Chapter 1: Starting an Advanced Project Successfully

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OVERVIEW

Surprisingly, once an organization has decided to undertake an advanced project, building the initial momentum can be difficult. The number of people involved in the project will grow quickly and as a result it becomes increasingly difficult to make progress. Often the early stages are characterized by significant time wasting. Since time is one of the most valuable commodities, this is something that should be avoided if at all possible. Fortunately a project manager can take effective action. If handled well, the initiation stage will be short and successful.

The accepted way for an organization to ensure a successful project is to adopt a tried-and- tested project life cycle. The life cycle sets out a range of activities that need to be undertaken. It specifies the order in which tasks need to happen and the content of each task. Life cycles also take into account that advanced projects are actually many smaller projects running in parallel. These smaller projects are bound together by the overall project and as a result they all share the same final goal. For example, at the highest level the project might be the building and fit-out of a corporate headquarters. Within this larger project there are many small projects that collectively deliver the necessary parts of the overall project jigsaw . Together the smaller projects result in the achievement of the larger project's goal - a completed headquarters.

Understanding that there are a number of small projects all operating in parallel helps to unlock one of the key problems that needs to be overcome to ensure the success of an advanced project. Each of the small projects operates to its own life cycle and in response the people on these projects all operate in different ways. Those responsible for near- term deliveries (short project timescales and therefore short life cycle) will be agitated about lack of progress. Those with deliveries that are further away (longer project life cycle) will be more relaxed about lack of progress. As a result conflicts can often occur. There will be those, even in the initiation phase, who ˜just want to get on with it'. They will be very frustrated at slow methodical planning. It is essential to remember this when dealing with the various project teams . Those attending the various initiation phase meetings are likely to be at different places in their project life cycles. They need to be dealt with appropriately.

The other major difficulty with life cycles within advanced projects is the reliance by senior managers on them. Unfortunately senior managers often come to believe that project life cycles alone deal with the complexities of an advanced project. They often believe that the project life cycle will ensure the success of any project. This is not true. It is the skill of the project manager that will ensure project success, not the project life cycle. The main benefit for any given life cycle is its provision of well-thought-out guidance material. This material helps to ensure that the steps needed to ensure success in the process are not forgotten. Your role is the successful interpretation of the project life cycle tasks. Ultimately it is your interpretation of the project life cycle material that will ensure the success of the project.

You need to understand the true purpose of the life cycle tasks to be completed. This means understanding the underlying themes that must be nurtured to gain the success that the organization is desperately seeking. You should not simply follow the life cycle blindly. Completing the tasks that are detailed in the quality manual will not ensure success. Instead you should consider four themes that almost always are the underlying requirements of the initiation phase. These are the themes that you need to work on first. This means ignoring the letter of the life cycle and operating it within the context of the following four themes:

1. Stakeholder management.

2. Build the business case.

3. Start long-lead activities.

4. Define early roles and responsibilities.

Each of these themes has the potential to take up a significant amount of your time and therefore you need to think carefully about how you will manage them. This is especially true when you are in charge of an advanced project, where the scope and scale of work are usually far greater than for a standard project. In practice you will find it difficult to support all of these themes fully. This obviously presents difficulties for you since the themes will run continuously and in parallel throughout the initiation phase. Ideally you could use extra resource to enable you to cope with the additional work load. However, even if extra help is provided you still need to look after these four themes personally . Personal involvement from you is important since it is these themes that will ensure the project is a success! Despite the difficulty it is possible to cope with these themes by careful time management and by using some of the suggestions in the following discussion on each of the themes.