Managing Projects
Managing Projects – Where Do We Start?
There’s methodology in their madness…
It is important to understand what a project is and is not. The key characteristic of a project is that it is temporary having a set start date and end date. Day to day procedures and routine work is not a project. The end date is important it is the date when the outputs or products are completed and is usually a date that is planned from the start.
Planning is essential to any project whether it is implementing a quality system, bidding for public sector work or building a house.
So where do we start?
We need good project managers and that means people with the right skills and personality. But a good project manager will be all the better if they and their team and the project stakeholders follow a good methodology. Prince project management methodology is widely accepted and recognised as the leading project management methodology. It has been developed over many years by the UK Office of Government Commerce. It sets out eight process stages of a project. The Eight Process Stages of a Project are:
- Starting up a project — developing a brief for what the project is going to do and identifying a team to deliver it.
- Planning a project — the process of analysing what is going to be delivered (products) and planning activities to deliver them.
- Initiating a project — bringing together the first two stages to make the business case and get authority to proceed.
- Directing a project — covers how the Project Board will control the project e.g. authorising stage plans or project close-down.
- Controlling a stage — method to break down a project into stages and work packages and to manage issues and reporting.
- Managing product delivery — sub process for accepting, developing and delivering work packages.
- Managing stage boundaries — covers how to manage stages, transition from one stage to next and end stage reporting.
- Closing a project — covers the things that should be done at the end of a project including decommissioning and evaluation.
So now we can deliver perfect projects — or can we?
Of course there is a lot more to the PRINCE2 project methodology than the eight process stages and experience tells us that adopting a methodology does not guarantee a great project, there are still lots of reasons why things go wrong. A few of them are set out below.
There is often a temptation to rush into things so the PRINCE2 business case gets forgotten. Instead of having a nice PRINCE2 business case the start-up phase is rushed or completely ignored and the organisation goes straight into the project initiation stage.
Projects are often badly planned so they go off track, overspend or are unable to deliver the intended outcomes.
Organising a project using the prince project management methodology requires a strong Project Board but often Project Boards are not strong and do not function well. They may ignore issues or avoid taking the key decisions they are there to make and so the project goes off track.
Instead of having clear stages projects are set up with only one or two stages so it becomes difficult to monitor or review progress which means the project can easily go off track.
The right skills are not identified to ensure the project goes smoothly or there is no management commitment so the project just flounders or lacks sufficient resources.
There are hundreds of reasons why a project might fail but on balance it is less likely to fail if everyone is working to a common methodology such as Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 (2009 Edition).
More about Prince2
Good project management is key to implementing your plans. The UK government recognised this and as a result the world has the PRINCE2 project management methodology.
There are a number of PRINCE2 books, the most important being Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 (2009 edition).
After more than a decade the UK Office of Government Commerce, PRINCE2 Project Management Methodology has become accepted world-wide as the leading project management methodology.
