6.9 Getting Ready for the Detail

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6.9 Getting Ready for the Detail

The past dozen or so pages may have been tedious, but they summarize a process that can take weeks or perhaps months in real life. Although the benefits and risk-prevention value of documentation is stressed in this and most other project management books, the truth is that most of the work just described is verbal. If documented at all, it is most likely captured in meeting minutes and e-mail correspondence. Now, it is time to get the detailed planning on paper. Two issues need to be addressed before proceeding with the detailed project schedule.

Whose plan are you keeping? Although in practice one sees mixed views on this, I believe you should develop and maintain a "master plan" that is separate and distinct from project team schedules. This "master plan" should document the critical path, plus significant tasks or events leading up to the milestones. The temptation most project managers succumb to, however, is to create a plan containing every task every team lead should schedule and track. I have been down that road myself and definitely understand the comfort level one hopes to generate with such thoroughness. If you have done that, then possibly you discovered the downside to that approach. I have never found a way to track everyone's tasks and the critical path within a single, master schedule. This is because while various teams may contribute to events leading up to milestones, the end-to-end schedule for all their project assignments cannot be assumed to map to the critical path. Each team tends to have its own scheduling logic, making it impossible, in my opinion, to have all the details plus critical path in one schedule.

The other downside to this comprehensive, "capture all tasks" approach is your second decision point: determining the level of detail your plan should contain. Again, if your plan includes every task performed on the project, you will spend more time and energy creating and maintaining such a document than you will be using it as a tool to ensure success.

Remember our hypothetical airport project from an earlier chapter? Imagine being project manager on that job and tracking each of the 729 toilets that will be installed, plus the associated plumbing, tile work, privacy stall installation, flush and fill testing, and inspections. Documenting to this level of detail would create thousands of tasks. Although this might seem like a silly example, the fact remains that large IT projects can easily generate this number of tasks, if you cared to track them this way.

Again, my preference is to drill down from the critical path to a level of detail that is actually useful for managing your project. Going back to the airport project, the milestone you would probably designate along your critical path would be getting a certificate of occupancy (CO) for the terminal building. The CO would be issued by the local government granting building permits and performing inspections that assure that all safety and building code requirements have been met. It is only after the CO is issued that airport employees and patrons can enter and use the facility, including the toilets.

Completion of toilet installs would contribute to passing a plumbing inspection that is a prerequisite to reaching that CO milestone and, as such, would be no more or less significant than getting the roof installed or passing the electrical or air conditioning inspections. Therefore, instead of your plan noting every toilet order, rough in, installation, test, and inspection, your airport construction master plan should look something like the plan in Exhibit 8.

Exhibit 8: Path to an Airport Milestone

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