Has your organization ever taken on a major design and construction project such as creating a manmade wetland? Did you succeed at completing it on time and within budget? At project completion, was it difficult to get final customer or regulatory authority approval? Does your team take on multiple major tasks that are vying for the same limited resources?

Many large undertakings would be more successful if they were managed as projects. Effectively managing a project or multiple projects requires some specific skills that are not necessarily intuitive to all architectural or engineering personnel. The development, acceptance and implementation of a standardized project management process can please your customers and improve your organization’s performance and bottom line.

Master The Vocabulary

The project management profession has its own unique terminology. When those terms are understood, a project runs more effectively to a successful completion. PMBOKâGuide – A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge by the Project Management Institute (www.pmi.org) defines many project terms, four key ones will be discussed here.

- Project – a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. It has a beginning and an end and requires resources.

- Program - a group of related projects managed in a coordinated way.

- Stakeholders –people actively involved in a project or those who can positively or negatively influence it.

- Project life cycle – a collection of generally sequenced phases specifically identified for that project.

For example, the construction of a manmade wetland could be considered four separate projects:

- Collect requirements and design

- Obtain appropriate permits

- Construct the wetlands through acceptance by the customer and proper authorities

- Provide the first year of warranty service

Another acceptable approach would be to refer to the four as separate phases of a program. The program life cycle would include collecting requirements, design, permits, construction and the warranty work. Or the program could be limited to the first three phases. Once any of those tasks is started, the program has started and when the end of the maintenance year has concluded the program is complete. These multiple phases (projects) constitute the life cycle for that program. The life cycle must be identified for all projects or programs. The customer or stakeholders will determine the project methodology.

Seize The Opportunity

The key to benefiting from a project management opportunity is to manage multiple projects effectively to ensure the following four basic characteristics are managed.

- Scope – The requirements for the final product are used to develop the project scope by identifying what is included and what is not included in that product. The scope must be documented and established early in the project life cycle. A scope change process is also required to manage scope change during the project life cycle. Remember, changes are expensive and can impact your schedule so they have to be managed.

- Cost – The project budget must be approved in conjunction with the scope early in the project life cycle. The project costs must be collected and analyzed against the budget throughout the entire project life cycle to assure the budget is not exceeded.

- Schedule – The project’s schedule is developed once the scope, estimates and network diagram are completed and resources have been applied. The schedule should be approved and tracked during the entire project life cycle.

- Quality – The quality standards of the project must be established early in the project life cycle, during the requirements definitions stage. The finished product should meet, not exceed, those established quality standards.

The balance of this project management (business) opportunity will be addressed in four separate categories: people, process, performance and tools. These are the glue that hold the project together to assure the project scope, cost, schedule and quality standards are met.

People

Various studies indicate that 70 to 80 percent of a project manager’s time and effort involves working with people and their issues. Project management is not a profession for individuals that do not like or cannot work with teams of people.

Individuals should be educated and trained on project management basics prior to being assigned a project. People skills and teambuilding are especially important in fostering cooperation toward the completion of a project. Ongoing training and education are recommended to continually improve project performance. Many colleges and universities provide project management education. Corporate in-house training, vendors and professional organizations also provide a wide range of training opportunities. Recent studies indicate that the amount people working on project teams that have little or no formal training is decreasing. Should this trend continue, project management performance should improve in the future.

One major key to increasing project management performance is to resource load (schedule the time required for project tasks in accordance with the person’s available time) project team members. Continually starting and stopping work on a task and juggling several projects at once isn’t always effective. Every time one stops working on a task, it takes some effort to get back up to speed. Doing this several times a day or a week will decrease one’s overall productivity. For example, does it make sense to quit mowing the lawn halfway through your yard, then wash half of your car, finish the lawn, vacuum the house and then finish washing the car? Of course not! It is more effective for an individual to remain on a task and complete it before beginning another.

Embrace The Process

Effectively managing multiple projects requires that each project be properly managed by using a standardized, repeatable project management process. This doesn’t imply that the same tasks must be completed on every project regardless of scope. Rather, similar projects should have standardized well-defined tasks. Stakeholders must understand, use and support the adopted process. The results of the project management process must also be measured and reported, through consistent methods, to the proper individuals.

In order to improve performance a documented repeatable project management process is necessary, but what is it? Where is one found? There are many methods available, but the PMBOKâGuide illustrates one generally accepted method that identifies nine major project management areas:

1. Project Integration Management

2. Scope Management

3. Time Management

4. Cost Management

5. Quality Management

6. Human Resource Management

7. Communication Management

8. Risk Management

9. Procurement Management

This is only one of many documented and accepted project management processes. Once your organization has adopted a project management process it must be properly followed and managed. This requires limiting the amount of work entering the system, working to established priorities, assigning knowledgeable project managers and possibly implementing a project office.

Perfecting Performance

The performance of the project management process must continually be monitored, analyzed, improved and communicated to ensure the most value for your customer and company. This process should incur the least amount of expense to assure profit at the end of the year.

Tools For The Job

There are multiple tools available to assist your project management efforts. Some of the Microsoft products including Project, Access, Excel, Word and Visio will be helpful. There are also entire project management software packages available. Try to select a tool set that is appropriate for your specific application. These tools should compliment the primary tool – the adopted project management process.

Methods

Here are a few “tricks of the trade” which regard establishing a project management process. You should have a management review process that screens all incoming projects to determine their priority and the ability for each to be accomplished. Remember that every accepted project has to have a sustainable business case.

Priorities must be established through a pre-determined system that applies a priority to each project. Try to limit your choices to less than five.

General project management tasks include developing a project charter, writing a statement of work, creating a work breakdown structure and writing task descriptions. Require project management tasks also include creating a responsibility matrix, developing network relationships and estimating each task. Developing a schedule, as well as managing risk, are important as well as beginning implementation, tracking costs and schedule, documenting lessons learned and closing out the project.

The Statement of Work (SOW) is a document that identifies the critical aspects of the projects such as title, objectives, deliverables, deliverables acceptance criteria, assumptions, ground rules, constraints, major milestones, high level schedule and, most importantly, signatures of the project manager and management. This can provide the authorization to begin a project.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) the PMBOKâGuide identifies the WBS as "a deliverable-oriented grouping of project elements that organizes and defines the total work scope of the project. Each descending level represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work." This is the classic "breaking the elephant down into bite sized pieces."

Task descriptions for each task on your project identify appropriate information similar to the statement of work, but at the task level. Even if team members say that they know what they are doing on their assigned tasks, it is vital to write down the task descriptions to ensure it is understood by the project team, not just the individual assigned to the task. It is very important to know what the delivery criterion is for each task – that criterion enables you to know what constitutes task completion.

A network diagram establishes the relationship of tasks to one another. It establishes the predecessor and successor relationships that will be used to construct the schedule.

The project schedule will be developed from your estimates and network diagram to establish the time line for your project. The schedule should reflect the duration for each task as well as the amount of work for each task. For example a task may take 40 hours of work but it may take two weeks duration for the individual to accomplish the task.

Metrics establish a means to measure each project’s performance and the performance of the process via identification of total projects open over time, open and closure activity, aging, priority, number of projects per customer, project assignment, schedule vs. actual completions, by group, etc. Metrics can be pulled from a project tracking system.

Whenever possible templates (SOW, schedule, WBS, task description, etc.) should be developed and ready for use. This will enable a standardized repeatable process and improve its efficiency.

Effective project management involves using a change management process. Project change is inevitable and must be addressed in a consistent manner.

As in all engineering activities there is risk involved in project management. A well-established project management process includes an adopted manner to deal with risk.

Take The Next Steps

Use good project management methods to bolster the performance of your organization. Identify and confirm with management the need for project management improvement. Develop a plan to create and implement a project management process that can handle multiple projects. Implement the plan, including the training and communication of all involved. Measure the results of the project management process and implement corrections as required.

A Practical Application

When managing the design and construction of a wetland the project may have to be adjusted mid-course.

Scope – When you started working on the project 2.3 acres of wetlands were required. The customer has changed the site plan and an additional .2 acre wetlands for a total of 2.5 acres are now required. This is a change to the project scope.

Cost – The project construction window was initially scheduled during the dry summer months. The permit required prior to starting was received in August and now the construction will have to occur during the winter months. This may impact the budget and must be managed. Project budgets should include contingency funding to address unforeseen situations such as this.

Schedule –The scope and cost impacts identified above will probably affect the schedule.

Quality – The wetlands initial quality standard was 100 shrubs per acre and subsequently changed to 150 shrubs per acre. This is a change in the quality of the final product and will also affect the project scope, cost or schedule.

The key to successfully managing the above change is to follow an adopted process that will officially change the project plan as required.