USING YOUR PLAN AS INSTRUMENTATIONTHE LAZY PROJECT MANAGER S DAY

USING YOUR PLAN AS INSTRUMENTATION/THE LAZY PROJECT MANAGER'S DAY

We're all familiar with instrumentation. In a car, for example, we have a series of gauges, clocks and other display devices that give us quantitative information about what is happening out in the world. We then take actions based on this information.

We can use our plan in exactly the same way to give us information about what is happening on our project. We can then make sensible decisions and take appropriate actions to control the progress of our project toward its goal. Fancier project management books than this one call this process project monitoring and control.

It is in this process that all of the hard work that went into Steps 1 “5, and notably Step 2, begins to pay off. Note too the way the plan we developed during the planning steps has multiple uses:

• The plan we developed with Steps 1 through 5a enabled us to estimate the project;

• Applying Step 5b to this plan enabled us to generate versions of it from which our management and/or customers could pick;

• Now we are going to use the chosen version again as the instrumentation with which we will guide the project.

The myriad uses we make of our plan are yet another reason why it is well worth putting time and effort into producing a good one. And we see yet again the central position of planning in having a successful outcome to our project.

You can use your plan as instrumentation whether it is on paper or stored on a PC-based planning tool. Everything I am going to say here will apply in either case. The advantage of using a PC-based tool is that you will get results quicker and your work will not contain the errors that will almost certainly creep in if you do things manually on paper. I am going to illustrate things here by reference to a PC tool, but I reiterate that everything I say here can also be done manually.

Let us assume that you have your plan and you have entered it into a PC tool such as MS Project. Every morning when the Lazy Project Manager comes into work, she fires up her PC and brings up the plan on the screen. Now, the plan may well have many activities in it. Four to five hundred wouldn't be uncommon for the levels of detail we have said you should produce.

But remember the format of our plan. It contains all the major milestones and then is very detailed to the next milestone. So when we look on our screen, and we look at those jobs clustered around today, we probably won't see more than a few dozen that fit within, say, a week either side of today. Then, when we look to the right on our screen, we will see those other jobs which are part of the big milestones off in the future.

The Lazy Project Manager then has two things she has to do, before she, quite literally, has finished her project management for the day. These two things are (1) check on the current stuff, and (2) look off into the future and try to unearth more detail about those future milestones. We discuss each of these in turn .

Check on current stuff

The few dozen jobs clustered around today give the Lazy Project Manager a to-do list for the day.

First there are the finishers. These are the jobs that the plan says should have finished. Have they? Go and see. Is there a deliverable you can hold in your hand? If so, then they're done. If they're not done, then you update your plan to reflect this fact. This change causes a ripple through the rest of the project. We will discuss this ripple in more detail in a moment.

Next there are the starters. These tasks should have started. Again, have they? Is somebody beavering away on it, doing exactly what the plan says? If so, fine. If not, what are they doing? Does the plan need to be changed? Or do they need to be refocused?

Finally there are the jobs that are in progress. Depending on the leadership style you are adopting in particular situations (see Chapter 6), you may want to go and check on some of these. On the other hand, you may be happy to leave the people to it. Note that this is the Lazy Project Manager at work again.

All of these items may generate additional off-line activities (meetings, memos, e- mails , faxes, phone calls, and so on) that you have to do. These are your project management tasks for the day.

Open up the surprise packages

Each day that passes you find out more information about the project. Almost like a detective gathering clues, you get more and more information about things which lie in the future, and which up to now had been hazy, or guesses, or assumptions, or just plain unknown.

Having checked on the current stuff, you now look through the stuff that lies in the future and try to fill out any additional details that you can. Remember that what you are trying to do is to achieve the man “day level of detail in all of your plan, so that you can say what each person on your project is doing for each day over a particular period of time. Once you have added all the detail you can, then you're finished.

Doing the two things just described may have a number of possible effects on the schedule. These are:

• no change

• a slip which can be recovered

• a slip which can't be recovered

Let's look at these in turn. The first is trivial. It means that you have managed to keep your project on schedule for another day. You can ask no more. Go home “ you've done your project management for today.

In the second case, the changes in the schedule generate a slip. However, by using our plan as instrumentation, we can do things like move people around, work some overtime, drop some feature which was a bit of a frill or similar actions to bring the project back on course. Note that those four parameters of the Apocalypse:

• functionality

• delivery date

• effort (cost)

• quality

show us what our options are. Note too how our model, which we have put such a lot of work into, is serving us well again. Our model tells us what is and what isn't possible. It stops us making foolish assumptions such as the one that says we can always recover from any slip just by working harder “ a well-worn recourse of software practitioners . As Caesar said, "Men usually willingly believe what they wish."

The third possibility is that we have a slip and we can't recover from it, no matter how much we tweak our four parameters. Now, we have a problem. This means that we have run out of contingency. The only thing that can help us now is a lucky break, and we might indeed let things go for a few days, a week, a couple of weeks to see if such a thing happens. Remember that our model is still only a prediction and so, occasionally, the gods smile on us and things take less time and effort than we anticipated. Occasionally! It may be we get such a break which puts things to rights.

However, if at this stage things are not improving “ this technique I'm describing is the way some people, including myself , manage their overdraft! “ you have to come clean with the powers that be.

Will this be pleasant? Almost certainly not. Humble pie rarely is. But you have to. The alternative is unthinkable. You can be caught in a small explosion now or a thermonuclear one further down the line.

Go on. Go break the news to your boss and/or customer. Whichever of these situations occurs, once you have worked your way through the business we have just outlined, your project management, your project monitoring and control, your know-what's-going-on, is finished for the day. You can do no more. You have done everything that needs to be done. You can go home and rest secure in the knowledge that it is all under control. Even if things went wildly awry, you caught it at the earliest possible moment. Now, that's a professional project manager for you!