Project Management 

We have gone a long way by defining what are we expecting from the project, but now it's necessary to make all the decisions pertaining to the planning and tracking of the project. We can talk about four categories of decisions:

• Planning Decisions, about schedule preparation

• Tracking Decisions, define status reports and status meetings

• Practices Decisions, centered on processes of improvement

• Relationship Decisions, relative to ownership by the project team members

A number of important decisions are taken at this stage of the project, such as how the project plan will be developed, if there is feedback from previous similar projects, what tools we will use to support the project, what training we will need on those tools, and who will use them and how frequently. It's also advisable to

Probably the main reason of failure of a project is the lack of an adequate definition of what we want to achieve. We must establish the justification of the project and its objectives. The objectives should be measurable and everybody should know how those measures are calculated. Let's say that we want to increase turnover by a factor of two. Fine, but are we talking about finished goods or raw materials? Over what period of time? What formula will we use? Who has that information? How can we guarantee the repeatability of the measurements? Some of these questions might be too simple, but we need to define them very clearly from the beginning.

To achieve our now clearly defined objectives, we must now establish deliverables. A deliverable is an action, document or any other tangible that is necessary to get to the objective. It's a common mistake to think that the project will be achieved with a single make-or-break task that will lead us from zero advance to full completion. If we understand the many little achievements that will take us to the final result, we are halfway finished. We will not worry at this time about who will do what or how long it will take. The purpose of this step is to figure out what are the main results that we must deliver to achieve the objective of the project.

Now we can begin to integrate our project team. It should be comprised of core team members, who will have responsibility for project tasks and will make commitments for their portion of the work. Try to keep this core team as small as possible to facilitate communication. There will be other team members that will be involved for specific tasks or phases in the project.

A good point to remember is that any project is a tradeoff between scope, schedule and resources. If you modify any of them, the other two will be affected. For example, if you decide that your project will be done in half the time previously estimated, it's possible that you will have to reduce the scope or increase the resources.

We have gone a long way by defining what are we expecting from the project, but now it's necessary to make all the decisions pertaining to the planning and tracking of the project. We can talk about four categories of decisions:

• Planning Decisions, about schedule preparation

• Tracking Decisions, define status reports and status meetings

• Practices Decisions, centered on processes of improvement

• Relationship Decisions, relative to ownership by the project team members

A number of important decisions are taken at this stage of the project, such as how the project plan will be developed, if there is feedback from previous similar projects, what tools we will use to support the project, what training we will need on those tools, and who will use them and how frequently. It's also advisable to take into account the specific roles and responsibilities of each team member, as well as the expectations of management. This is the time to define how we will assess the quality of each deliverable and who will approve them.

To be Continued

Lean Six Sigma Training   Thinking Out of the Box   
Balanced Scorecards  Strategic Tactical Planning  
Supply Chain Inventory Management  Total Quality Management Principles
Lean Manufacturing Implementation  Lean Manufacturing Principles