Project Perfect - Project Management

Project Steering Committee

The role of a project steering committee is always difficult to sort out. Some become involved in the trivia of a project and some are so removed, you wonder why they exist. If a project has a sponsor, how do they relate to the project manager and where does the project manager escalate issues - steering committee or sponsor? In many cases, a steering committee is just a dilution of responsiblity.

If you are asked to work with a steering commitee, here are some possible authorities and accountabilities that a steering committee may be given. It will depend on how remote the sponsor is from the project.

- Ensure the project manager is keeping the sponsor advised of any changes to time or cost. In particular, monitor completion of milestones and significant changes to the plan.

- Ensure all project governance activities are being undertaken

- Approve scope changes up to a certain level (dollars and days). Escalate to the sponsor changes above that level with a recommendation.

- Recommend to the sponsor the project proceed or not proceed at go/no go checkpoints (after discussion with the project team)

- Through its representation, ensure cross divisional support. This implies senior management (probably GM level) participation on the steering committee.

- Meet within 24 hours if requested by the project manager, to address issues being escalated by the project team. If the steering committee is not able to resolve the issue immediately, it should be escalated to the sponsor within 24 hours.

As a project manager you can fight a steering committee, or turn it into a tool to help you manage a project. The key is to define their responsibility.

White Paper on Running a Supply Chain Project

Running a supply chain project has it's own unique problems however most are just a variation on other Project Management problems. See what an expert has to say about running such a project. Go to http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_supply_chain.php

Having a Business and IT Project Manager

Recent experience with an IT project review brought up a regular problem that appears in projects. The project was structured around a business project manager and an IT project manager. Two captains at the helm. As you would expect there was the usual problems of underlap and overlap in responsibilities and planning. Both however suffered from the lack of long term project planning. It seems neither was focused on how the overall project was going.

Project Management is one of three legs in an IT project. You have:
- A business lead
- A technical lead
- A project lead

The role of the project lead is to ensure both business and technical are travelling down the same path. It is to ensure that the forward thinking and planning is taking place. The business and technical lead make the plan happen. The project manager makes sure the plan is in place, and the integration between the customer and provider is as seamless as possible.

It is disturbing to see business and technical project managers within a project, with neither having overall responsibility for the project as a whole. It usually comes down to senior management wanting a structure but not having the project experience to understand that project management is a discreet role. It is up to the project management community to educate senior management as to why a project manager is needed. For some guidelines as to how this can be done read our white paper at

http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_need_a_pm.php

Delegation in Projects

As a project manager, you often come across the sort of person who wants to be involved in everything. The sponsor, or key stakeholder, who won't let go. You buy a piece of project management software, and they want to go on a training course to use it. You employ a new person and they want to spend an hour briefing the person. And that is after they wanted a final interview in the selection process.

It is called "Delegation". The person has to give up some control and delegate responsibility to the project manager. Chances are, you are not the only one suffering. Probably most of this person's direct reports are not allowed to do their job. Here is one technique to try and break the cycle.

First you have to get the person to agree to a schedule for your project. The key thing is to get agreement for the next few weeks. Let us imagine you have a deliverable by Tuesday next week. The sponsor has signed off on delivery of the particular component of the project. Have it ready for delivery by midday Tuesday, and happen to mention to the Sponsor that it is ready, and you are actually a few hours ahead of schedule.

The likely response is that they will want to review it. Suddenly, they need to do it in the next few hours or miss a schedule they agreed to. Usually they will not have the time and have to skip the review. After this happens a few times, they will start to get out of the habit of reviewing the deliverables and just accept them.

If on the other hand, they do review the deliverable, and demand rework, you give them the choice of either having the rework undertaken and missing the schedule, or accepting the deliverable and meeting the schedule. This is of course if the changes are only pedantic and add little to the deliverable.

If they continue to demand a review of deliverables, build it into the schedule. If they cannot make themselves available when scheduled, the missed delivery dates start to be their responsibility. Of course, keep a record of when deadlines were missed.

Lack of delegation is both time consuming and inefficient. It needs to be combated and the easiest way to do it is to put the pressure back on the person who will not delegate. The schedule is a good tool to do this as the person is put in a situation of making the choice between letting go and meeting a schedule, or hanging on and missing the schedule.

www.projectperfect.com.au

What do you call a "Project Contingency"

Some time ago we published a white paper called managing changes to projects. http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_contingency.php It basically covered the need for a contingency and how to manage it. An interesting conversation recently with a group of PMs focused on how you handle the contingency in a budget. The common experience was that if you used the word "contingency" it was usually cut.

We came up with a number of other terms such as:

- Unallocated funds
- Reserve for undefined low level requirements. (I like this one as if challenged, you can always say you want more time to define the requirements to a lower level of detail)
- Scope Expansion funds
- Undefined scope
- Uncosted detailed requirements (This was my favourite)

There were a few others such as "PM's discretionary funds" that are not worth mentioning but it would be interesting to hear other people's views on what the reserve could be called.

New release of Project Management Software

Project Perfect is proud to announce the release of Project Administrator version 3.3. Project Administrator assists project managers to manage issues, risks, action items, scope, documents, budgets, timesheets and more. The latest release adds change control to the functions available to a project manager.

"We have a philosophy of letting our customers decide what developments they would like to see for the software." said Neville Turbit - a director of Project Perfect. "There are many refinements in the new release including new reports, and easier data entry. One suggestion we were happy to take up was to include an area to track changes on a project. You can use this function to manage proposals through approval and allocation to a person for implementation."

For more information see www.projectperfect.com.au/pa.htm