My background is in software engineering, a field that is infamous for delivering every project late, over budget, and with lots of bugs. However, the notion of the "infamously late project" is not something unique to software engineering. In fact, most projects are late (and often as a result, over budget.) It's an epidemic, but what's behind it?
Let's take a look at the project planning process:
There are critical pitfalls in all three of these steps which can result in projects being delivered late. In fact, here’s the most common project planning missteps which directly correspond with the steps I just provided:
Let's take a look at these missteps in a little more detail.
Poor Communication
This is where the trouble begins; the lead decision maker meets with his or her team and starts making the case for launching a new project. He or she has a list of clear objectives, a well-defined scope, and a set of specifications in his or her head. The problem is that those great ideas are never expressed clearly due to poor communication.
Laying out clear objectives should be easy, yet many project managers get it wrong. Many project managers come into that first planning meeting with a very vague idea of what they want to accomplish, something like "improve the efficiency of our customer service team." This kind of objective is so broad that it doesn't mean anything.
The scope of the project is another weak point for many project managers. Take a look at my "improve the efficiency of our customer service team" example - the scope of this project is all operations and infrastructure as they pertain to the customer service team. That's an enormous scope; it's a lot harder to plan and execute a project when you have to take every facet of the customer service team into account.
As for the specifications, there are none provided in the example thus far. Specifications consist of implementation guidelines; they are a roadmap to how the objectives are going to be met within the scope of the project. They don’t cover every piece of minutia but they do set some direction regarding how the project team should meet its objectives. If you have poorly defined objectives and scope it’s obviously going to be harder to provide good specifications.
Coarse Tasks
The next step in the project planning process is tasking – breaking down the specifications into actionable tasks that can be assigned to individuals or teams. This is yet another area of difficulty for many project managers. It’s pretty easy to recognize the broad tasks that go into completing a project, but most project managers simply don’t get specific enough. They assign tasks at a very broad level (i.e. “improve the customer service phone tree”) and then assign some arbitrary deadline by which that task must be completed, if at all.
The problem is that if you assign tasks in this manner then you’re setting yourself up to fail – no one can accurately measure how long it will take to complete such an abstract task. What project managers should do instead is use a mind map to break down tasks into ones that are small enough to where the project team can accurately assess the duration. I’ll be writing a more detailed post on that subject soon.
Milestones are another pitfall – many project managers use only one milestone: the delivery of the entire project. That’s not very helpful. Milestones should be used to mark the prospective dates for when major objectives are met or delivered – if your project is to improve the efficiency of your customer service team then perhaps your first milestone is the date when the customer service operations team is able to answer 100% of all email inquiries within 24 hours. Perhaps the second milestone for this example is when the average wait time for customers on the toll-free support line is under five minutes. Either way, you get the point: most project managers don’t use milestones effectively.
Misappropriated Resources
Given that most project managers can’t accurately assess how long it is going to take certain tasks given that those tasks are defined in a manner that is too broad, one can conclude that these same project managers are not going to be able to allocate resources properly. Project managers will budget too many resources to some tasks and not enough to others.
In addition to the issue of budgeting there is the secondary problem of resource contention – many project managers commit people and resources to a project as though those people and resources existed in a vacuum for the sole purpose of helping complete the project. Realistically those people and resources are already committed to other projects and daily routines, but project managers don’t factor in that resource contention into their estimations for delivery dates. This is yet another cause behind the infamous “late project.”
We’ll be covering a few basic areas of project management over the next month so stay tuned!
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