Chapter 1

Success in Project Management

In This Chapter

Understanding what makes a project a project

Seeing what's involved in project management

Coming to grips with the Project Manager's role

Knowing what it takes to be a successful Project Manager

Organisations are constantly changing, and ever faster, as they adapt to new market conditions, new financial conditions, new business practices, new legal requirements and new technology. Then there is work to be done such as upgrading or moving premises, installing new facilities, carrying out major maintenance, improving manufacturing processes and re-branding commercial products. A lot of that work is carried out with projects, and as a result businesses are increasingly driven to find individuals who can excel in this project-oriented environment.

Taking on a Project

Because you're reading this book, the chances are that you've been asked to manage a project for the first time or that you're already running projects and are looking to see whether you can find easier and better ways of doing things. If the project is indeed your first one, that's a challenge and may well give you the chance to excel in something you haven't done before; for many, managing a project even opens a door to a new career.

The really good news here, whether you're completely new or have some experience, is that project management has been around for a very long time. In that time, Project Managers have come up with highly effective strategies and a range of very practical techniques. You can benefit from all that experience, and this book takes you through what you need to know. You may be a bit guarded even now because you've heard of, read about or even seen, an awful lot of project problems and failures. More really good news is that most project failure comes from well-known and avoidable problems; you really don't have to be part of the failure statistics if you manage your project in the right way.

So, hang on tight - you're going to need an effective set of skills and techniques to steer your projects to successful completion. This chapter gets you off to a great start by showing you what projects and project management really are and by helping you separate projects from non-project work. The chapter also gives you some insight into exactly why projects go wrong. That will help you become absolutely determined to do things right and succeed where so many others have failed.

This book offers a generic approach to project management and isn't based on any one approach. Specifically, if you're interested in the PRINCE2® project method then you might like to get hold of a copy of PRINCE2 For Dummies. That book will help you to understand the method, but be aware that PRINCE2 hasn't set out to cover all that's involved in project management. It's focused on planning and control but doesn't even cover all of that, so you'll find a lot in this book that isn't in the PRINCE2 one.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

By following a sound approach to the project, you automatically avoid many of the pitfalls that continue to contribute to, or cause, project failure on a mind-boggling scale. You may ask why, if good ways of doing things exist, people ignore them and then have their projects fail. Good question. People make the same project mistakes repeatedly, and they're largely avoidable. You may have come across the joke by comedian Tommy Cooper:

I went to the doctor and said 'Every time I do this, it hurts.' The doctor said, 'Well, don't do it then.'

A national public project run in the UK to create a database of offenders for use by the Prison Service, Probation Service and others has attracted heavy criticism for poor management. The National Audit Office, which checks up on government departments, investigated and reported that the project was delayed by three years, and the budget was double the original, but the scope had been radically cut back. Edward Leigh MP, chairman of the powerful Public Accounts Committee in Parliament at the time described the scheme as a 'spectacular failure' and 'a master-class in sloppy project management'.

The following list takes a quick look at the main causes of project failure; you'll find the remedies in later chapters in the book. The list makes for depressing reading, particularly if you recognise some elements in parts of your own organisation. Nevertheless, it gives a good background against which to contrast successful project management and the approach and techniques set down in this book.

• Lack of clear objectives: Nobody's really sure what the project is about, much less are people agreed on it.
• Lack of risk management: Things go wrong that someone could easily have foreseen and then controlled to some degree, or even prevented.
• No senior management 'buy in': Senior managers were never convinced and so never supported the project, leading to problems such as lack of resource. Neither did those managers exercise effective management supervision (good project governance) as they routinely do in their other areas of responsibility.
• Poor planning: Actually, that's being kind, because often the problem is that no planning was done at all. It's not surprising, then, when things run out of control, and not least because nobody knows where the project should be at this point anyway.
• No clear progress milestones: This follows on from poor planning. The lack of milestones means nobody sees when things are off track, and problems go unnoticed for a long time.
• Understated scope: The scope and the Project Plan are superficial and understate both what the project needs to deliver and the resource needed to deliver it. Project staff (often team members) then discover the hidden but essential components later in the project. The additional work that is necessary then takes the project out of control, causing delay to the original schedule and overspending against the original budget.
• Poor communications: So many projects fail because of communication breakdown, which can stem from unclear roles and responsibilities and from poor senior management attitudes, such as not wanting to hear bad news.
• Unrealistic resource levels: It just isn't possible to do a project of the required scope with such a small amount of resource - staff, money or both.
• Unrealistic timescales: The project just can't deliver by the required time, so it's doomed to failure.
• No change control: People add in things bit by bit - scope creep. Then it slowly dawns on everyone that the project's now grown so big that it can't be delivered within the fixed budget or by the set deadline.

That's ten reasons for failure, but you can probably think of a few more. The interesting thing about these problems is that avoiding them is, for the most part, actually not that difficult.

Deciding Whether the Job is a Project

Before you start to think too deeply about how to set up the project, the first thing to do is check whether it really is one. No matter what your job is, you handle a myriad of assignments every day: prepare a memo, hold a meeting, design a sales campaign or move to new offices. Not all these assignments are projects. So what makes something a project?

Some people say that everything is a project, even making a cup of tea. Don't listen to them. And don't be fooled by references to 'the Project Manager' in TV programmes like The Apprentice either, unless you want an object lesson in how not to do things; Lord Sugar really should know better.

You can think about three things to determine whether a job is a project:

• Is it a one-off job or something that's ongoing? If the job is ongoing, like producing bars of soap on a production line or taking customer orders, then it's business as usual, not a project.
• Does the job justify project controls? Project management means incurring some overheads, although you can find advice in this book on how to keep overheads to the minimum. But the fact remains that there will be overheads in a project (such as for planning, approval and control) and some jobs are so small or straightforward that they just don't justify that degree of control.
• This last one may sound a little weird, and it certainly doesn't fit with the formal definitions; it's the question, 'Do you want to handle the job as a project?' You may choose to deal with a block of work as a project, but I wouldn't - so, in some instances, you have a choice.

Understanding the four control areas

Different project approaches have slightly different definitions of a project; here's one:

A project is a temporary undertaking performed to produce a unique product, service or result.

The 'unique product' is true, but don't let that put you off setting up projects that are effectively repeated, such as organising the annual company conference. Although, strictly speaking, the task is unique each time, you will nevertheless find large areas of commonality with previous projects so you...