditional project management? How do we manage defined processes, compliance and flexibility? How do we implement and sustain practical best practices in the project management process in a way that maximizes benefits? How do we satisfy all the stakeholders – clients, sponsors, champions, sales people, performers, regulators, etc.? These are among the questions we will address over the coming months.

Please comment to let me know what you think of the definitions and direction reflected above. For further exploration of these topics and for other resources visit www.pitagorskyconsulting.com.