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The Soft Side

So how useful is all this planning tool virtuosity in real life? My experience of working both as a consultant and ‘client-side’ has taught me this:

1. The planner needs to understand the activities he is planning. This sort of work is not just admin. It also helps to take the trouble to learn how to use MSP2007 fluently. A bad plan, full of overconstraints (which break the logical flow of activity) and over-simplifications is not convincing.

2. Paraphrasing Einstein, keep things as simple as possible but no simpler. Never try and present 200-line plans at meetings. Keep to Levels 1,2 and 3 in the task hierarchy. At that level, the rollups of work and spend are useful and convincing without inducing narcosis.

3. The greatest value of MSP plans is in the quality of estimation and the nomination of detailed tasks often forgotten.
4. In reality, MSP is next to useless for weekly project management. Far better to pull out Level 4 (‘job’ level) activities from the MSP and agree the achievement of these with the team on Monday morning or the previous Friday evening. Write down up to 5 of these goals for the week on a big piece of paper or whiteboard, so the team can see them. Then start gently probing individuals for completion about midweek or so, becoming more urgent about this as the deadline approaches.

5. Project management is often a fulltime job, yet is rarely treated as such. This is a big reason why most projects fail on deliverables and/or timescale and/or cost.

6. Bright team members sometimes are tempted to play ‘chicken’ with the plan, in delivering their ‘jobs’ for the week. If the level of challenge of their work that week is not arousing to them, they can deliberately elaborate or extend the scope, achieving a quality of deliverables which exceed requirements – but involves unprogrammed extra work and risk. A knowledgeable PM will spot people like that – and try and nip the behaviour in the bud.

7. Team knowledge and peer pressure are the most powerful tools in project management.

8. Plans for innovative work are always wrong and generally underestimate work and cost. A contingency should be retained in recognition of this. The size of the contingency should reflect the major risks on the project. I find it helpful to fill in a checklist of risks against which a project can be assessed before deciding whether to issue a quote and how to cost it (Pre-Proposal Checklist).

9. Weekly round-ups of task completion should be back-annotated into the project plan. This gives a fairly accurate picture of ‘earned value’ against programmed cash burn. This comparison is one of the best early warnings of a project that is not tracking to plan and is therefore not in proper control.

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