How Much Can You Manage to Manage?

The article How Far Should Project Managers Break Down a Project? touches on a sore subject in Project Management. Often times it is easy to confuse planning a project with actually achieving results. When managing a project it is easy to get bogged down by the minutia of planning the steps of the project and reaching the timeline.

One of the first things I have learned in project management is that you need to have an easily shareable and updatable planning spread sheet or platform to report progress for every member of your team. Without this RACI tool, it is easy to lose track or assume that tasks are being completed when they are not. Unfortunately, when you are deep into planning spreadsheets, it feels like you are actually working towards the common goal. However, the actual work only occurs when those accountable parties start working on the individual goals of the project.

From a digital perspective, if you take this model and apply it to something like building an app and picking a roll out date, it is important to merge my new understanding of the user experience with the guidance of project management. For a successful roll out, I believe it’s important to have an initial time line to create a demo of the product to test for users, then to create a separate timeline after the user experience is measured and the production goals are clear to the programmers. This can make taking on a larger amount of work that much more complicated and time consuming to manage.

The size of the project is also an issue when trying to estimate the resources needed and completion timeline. An interesting point the article also provides is the acceptable variance. In this example, a 5% acceptable variance is used. I do not understand this practice. If the goal is to only spend a certain dollar amount, why is a variance acceptable? Are you truly supposed to use those extra dollars? Or is it actually your job to stay at the budget amount. Balancing these constraints is a vital part of of the PMO’s success.

Overall, If you are managing your success solely on your ability to meet your time frame and stay on budget, a smaller project is probably right for you. A larger project that yields larger results can however be more of a disrupter to the industry and create more actual results. Either way, it is important to set out a plan for each stage of the project, and be able to measure your results and overall success.