Project Management PDF

Project Management lauantai 19. lokakuuta 2024 8.55 22. What to Expect Transcript And now welcome to the section on project management. You may not think you're a project manager, but actually everyone's involved in project management. If you change anything, you're working on a project and it'...

Project Management lauantai 19. lokakuuta 2024 8.55 22. What to Expect Transcript And now welcome to the section on project management. You may not think you're a project manager, but actually everyone's involved in project management. If you change anything, you're working on a project and it's the job of any manager to improve and change things. So all managers are actually involved in project management. It's also good to understand what project management is all about because you might find yourself in charge of a project manager suddenly, and this will give you an overview so that you understand what the subject involves. So I have broken project management down into 12 steps, and if you follow the 12 steps, your projects will be successful. It's quite a challenge to reduce project management down to 20 minutes because you can actually do a two year diploma. But I've pulled out just the absolute key practical things that you need to know in this course. And so here they are. Let's get started. From 23. Clear Objectives Transcript Step one of planning a project is to work out what your objectives are. You've got to be really clear what the objectives of a project are. Probably the biggest failure of project management generally is when you're not quite sure what the project is. Perhaps the customer or your boss has a different image in their mind from what the project manager has. So you've got to be really clear what it is you're trying to do. And if you think about what the definition of a project is, is you're trying to do something that you haven't done before, you're leaping forward into the unknown to do something different. Because if you've done it before, then it's just a process and that's easy. So what is it that you're trying to achieve? And then based on that, you've got the big three cost quality and time. So how much are we going to spend on doing this? What exactly is the quality we've got to achieve? So what's the scope, What's in scope and what's out of scope? And then the time when has it got to be finished by? Udemy Page 1 And then the time when has it got to be finished by? And all three of these need to be defined and agreed with all the stakeholders. Now you might want to have a kick off meeting with the stakeholders where you discuss this and I actually think you need to kick off meetings. So the very first one is where you say, what exactly do you want? And sometimes they disagree and they argue and you have to just facilitate that to get everyone to agree on what we're going to have. Then you go away and do a bit of planning. And then the second kick off meeting is where you say, This is my plan. Are you all okay with this? And quite often at that second kick off meeting, you have to say it's going to take a month longer than you wanted. Are you okay with that? Or it's going to cost an extra £5,000 more than you hoped you were going to spend? Are you okay with that? And if you're not, do you want to reduce the quality a little bit to keep it within the budget or within the timescale? So a little bit of negotiating that goes on there where you agree with the stakeholders what they're going to have. And a final thought is the key driver. So cost, quality and time. Often there's a top one. So some projects like the Olympics times the key driver, whereas something like a nuclear power station quality would be the key driver. And sometimes cost is the key driver and you need to find out which one is the constraint that you really can't go beyond. So you need to ask a few questions at those kick off meetings to find out what's flexible and what isn't. So that's the first step of project management. Define everything before you start. From 24. List of Tasks Transcript Once you're clear what your project is, you can start planning it. And really, the first step of this planning phase is to get a list of all of the tasks that are making up your project. I think it's obvious that you have to break your project down into a list of tasks to be able to get a grip of how long the whole thing is going to take and how much it's going to cost because you can estimate each little bit and then add them up. So we need that list of tasks and if we miss any, the project is going to cost more than Udemy Page 2 So we need that list of tasks and if we miss any, the project is going to cost more than we thought or it's going to take longer than we thought. So how do we get a list of tasks for a project that we've never done before? There are three ways, and the first way is a brainstorm with the team. Get everyone together, Just shout out a big random list of everything we can think of. The second way is what's known as a work breakdown structure, and this is a structured breakdown of the work. It's a tree of tasks. So we have the main areas and then the subsections within those. We might break it down to several layers. It's a structured way to make sure that we don't miss anything. And then the third way to get a list of tasks is research to ask other people, to ask experts, maybe within the company or outside of the company, perhaps we might have to pay them. But we're trying to find out who's done it before and what did they do when they did the project? There might even be records of similar projects that were done previously in the company, or there might be people who've got history in their head. They can still remember the last time they did it. So we've got these three different ways the random brainstorm, the structure and the asking other people. And ideally you would do a bit of all three of those to maximize your chances of getting every single task. Now, there is a little wrinkle in all of this, which is granularity. How far down do you go? How small do you have to break it down? What size are the grains? And as a rough guide, I would start with quite big chunks of work. For example, install kitchen and then break it down more if you have to. Now it could be if you do kitchens all the time, you know, they take six weeks and cost £3,000 or something. But if you haven't done a kitchen before, then you would break it down into how much is it going to cost for the cooker, the floor, the lights, etcetera, and how long will it take for the cooker, the floor, the lights? So if you can't estimate something, you have to break it down a bit more. Also, if a task is much bigger than the other tasks, it makes sense to break it down more because that's an area of risk and the final sign of needing to break something down more, needing more granularity is the forbidden word, which must never be spoken, which is ongoing. And this word is really bad because if you find yourself saying the O word, it means that you don't really have a grip of the project. It means that that part of the project is either really big or it doesn't have a start and a finish. So if you find yourself saying the O word, it means you need to divide that task down more. So that is the first part of planning, which I'm calling step two, because step one is to Udemy Page 3 So that is the first part of planning, which I'm calling step two, because step one is to define the project. So the first part of the planning is get a list of all of the tasks in your project. From 25. Running Order Transcript Once you've got a list of all of your tasks, the next thing is to decide on the running order of the tasks, which ones depend on which. And the best way to do this, I find, is with Post-it notes. Just write each task on a Post-it. Stick them on a whiteboard or a big piece of paper and just move them around until you've got them in the right order and then connect them up with arrows drawn by pencil. Or if it's on a whiteboard, of course you can just use whiteboard pen. Once you've got that all drawn out, you can then put the Times on the Post-its as well. I prefer weeks as my unit of measure for a really big project. It might be months and for a very quick project it might be days. But normally you put the weeks on the Post-its and then based on that you can find the longest path through your diagram. And this longest path known as the critical path tells you how long you will need to do your project because you can't do it quicker than this longest path. All the other tasks which aren't on the critical path are known as floating tasks. And with those you've got a choice of when you do them. And that movable ness is known as float. So you've got your critical path diagram all drawn out with Post-its, with the floating tasks on there as well. And you know how long your project is going to take. From 26. Safety Margin Transcript Step four of the planning process is to go through your Post-it note diagram and put a safety margin on there because things are going to go wrong. There are going to be some tasks that you've forgotten and also for the tasks that you know about, there are bound to be some problems that may take longer, and there are many ways for things to take longer and very few ways for things to be quicker. So, for example, people often say, I don't feel too good, I'm ill, or I can't do very much work today. But they never come in saying, I feel fantastic. I can do the work of two people today. Udemy Page 4 I can do the work of two people today. And similarly, people get taken off your project, but you never get given extra people by another department. You've got some spare people. So if you think about it, there are always things that could take longer, but things are not often quicker or cheaper. So we need to add a safety margin. The question is how much? And what I would recommend is think about the absolute worst case for your project and what we're doing by the way, is we're just looking at the critical path and we're going along there because that's what defines how long the project will take. So go along the critical path and just think if everything went wrong, each of those tasks were the worst possible outcome. How much longer would the whole thing take? Add that up all the way through and then add on half of that amount. So if you think there's an extra ten weeks of possible lateness, if everything goes against you, you need to add five weeks to your project. And then what you do is you don't add one lump of five weeks at the end which your boss or customer will take out. Again, you hide those five weeks, spread through the tasks. You just add one week of extra safety margin to five different tasks so that it's in there safely. And doing this is not dishonest because the reason you're doing this is to plan for reality. We know from bitter experience that some things are always going to go wrong, so we need to have that safety margin embedded in our plan so that we don't let down our customer. So that's the next step of the planning. Put a bit of a safety margin through your critical path. From 27. Speed it Up Transcript The next step of planning your project is to speed it up if necessary. So you've worked out the critical path and you've added a safety margin on. And the question then is, is it too much? Is it longer than we've got? Is it longer than we're allowed to have by our boss or our customer? Now, if it is too long, we've got to speed it up. And there are really three ways we can do this. The first is to throw money at it, and money can be people putting more people on it. It might be working weekends, shifts or whatever it might be even paying a different type of person to come in and do the work like consultants or something. Udemy Page 5 to come in and do the work like consultants or something. So there's money up. The second way is quality down, so you could do a slightly worse job. I never liked that option, but sometimes it is an option and remember that that could include scope. So you might, for example, build a slightly smaller building, but just as good quality, or you might have fewer beds in your hospital, but just as good quality beds and doctors. So you've got money up. We've got quality and scope down. The third option is overlapping, So sometimes you can overlap tasks. You can start the second one before you finish the first one. This usually involves risk as well as complication and hassle, but overlapping is definitely an option. Now, when you're using all three of these or any combination of these, make sure that you still keep a safety margin on your project. So imagine if you had a 20 week project and a safety margin, took it to 30 and the customer said, Well, I need it in 25. You can't just take out half your safety margin because then your 25 is just a promise that's not going to happen. So you have to bring the 30 down to the 25, buy money up, quality down or overlapping. So what you're really looking at in a way is a 15 week project, but with ten weeks of safety margin added on again. So you've always got to have that safety margin even on a project that has been reduced in length and by the way, reduction in length is known as crashing. So when you talk about crashing a project, that's all it is. It's money up, quality down or overlapping? From 28. Gantt Chart Transcript Next we come to my favorite part of project planning, which is producing your Gantt chart. Now a Gantt chart is just tasks down the side and dates across the top, and then you have bars showing when you're going to do each task. So there's nothing too difficult about the idea of a Gantt chart. And certainly anyone who looks at one instantly understands what they're looking at. The best way to produce a Gantt chart, in my opinion, is to use Excel. You can use Microsoft Project, but you have to pay for it and learn it. And it's quite complicated. But good old Excel, I think is really good for producing Gantt charts. So you've got the tasks down the side, you've got the dates across the top. The first thing you put in is your critical path, and that comes down in steps because everything needs to be on its own line. Udemy Page 6 to be on its own line. So you've got the name of it off to the left and probably the person who's doing it. And then you've just got a bar for when that task is going to be done. So you have the critical path coming down in steps, probably without any gaps, because this is what defines how long your project is going to take. And then you put in all the floating tasks underneath the critical path. The key thing when you put the floating tasks in is always ask yourself, what do they come after and what must they be done before? And these are the two constraints for the floating task. So you draw vertical lines after the preceding task. What must it come after and before the following task? What must it be done before? And then the floating task can be put somewhere in that gap and you can decide whether to float it earlier or later within that gap. But it has to be between those two lines. And that's how you produce a Gantt chart. Now, why do we want a Gantt chart? Well, three reasons, really. Firstly, it's great for communication. The Gantt chart tells you who's doing what and when, what's critical, what isn't, what's got a lot of float, what's got very little float. It's brilliant for showing people the project. The second reason it's great is resource planning, because you can look vertically and you can see all the bars that are overlapping during that vertical time. So it's really good for showing when you're going to be busy. And you can then ask yourself, Do I have enough people? And if not, you have to move some of those tasks sideways. And then finally, you can use it for monitoring your progress by colouring in. People often produce a Gantt chart in order to sell the job or get permission for the job, and then they throw it away. And that is such a waste because it really comes into its own as you do the project, because you can colour in each task as you complete it and you can just check that you're keeping up with the now line. And it's by far the best way to monitor progress. So those are the three reasons why you need a Gantt chart. Communication Resource planning and monitoring Progress by coloring in a Gantt chart is completely essential for every project. From 29. Allocating Resources Transcript Next we come to resource planning because when we do the Post-its, we're assuming infinite capacity. So the first thing we do is we start to take account of capacity restraints and we look at Udemy Page 7 So the first thing we do is we start to take account of capacity restraints and we look at the Gantt chart and we can use this to plan resources for one project. We can look vertically and think, Have we got enough people to do this project? And if not, then we have to shuffle the floating tasks if necessary. Now if you can't move the floating tasks enough and you don't have enough resource, then you might have to break the critical path. It's a bit of a crime, but if you can't get more people, that's what you have to do. So you have to stop the critical path, deal with some of the floating tasks, and then go back to the critical path and your whole project is going to take longer. But it's either that or get more people. So the Gantt chart allows you to look at the resource requirements for a single project. You can then move on to planning resources for all of your projects because each one might be okay in isolation, but you might not have enough resources to be able to do all of the projects that you want to do. In fact, I would say you almost certainly won't be able to do all the projects you'd like to do. And this is why we need a Gantt of Gantz. And this is a diagram which allows us to add up resource requirements for all of the projects we want to do. If you can't do them all, then you'll have to move some of them out into the future and just do them next year. And that's life. But at least with this Gantt of Gantz, we can look at our various projects and decide which one we're going to put out into the future. We can be scientific about prioritizing our projects. Now, if they all have to be done now, then it proves that you need more people. So if you're in, let's say the IT department, it's a great arguing tool to say, Well, you're asking me to do five projects and therefore look at my Gantt of Gantz. I need 32 people, I've only got 28, I need another four people. So it's a great arguing tool if you're delivering a lot of projects. But it's also great for monitoring everything from a high level. So if I was the big boss, I would definitely want a Gantt of Gantz so that I can just check that I can have all the things I want in the future. But I can also check that all the current projects are being done and they're keeping up to plan with one glance. I can see all the projects and I can ask, Have they done what they should have done? So it's completely brilliant for checking the past. Have they done what they should have done and the future? Can they do what I want them to do? So a Gantt of Gantz is a really good idea if you can produce one. From Udemy Page 8 30. Reducing Risk Transcript Now step eight, and this is the final part of project planning, is to think about risk. Have a look at your plan and think, how risky is it? And the way we do this is we do a list of everything that might go wrong looking at our plan and we might brainstorm all the risks perhaps with our team and get a random list. But we might also look at history and see what's gone wrong in previous similar projects. And then against this risk we put how likely and how serious often you give a score out of five for how likely are those things to go wrong and how serious would they be if it did go wrong? And then you only need to focus on the things that are reasonably likely and reasonably serious. So if it's medium or high, when you multiply the likelihood and the risk, you then need to have a plan and the plan needs to either make it less likely or less serious. So if you take, for example, fire, we've either got to make fires less likely in our houses or we've got to make fire less serious if it does happen. So we do scores of five by five and we get a score after 25 about whether we need to worry about it. And then what we really want is the score, after all, mitigation plans. So if we've made it less likely that numbers come down and if we've made it less serious, that number has also come down. So when you multiply those two together, we're trying to get the number at least down into single figures, preferably less than five. And that's what customers and bosses are interested in. What are the scores of all the risks after mitigation? And then they can make a scientific decision about whether they want to go ahead with the project at all. From 31. Monitor Progress Transcript So now you've finished the planning and you can actually start doing your project, carrying out the tasks. And the main thing to do is to monitor your progress as you do this, are you keeping up with the plan or not? And we do this by coloring in the Gantt chart as we go along. So there's a now line that moves along every week or every month, and then we color in what we've done and we can see whether we're keeping up. Udemy Page 9 and we can see whether we're keeping up. So this will be done at a meeting that would be usually monthly, but it might be a weekly meeting if it's a short project. And there are two ways to color in you can either color when complete. When we finished a task, it gets colored or you can do proportional coloring where if you've done half of the task, you can color half of it and you just have to decide which one of those methods you're going to use so that everybody knows. Now, a couple of other points about this. You can use Sub Gantz to know where you are in a big task. So if you're doing proportional coloring and you're thinking, well, you know, are we halfway through this? If you've got a little sub plan that will show you because you can see which bits of the sub plan you've colored in and you don't have to worry about the sub plan until you actually get to that task. And then you can drill in and start looking at that. And this allows you to handle really big projects because you can have a high level plan, high level Gantt chart that would be and then you can have your sub Gantz. So imagine if you have a plan that has, let's say, 20 high level tasks. If each one is broken down into 20 sub tasks, you could handle a project that consists of 400 tasks and I don't want to see a Gantt chart with 400 tasks on. I mean, I can't get my head around that. It's no use to anybody, but if you show me the high level 20 and I can drill into them if I need to, that's a much better way to control and monitor progress. From 32. Monitor Costs Transcript So as well as monitoring the progress, we also need to monitor the costs of our project. And when we look at the costs, we've got to be careful to compare them with the progress. So, for example, it could be that you're underspent so far, but that's because you're behind schedule. So don't just look at the money and go, Brilliant, we're under spent. Always check the progress as well. It could be that the money is looking okay, but actually you're behind schedule. So really you've overspent on what you've done so far and that's actually quite common in projects. Also, quite often the spend is non-linear. So you look over spent because you've done one of the very expensive bits or you might look under spent, but that's because you've got the expensive bits still to come, so you're not really under spent. The key is to get a planned spend profile and that comes from the Gantt chart because Udemy Page 10 The key is to get a planned spend profile and that comes from the Gantt chart because you can put money along the bars and then you can add up the money vertically so you know how much you should be spending in each week or month. And once you've got your spend profile, that allows you to compare what you've spent with what you've actually done and what that work should have cost. So never just say we've had half the time, so we should have spent half the money. The question is what have you actually done and what should that work have actually cost? But why monitor the money at all? And the objective of monitoring the money monitoring the spend is to forecast what your final cost at completion is going to be. So halfway through, we need to be thinking, are we heading for an overspend or not? Because then we can plan for that. So we need to think will the problems in the first half continue into the second half or are we going to get back onto plan again? And by monitoring the progress and the spend, we can do these types of calculations, and that is step ten of project management. From 33. Adjust the Plan Transcript So we're monitoring the progress and the cost. And the question then arises, what if we're overspending or running late? Let's take running late as an example. And this is really step 11 of project management adjusting our plan. So if we're running late, we need to speed the second half up. And there are some options for that. And the first one is to put the money up. We could spend more money in the second half and do it quicker and get back onto plan. Another option we could reduce the quality or the scope of the second half and that would allow us to do the second half quicker and to still finish perhaps on time. The third option is overlapping some of the tasks in the second half and again, that might allow us to catch back up and finish on time. There's another option though, which is to just let it run late and to deliver late. If quality is your key driver or if you don't have any spare money, you might have to just finish the project late and maybe that wouldn't matter too much. Maybe time isn't that much of a key driver. But the one option you must never take at this stage of the project is do nothing and hope and project managers quite often hope that maybe they were really unlucky in the first half and they're owed some Udemy Page 11 they're owed some luck in the second half. But I would say if the first half went badly, the chances are the second half will go badly as well, because whoever did the planning probably underestimated the work in both halves. Or if your team's not very good, you're going to continue with the same problem in the second half. So never do nothing and hope you have to take some action, whether it be money up, quality down, overlapping or admitting to your customer that you're going to deliver late. From 34. Review Transcript Finally we come to the project review and this is often neglected because either we don't have time to do it or we don't want to relive the pain again, or we don't want to admit our faults in public, in writing. But it's really important to do the review because this is the only time that we all learn. So you might learn things about what went wrong in the project, but does everyone else in the team know what you've learned? And what about all the people who weren't involved in the project at all? The people who might be doing a similar project next time? They need to learn whatever you've got in your head. So it is really vital to have a proper review and to write some notes. And the review would probably take the format of good, bad and better. What were the good things we want to repeat? What were the bad things we want to avoid next time? And how could we have done the project even better now that we have perfect hindsight? So discuss those three questions and write them all down in a one page summary so that it's dead easy and quick for future people to look at. Finally, there's the idea of a post project review, and this is 1 or 2 years later you come back and you say, Was the project worth doing? So maybe the outputs were spot on. We built that cycle lane and it was the right color. But what about the outcomes? Did we get more people cycling to work? Were there fewer accidents? So did the outcomes materialize? So this is not a criticism of the project manager in any way. It's more of a criticism or an assessment of the person who commissioned the project. But it's still worth doing a post project review because we can work out which projects are worth doing next time and which ones aren't. So a project review and a post project review a couple of years later and that is the 12 step project management process. Udemy Page 12 management process. From Udemy Page 13 Attachments lauantai 19. lokakuuta 2024 9.04 2.+12+Step +Process Udemy Page 14 3.+What+Is +My+Proj... Udemy Page 15 Udemy Page 16 Udemy Page 17 4.+Work+Br eakdown... Udemy Page 18 2.12+Projec tReview Udemy Page 19 30.+What+ Can+We+... Udemy Page 20 30.+What+ Can+We+... Udemy Page 21 Udemy Page 22