The Quickest Crash Course in Project Management

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OK, so you’ve seen all these jobs around for project managers, and you’ve even run some small projects here and there. But there is some great mystery around how ‘real’ Project Managers work, and what about all this jargon!?! Here is the definitive crash course in project management!

I have been lucky enough to have some successful project management roles under my belt, and I have done a lot of research on the subject. Let’s cut through the mystery and get up to speed on project management so you can hold your own next time you need to!

When is a project a project… and when is it something else?

When you get asked to do something, like make something happen by a certain time or for a certain budget, you are being asked to do a project. It may not sound like it, but if there are outcomes required, and you are being asked to deliver them… bingo. So, basically, a task that needs some degree of forethought for its delivery.

What about a ‘Programme’? That is a big project, or sometimes a project that is setting up a system of work that will be incorporated into ‘recurrent’ or ongoing work once the initial project has finished.

There is always a catch

When being given a project, its likely your boss will say something like, “I need you to make this happen… by this date… and there is this much money available.”

Bosses never say, “I need you to do something along the lines of this… anything close is fine… take as long as you want… and you have an unlimited budget…” do they?

What we are describing here are the project constraints.

It is extremely important to understand what these are and how they will affect you. Which is why there is a necessary first response whenever anyone asks you to take on a project.

Don’t fall for the sucker punch

In his 2011 book, What you need to know about project management, Fergus O’Connell identifies a magic phrase that you should always use when asked to manage a project, and that is “I’ll take a look at it”.

Shop at Amazon to read the full text

Sounds obvious doesn’t it? But it’s not. You see, when you are being tasked with a project, often it’s by your superior or after having just accepted a PM role… and it’s all too easy to fail to see the only sensible course of action available to you.

O’Connell uses the example of having trouble with your car. He asks that if you went to a garage and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my car, but I want you to fix it, for $50 and have it done within the next 30 minutes…” what would the mechanic say? It wouldn’t be, “sure!”.

It’s already begun

From the very outset, your PM role has already begun. You are immediately managing the expectations of the key stakeholder. This key stakeholder, if they are the person responsible to the organisation for the delivery of the project, and likely the person signing off on the budget, is most likely the Project Sponsor.

So, what do you do first? The very first thing you need to do is forget the constraints that you have been presented with (just like the mechanic would). Now, examine the project in all its details and glory. Don’t accept anything at all on face value, and don’t take anyone’s word for anything (least of all the client’s or the project sponsor’s). This is easier said than done, as you may be under pressure to deliver the project as the sponsor sees it. But getting all the details right here will go a huge way to ensuring your project sponsor and all the stakeholders are happy at the end of the project.

Examination leads to the list of options

What do you examine first? You examine EXACTLY what the goal of the project is. In other words, how will you know when you can call it done? This is where we first have a look at the stakeholders. Who are they?

The stakeholders for a project are anyone at all that the project will affect. It really is that broad. In this very first examination step, you need to identify them all, and crucially find out what each of them considers a good result for the project to look like. They will have a list of conditions that they feel need to be met for the outcome to be considered a success. These will all be different, that is just a fact.

Go and ask. Get specifics from each of the stakeholders. This is where your first project management skill becomes essential, you need to negotiate and placate. Weighing up which of the stakeholders’ desired outcomes carries more weight than others, and where little edges can be trimmed off here and there. All this brings you to a composite set of conditions that if achieved will keep everybody happy. David Wilemon identified negotiation as a key skill when examining NASA’s Apollo program in his 2000 paper, Project management research: experiences and perspectives.

If you need help with negotiation, this article gives you the shortcuts.

Establishing the scope of the project

You may have heard the phrase ‘Project Scope’ or perhaps ‘Project Terms of Reference”. These are jargon for, what on earth are we actually going to do. Your first and most important task is to set a hard boundary box around what your project is going to do, and therefore identify what your project is not going to do. This is defining the scope.

When I say fix a boundary around it, I really mean fix. You see, what you understand to be the scope of your project, and what each of the other stakeholders considers to be the scope of the project need to align. Otherwise, when you think you are done, the client will be expecting more stuff, and your boss will be expecting a cheaper bill… get the scope locked in and get agreement first.

Having a clear goal is important, it must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound.

Laying out the options

Once you have a scope defined, you will quickly realise there are usually many ways to arrive at that outcome. Usually there are also several outcomes that would achieve the same overall aim. Each of these ways, or variations of method are going to cost a different amount and these costs are either acceptable or not to the person paying the bill.

To arrive at the costs for each of the options requires you as the PM to estimate the amount of time and resources for each given task that makes up the whole project. I’ll cover how you can estimate with any degree of accuracy later on, but for this stage its acceptable to make fairly broad assumptions on the costs of things.

Once you have produced your list of stakeholders and a detailed list of their expectations for the project, defined the scope (composite collection of outcomes that everyone is happy with) of the project and produced a list of options on how best to achieve that scope, you have all the information you will need to produce:

Your first documents

Most larger organisations will expect you to lay out the information described above in some sort of document so that the decision makers can sign off on what needs to happen next. You may have heard of these documents; they are most often called the Project Initiation Document or the Project Charter.

Once you have produced one of these documents, this is your tool to get the go ahead to start locking in your approach to the project as a whole. Getting approval at this stage covers your back as you can now call on these documents as your point of truth if the scope or funding gets hazy later on.

Planning for change – 3 possibilities

Over the life of all but the smallest projects one or another of the stakeholders will want to change the goal of the project. Some changes are small, and some changes are massive. How you plan for this and respond to it when it happens (it will happen) will determine the success of your project, and your reputation as a PM.

Try hard not to make the classic PM mistake of locking in the scope of the project and presenting a quote of cost and time, only to fail to re-calculate that estimate should the client change the scope of the project! This again sounds obvious, but remember this, for big scope changes, if you don’t call an immediate meeting and re-plan the project at this point, there is only one way you are going to absorb the extra work. Working you and your team to death. I hope you are not planning on seeing your family much or remaining very popular with your team members over the life of the project…

For moderate changes or just bumps in the road, there is a third option, and that is to have contingency built into you plan (more on this later).

Time to predict the future

Once your Project Initiation Document is signed off, its time to get down and dirty and produce the bible of your project… The Project Plan!

I cannot stress enough that the likelihood of your project succeeding is directly linked to how much detail you incorporate in your project plan. By its very nature, this requires you to pre-plan for as many foreseeable events as possible. If for example, you don’t allow for tasks that will always happen (team meetings, phone calls, HR issues) you are attempting to run the project ‘in real time’ or on the fly… which is stupid, but surprisingly common.

The more detail you can incorporate, the smaller the margin for estimating error. The truth is, the margin for error is still enormous, but its less enormous if you pack the plan with detail at this stage.

Estimations of cost and time

The most challenging part of writing a good quality project plan is accurate estimating. But, remember, you are estimating! If you can, base your estimates on historical data wherever possible. Look at previous projects the organisation has been involved with or other PMs have run in the past, and mine them for information. How much did it cost to get that brochure designed last time? How long did it take? If you are planning a career in PM, start collecting your own records straight away, this information is very valuable.

The internet is a useful resource for basic quotes on things like materials too, so don’t forget the obvious sources of information when collecting data to base your estimates on.

Step by step

The first thing to do when estimating the cost of something involved with your project is to get help. Really Greg? Get help? But I’m the PM… I must be seen to be the font of PM knowledge surely?

Understand this, senior people in an organisation appreciate two key things in a PM, 1) give them an accurate project plan, and 2) deliver the project in line with the plan!

They will very much value someone who endeavours to validate their work through engaging content experts, it is not a sign of ignorance. So, get the people who are going to be working on the project to help you do the estimating.

Next, identify the big pieces of work that will be needed to get the project delivered. Broad strokes here, accuracy at this stage is desirable but not crucial. These big pieces of work are laying down for you the milestones by which your progress will be measured.

For each of these big pieces of work, break them down in to sub-tasks. The smaller tasks that you need to complete to achieve each of the big tasks go underneath. Remember, be thorough here. For example, don’t list ‘design brochure’ as this is too vague. Fill in the detail – ‘Gary and Jill will draft the two-sided colour brochure, and email a PDF version to, John, Chris and James for review – 2 days’.

Each subtask should be broken into increments of between 1 day and 5 days. Be sure to use simple, jargon free language. This project plan is a working document which many people will need to refer to. If you have an integral contractor or team member who is too shy to ask what the jargon means, they may be the broken link, because they don’t know what they are doing!

Keep on going

Ask yourself and your team, ‘What happens first’. Write that job down as the primary job in the list.  Just like a child who always asks why, your job now is to keep asking, ‘What next?’ – keep on going.

You are building a huge list of tasks and subtasks, each one fitting underneath the last, recognising the simple truth that none of these jobs will happen in isolation.

If you don’t know a detail, like how long something will take, or what exactly is involved in a process, make an educated assumption at this stage!

Now, list all the jobs in a structure that shows the big milestone pieces of work we discussed earlier clearly made up of each of the smaller subtasks below it. Be sure to be clear at this stage which tasks rely on each other for their completion.

Congratulations!!! – you have just produced your Work Structure Breakdown! (WSB)

Things to know at this stage – Duration vs Work

Understanding the difference between duration (elapsed time) and work is absolutely vital to getting your figures right in a project plan. Duration is how long something is going to take. So, when you have your estimates of duration for each of the jobs in your Work Structure Breakdown and you know which tasks rely on each other, you can add them all up to work out your project duration. The duration is measured in Days, Weeks, Months or Years.

Work (or effort) tells you how many people you will need to get a task or project done, and therefore by extension, how much it is going to cost. Work is measured in Person Hours or Person Days.

O’Connell uses the example of a football match here to illustrate this. The duration of a football match is 90 minutes. The work for a football match is calculated as two teams each fielding eleven players, for the 90 minutes (1.5 hours) duration. This equates to:

22 x 1.5 (hours) = 33 person hours work!

The work figure allows you to calculate the budget.

Things to know at this stage – the budget

We want to dial in our budget a little more accurately now. In most projects the biggest expense is the labour cost. For every task you have broken down to a duration between 1 and 5 days, convert these to a calculation of the amount of work in Person Days. Put simply, that’s duration multiplied by the amount of people you have working on each task.

Once you have your work figure for each task, you are looking to multiply this by the wage rate (in hours or days) for those individuals. Something you may not know (I didn’t when I ran my first team) is that the hourly rate you need when budgeting is not their actual hourly rate. You must factor in the ‘on-costs’. This additional amount (also calculated hourly) covers their holiday pay, pension contributions and the cost of administering their role (like payroll etc.) Approach your payroll team and ask for the total hourly cost of the individual you are budgeting for. It may shock you to know that this figure is sometimes 2-3 times their actual hourly earnings!

Work your way through your Work Structure Breakdown and calculate the cost of every warm-blooded individual required and add them all up. This gives you your labour budget estimate in its bare bones form.

If you are using contractors outside your organisation, you only need a duration from them. They will give you a price for the work. Add this in too.

Materials and services are costed using solid estimates, assumptions or quotes. Give this your all at this stage. Larger (usually public sector) organisations are going to require you to get three written quotes for this kind of thing if its over a certain threshold, so allow time for them to respond.

Time to Gantt

Henry Lawrence Gantt developed a way of laying all your work planning out in a way that helps you clearly show job dependencies, durations and other crucial data. In its simplest form (usually an Excel spreadsheet) it allows you to get all this foggy information out of your head and on to paper, relieving you of some mental load.

Look online for GANTT chart templates, preferably with 8 columns on the left of a large spreadsheet and then a calendar representing the duration of the project thereafter.

The column labels should be something like this:

Column 1:           Description of Job

Column 2:           Number of Person Days to do that job

Column 3:           Duration of the job (how long it should take)

Column 4:           The dates it will start and end

Column 5:           The jobs that this job depends on

Column 6:           The budget for this job

Column 7:           Who will do the job

Column 8:           The availability of the person(s) in 7

Credit: Vertex42 Excel training

Start by listing the first major job that you have identified (remember this would be one of your milestones). Complete the information in the columns. Underneath this milestone job, list the tasks that make up this larger job and complete the columns for these tasks too. The sum of all the task durations should match the figure in column 3 for the milestone job.

Over in the calendar section, block out all the days that each task will take place over, using different colours for adjacent tasks, so they stand apart from one another.

Things to know at this stage – Critical Path

A term you may hear thrown around is ‘Critical Path’. People sometimes wrongly attribute this to the tasks that are most critical to the success of your project. It actually refers to the shortest possible route through the tasks you have listed, giving you the shortest time in which your project can be done. You have now identified your preliminary project duration!

It is by shortening the critical path tasks, or by overlapping them, that you can shorten the duration of your project. Perhaps a task that you have listed a being dependent on a previously scheduled task can start before the previous task has fully completed? Voila! You have shortened the critical path and made the stakeholders happy!

Your Gantt chart gives you the best method of identifying your critical path and therefore, if you are coming under pressure to shorten the duration of a project, this is where you should look!

Where do you fit in?

Project Manager PM is a job title isn’t it? There is a reason for that. Sometimes though, you have been asked to run a project, alongside your day job. Its important to realise that the PM role takes a massive amount of time and effort, and that time and effort needs to be factored into your plan! If it isn’t, you simply will not have the time to do it. Your project will fail. Add a line to your Gantt chart that is called, ‘Project Management’.

So, how much time (duration) and effort (work) should you calculate for the project management task? Take the total work figure you have calculated for the whole project including all the subtasks. Calculate 10% of it, this is the work or effort required to manage this project. Here is an example of how this works:

There are 5 people working on a project (not including the PM) and the project duration has been calculated using your Gantt chart and Critical Path as 12 months.

Therefore, the project work is 5 people x 12 months = 60 Person Months.

60 x 10% = 6 person months of work for the PM.

Now, the total work (remember this makes up the budget calculations too) is 66 Person Months.

If the PM role is to be spread out of over the 12 months of the project, that makes the PM role a ½ time role, like around 20 hours a week!

If you are a full time PM, that means you are spending 50% of your time managing the project, leaving you only 50% of your time to do actual project work if some is allocated to you.

Supply and demand

Through calculating how many Person Days of work your project is going to need, you have ultimately defined the demand of the project. A simple truth here is that every single task, no matter how small or seemingly trivial, needs someone to do it. By the time the task is due to start, you must have a real person’s name in the ‘who’ column on your Gantt chart.

The people are your supply. Another truth here is that during the life of any project, it is extremely likely that the demand will go up, and the supply will go down. Supply / demand imbalances kill projects.

Things to look out for – People getting pulled off your project in favour of the next flavour of the month. This happened to me, a lot. When this happens, you have three choices:

• Call it a major change and inform the stakeholders the project plan will need to be adjusted to reflect this change
• Soak up some of your contingency (talked about shortly)
• Dump the extra work on the remaining team and / or do it yourself

I strongly recommend the first or at worst the second option.

We are nearly done with this crash course in project management, but another stealth project killer is the knotty problem of availability.

Availability

“Yes, yes, of course… you can have Bob for your project to cover that…” Says your flustered boss when you are trying to lock a name in for the ‘who’ column of your Gantt chart. The task in question has been expertly calculated as needing 10 Person Days to do it.

So, great, Bob works 5 days a week and therefore your duration for that task is just two weeks – brilliant. Did we specify that Bob will be working on your project full time? – Well, er.. no. But, no one actually thought to bottom this out. Bob is working on a load of other projects too, so he can actually only give you a very disjointed 1 Person Day per week. That cranks your project duration up by a staggering 2 months! These little details will absolutely go unnoticed, unless you… well, notice them.

How do you tackle this? – You must use what O’Connell calls a Dance Card for calculating availability. Try this for your own workload now to get into the swing of it:

• Choose a period of time that you want to calculate your availability for, then list all the projects you are working on during that time, regardless of when they start or end.
• Add in estimates for your ‘business as usual’ tasks – you know, meetings, meeting preparation, report writing, inevitable interruptions, dealing with emails, site visits / trips, training / coaching, holidays, managing people, recruiting people, phone calls, firefighting, filling in for people and new stuff!
• For each of these lines on your list, estimate a number of work hours you spend on them over the given period you are assessing. Add them all up, to give you a total number of work hours that you are unavailable for over that period
• Calculate how many hours you actually have available over that given time period, usually assuming an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week

Calculate the availability for all your key players if you can. Using this information, complete column 8 in your Gantt chart. Use this information to adjust the duration of your project and if necessary, recalculate your plan and budget.

Congratulations!! – You now have a very fragile project plan… time to add:

Contingency

It goes without saying that your plan absolutely will not work out how you have predicted it will. It just won’t. You need to do what any good estimator does in these circumstances; they add the magic fudge factor.

You need to add several types of contingency, to soak up mid-size changes and bumps in the road. The first thing you do is calculate around 15% of the work, duration and budget figures. For the work figure, you can plainly add this into your Gantt chart. Be prepared for the stakeholders to challenge these figures, you may end up dropping back to around 10% contingency here. Remember the negotiation techniques I talked about here.

Next, break up the duration figure over the number of major jobs you identified as milestones, and add a line item to each that has a relatively mysterious title, like finalising projected design work or something equally as unintelligible. This is a way of hiding contingency in the plan, to make it less vulnerable to stakeholder meddling.

Finally, Try and negotiate an iterative delivery. This simply means a staged delivery, where you deliver the project in stages over a time period leading up to the (now hopefully revised) delivery date. These stages can more easily be manipulated as required, whilst not losing the stakeholders good will.

What can go wrong?

No seriously, ask this question with your project team, a lot. Risk assessing your project, at the beginning, and at least weekly will give you the means to recalculate your plan and hopefully keep your project on track.

How? Sit your whole team down initially and ask them to all come up with any possible thing that could derail the project. A good example here is losing team members to other projects.

Then score that risk by its severity (S), between 1 (not detrimental) to 3 (Severely project crippling)

Then score the risk by its likelihood (L), between 1 (pretty unlikely) to 3 (almost certain to happen)

Multiply S and L together to give you (E) exposure.

For the highest exposure risks, come up with ways of fixing them, (usually additional tasks that need to go into the plan) and add these into your project plan. Do this weekly as best you can, and hopefully, you’ll head off disaster with clever forethought and planning.

So that’s it!

With all these things considered in your project plan, you should have a fairly robust approach to the whole shebang!

There are lots of Project Management Methodologies, and I have only given you the barebones here, but honestly, if you do this stuff on your project, you should do pretty well. I hope you enjoyed this crash course in project management!

All that remains is to manage the people that are on your project team, so that they deliver what was agreed at the beginning. Much easier said than done obviously! For help with leadership of people, I have lots of resources on my site and will be adding lots more too, so check these out often.

Over to you!

Have you got any suggestions for golden tips for new project managers? As you can see from the post, at letsworkhealthy.com we are giving simple practical help to people wherever we can. We would love to hear your thoughts on the tips in this article, so it would be great if you could leave some comments below!

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Greg Bennett is a Public Health Professional and

Leadership Coach

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