Whether you’re constructing an entire airport, digitizing a functioning library, upgrading a company’s payroll system, or developing a website for a family-owned grocery shop, each of these efforts, despite the sheer disparity in scale, can be called a project.
As you look back in history, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that project management is one of the pillars that has helped develop global infrastructure – be it physical or digital – to the state it is in today.
As defined by the Project Management Institute:
A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.
With the prominence that Agile frameworks have gained over the past couple of decades, “traditional” project management often tends to be dismissed as a rather rigid and inflexible approach to delivering outcomes, overly focused on following a plan, with an inability to deal with change.
On one hand, there’s some evidence towards this, with missed deadlines, cost overruns, poor quality, rework, expanding requirements, unsatisfied stakeholders, and failure in achieving the objectives that many quote as proof… But on the other hand are clear reasons why you see these outcomes: poorly managed projects, or a complete absence of project management.
Done right, there’s almost no approach more suitable than project management to deliver clear, valuable outcomes when it comes to the most complicated of requirements.
For example, building a specific model of an aircraft, such as a business jet customized for a particular customer, comes with a need for detailed planning to deal with thousands of parts, tight tolerances, a ton of dependencies and more, with a supply chain that spans many countries and a difficult to meet deadline. However, having a plan alone isn’t anywhere near enough to achieve a successful outcome.
Project Management is what helps bring this plan to life, dealing with an assortment of factors and functions from a clear beginning – an order placed by the customer, to a clear end – the delivery of the aircraft.
Let’s have a look at what goes on in-between:
Managing the scope – Understanding customer requirements, validating them, planning how to deliver on the requirements
Managing the schedule – Sequencing activities based on dependencies, planning the timing while working backwards from the deadline
Managing resources – Bringing in and leveraging people, machines, warehouses, etc.
Managing costs and budgets – Estimating costs, planning the budget and controlling costs over the course of the project
Coordinating procurement – Procuring the materials or parts needed to build or develop the deliverable (in this case, the aircraft)
Performing the work and contributing insights – Pulling together the actual deliverable, and sharing learnings and knowledge within the team as you progress
Controlling quality – Building in good quality, but also resolving (and learning from) issues and defects
Oversight and coordination – Overseeing the work being done, coordinating resources and materials
Facilitation and support – Dealing with impediments and unforeseen events/circumstances, providing support, whether in the form of authority or an additional pair of hands
Managing change requests – Responding to changes in customer needs over time
Communication – Effectively sharing the right information at the right time with customers and stakeholders
Managing stakeholders – Understanding who your stakeholders are, keeping them informed and involving a subset of them at the right moments, such as during decision-making regarding major trade-offs
Managing risks – Identifying and analyzing risks, planning responses to mitigate risks
Documentation – Creating suitable documentation in each stage of the work to support records, learning, ease-of-use and more, all the way from the project charter and project plan to user manuals
This list is non-exhaustive, and has been written in no particular order. This is the tip of the iceberg, and there’s a lot more to projects and project management than this, including a plethora of tools and techniques.
However, can you relate to these activities when it comes to the work that you do in your organization? They’re certainly not useful only when building airplanes!
Keep in mind though, that achieving successful outcomes that meet the scope on time and within budget, while maintaining excellent quality is never easy. A combination of these factors is in fact called the Iron Triangle of project management, as a change to one means an impact on the others – it’s always a trade-off.
Let’s circle back to the example of digitizing a functioning library. What if your customer decides that in addition to providing high resolution scans of each book and publication as per the original scope, there’s now a requirement for detailed meta data that lets readers search for content by subject and keyword, rather than just the title?
It’s a logical ask, but still a substantial increase in scope. If the deadline remains the same, the cost will rise, as you’ll need more people and resources to deliver on the larger scope in the same amount of time. Or alternately, if there’s limited flexibility in the budget, you need to move the deadline to achieve the larger scope with the same resources. No matter what, during these trade-offs, it’s important to ensure that the quality of work does not suffer.
Have you faced the dilemma of the iron triangle in the work that you do? Think back to the projects that you’ve been involved in or heard about. How did you resolve it?
It’s not an easy task, and that’s why a good project manager is worth his/her weight in gold! This is a person that can balance all the factors that are involved over the course of a project and deliver great results.
In conclusion, for complicated work that has a clear beginning and end, whether the scale is large or small, project management can help you achieve clear and valuable outcomes no matter the industry – finance, manufacturing, healthcare, education… you name it.
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