Lessons Learned - Project Planning

Lessons Learned

What you would attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

Project Management LESSONS LEARNED
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Project Planning LL

Lessons Learned

Project Points
Our Monthly Publication for Clients,
Prospects , Associates & Subscribers

Lessons Learned are snips of knowledge
regarding mistakes in project development,
management, control and/or finance. They
are put forward for the benefit of Project
Executive Group subscribers.

The customer's business needs must dictate a project' objectives.
Inexperienced or busy customers may assume that in routine projects their active
involvement in developing project objectives is not essential. It is the responsibility of the
project manager to ensure the customer's involvement.
A competent project leader understands when to stop fixing and when to start devising a
new plan.
To get timely attention from senior management, don't hesitate to exploit any legitimate
means.
To speed up implementation, time and effort should be dedicated to early preparation.
Short-term planning calls for very detailed planning and scheduling.
A team that is organized and committed to a common goal, while genuinely involving the
user early on, ensures quality decisions and rapid implementation.
Even in fast and uncertain projects, it is essential to identify area where the search for
optimal solutions can be worthwhile.
Be selective, go for the big opportunities.
The optimization process is basically simple and includes a dedicated effort to search for or
create several options and to evaluate them according to a few important pre-selected
criteria.
You achieve effective project planning and implementation by simultaneously addressing
and integrating all project areas at an early stage.
To carry out such planning, you don't have to resort to sophisticated measures. All you
need to do is start early and systematically involve all the related parties, employing simple
procedures, tools, and analyses.
If you do not plan for a certain area before making decisions in other interdependent
areas, you will have to address that area later during execution, after constraining or
contradictory actions have been implemented.
Involving your customer in early planning facilitates project implementation and reduces
the need for future changes.
Maintaining and reducing a budget requires genuine review of project scope combined with
systematic monitoring of project performance and cost.
Even the most dedicated effort of a competent team cannot deliver a successful project
without the trust and support of management.
Unreasonable pressure from management to pursue unrealistic objectives does not ensure
the achievement of those objectives. On the contrary, it frequently leads to failure.
Actual budget reduction is not the result of the artificial treatment of indirect factors, such
as overhead, or the arbitrary or wishful decisions concerning project outcomes. Real
reduction requires thorough examination of project scope.
Early review and modification of project scope by a highly empowered and motivated
project team are the keys to significantly reducing cost.
Meeting project objectives demands that you systematically monitor performance. Only by
having timely information concerning the status of the project can you make maximum use
of available resources.
You can ensure high commitment to implementing a decision if you involve those most
affected by that decision early enough in the decision-making process.
Under conditions of uncertainty, avoid preparing too early a full and detailed plan. An
outline plan should be prepared for the entire project and a detailed plan for the short term.
The outline plan should be prepared with enough flexibility to allow adapting to a reality
that can only be ascertained in the future.
Throughout the course of the project, data must be continuously and actively assembled for
future planning.
"God is in the details," but not too early.
You can prepare a useful project definition, even during constraints of uncertainty and
speed. Work in stages and adjust the timing of program preparation and degree of detail to
the availability and stability of the information.
Formulating and monitoring design assumptions permit early reaction to
changes. This early reaction limits the impact of the changes on the plan.
In area crucial to the success of the project, stand up for your opinion. Use all
available means to convince your partners.
Creating a real, one-to-one model of a project's critical elements and involving your
customer in the fine-tuning allows your customer to learn directly and quickly what he or
she really needs.
While this process consumes time and resources, it ensures valid and reliable feedback
from your customer. In the final analysis, it brings about the early completion of stable
plans that require few changes.
To be able to understand and critique some elements of the ultimate product, they must
actually be experienced — hands-on — by the user, not just read or discussed.
Planning by feedback may require several cycles of incremental planning and
implementation. Often, in order to do it quickly and correctly, one must be willing to do it
wrong first.
The idea that the customer should clearly know, in total and final detail, what he or she
wants before briefing the designers is expecting too much. Insight into possible solutions
and the availability of alternatives influence the customer's ideas of what he or she really
wants.
It is self-defeating to force an aura of detailed and final requirements on incomplete ideas.
Developing clear and stable project definition often requires fast experimentation with
selected elements of the project.
Small and fast experiments allow you to accelerate learning and to make timely and stable
decisions.
To get timely attention you must sometime take a personal risk and employ "uncommon"
devices.
One tangible model is more effective that countless argument; or "one picture is worth a
thousand words."
Under conditions of uncertainty and speed, you can accelerate learning by splitting the
project into smaller, more easily executable parts, and by applying the feedback from the
first part to the rest of the job.
Effective planning by feedback is not simply adaptive planning. It is rather a conscious
learning effort. Thus, planned and focused effort is dedicated to collecting feedback from
implementation.
You are not usually expected to eliminate risk. You are expected to take the right risk. Yet,
when the negative impact of a risk is intolerable, you have no choice but to eliminate it.
It is absolutely irresponsible to ignore such a risk only because it seems so remote.
Risk analysis does not reduce or absorb risk. To mitigate the risks that are left after you
have carried out all the necessary preparations, you have to adjust to uncertainty by
employing redundant resources.
Isolating highly uncertain tasks enables you to prepare robust project plans and maintain
rapid progress.
Ostrich-like thinking does not belong in the age of dynamic change. You must identify
potential changes and dangers early and take pre-emptive action.
To accelerate project speed by overlapping tasks, you have to isolate uncertainty.
Otherwise, the uncertainty of the upstream tasks may impede progress, sometimes to the
point where no time savings at all will be realized, while costs will increase considerably.
There is no free lunch. To isolate uncertainty in crucial tasks, you must build in redundancy.
Separate the few highly uncertain tasks from the other project tasks to create a stable plan
free of uncertainty for most project tasks.
You can easily isolate parts of the project, at a cost of limited redundancy and
minimal disturbance, by reorganizing its components early in the project.
The combined effect of many tightly linked project objectives, each suffering from only a
low or moderate degree of uncertainty, produces high project failure probability. To
prevent this problem you need to convince the customer to limit the number of uncertain
objectives.
The combined effect of many tightly linked product tasks, each suffering from only a low or
moderate degree of uncertainty, is frequent changes. To overcome this problem you have
to loosen the tight connections between tasks.
In drawing up a budget, any monetary deviation in one task will generally not have a direct
influence on the other tasks. Therefore, creating an overall reserve is an effective means
of dealing with uncertainty. This solution is not effective, however, in a project schedule
where a delay in one task usually effects several other tasks.
In drawing up a project schedule, introducing time buffers between uncertain tasks, based
on experience and familiarity with the working environment, is a proven means for
loosening the connections between that tasks.
In a world of uncertainty, it is unwise to schedule the individual project tasks as fail-safe.
Rather, by incorporating time buffers, each task can be scheduled as safe-to-fail, that is if it
is late (fails) the entire plan is still on time (safe).
These time buffers enhance the resilience of the entire plan, which is now both stable and
adaptable, in other words, the whole is more reliable than its parts.
Before creating stack resources to limit the effect of uncertainty of one task on another,
you must try to weaken the cause of the uncertainty.
You can better manage a very large project by dividing it into several sub-projects.
Focus the cost goal on total project costs, not simply on reducing the cost of those who
plan, support, and organize the project. Properly used, overhead costs in planning,
scheduling, organizing, and managing will actually save money!
Regroup the tasks and people according to uncertainty. This allows you to isolate uncertain
tasks and resources and to match your coping mode to the type and degree of uncertainty.
Coping modes with uncertainty may include allocating slack resources and providing for
adaptability and responsiveness.
Sometimes the solution to a problem, even a complex one, is at your fingertips.
Breaking down a project into several small independent segments enables greater
flexibility in timing and method of execution of the different segments, and particularly, in
selecting the most appropriate tactic for coping with uncertainty.
By focusing selectively on separate segments of the project, you can absorb and reduce
any uncertainty within those segments early in the project. This allows you to complete
those work segments sooner and to later allocate more attention and resources to cope
with the remaining uncertain segments.
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