Project Management Skills for Everyday Business
by Alan Patching
Any Futureproof Corporation realises the importance of innovation to its continued success. It also realises that a 'management by projects' (or enterprise project management) approach not only assists the release of innovation from the organisation by making people feel significant, but also identifies the imperative of improved business skills to deliver the products of innovation to the market place.
Management by projects is a different concept from project management. Management by projects is a management philosophy that proposes the most effective way for an organisation to remain competitive is to deliver its corporate strategic objectives and conduct its business on a 'projects' basis with every member of the organisation having two distinct roles. The first is the traditional hierarchical role. The second role is the project role in which the dictates of management in the hierarchical structure are delivered within the project team environment. The roles are separate and a more senior person in the hierarchical situation might often sit in a junior position in a project team. Moreover, a person well below the senior person in the hierarchical structure might well manage that project team.
In other words, a senior manager might prescribe a required project outcome. He or she must then consider themself subordinate to the appointed project manager to the extent that project manager requires their input to the delivery of results and not excuses in relation to the prescribed outcome.
While this approach has long been utilised by organisations from industries which are traditional users of project management, such as construction, it often causes consternation when described to corporations with little projects experience.
The term Project Management refers to the set of skills available to project teams to assist them to always deliver results and never excuses in their project endeavours.
Some of the skills used by project managers can be of great use in the everyday management of businesses from a wide range of industries. Some such skills include flow-charting, work breakdown structures, and scheduling.
Following is a brief synopsis of these techniques.
Flow-Charting
This is a technique used by various professionals from a range of industries to assist them to understand both the totality of a particular task, and the management logic and processes that must be applied to bring the task to completion. The most effective flow charts are liberal in the ratio of 'question' or 'decision' boxes to 'process step' boxes.
It is a common error of 'business as usual' managers (as opposed to project managers) to prepare flow charts at a hierarchical detail level that prevents sufficient insight into processes to give the level of understanding that is a necessary pre-requisite of improvement. As with most management skills, practice does not necessarily make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.
The aim of our flow-charting should be to have perfect practice prior to application in the live business environment, and following development of an understanding of what is involved in the process.
Tips for business flow-charting:
- Try to think in a far greater level of detail about the process than you usually do
- Imagine you are explaining the process to a person who knows nothing about it
- Remember that processes often involve far more decisions than we are often conscious of
- Reflect these decisions and/or questions in your flow chart
- Business flow-charts can usually be restricted to decision and process step boxes only
- The purpose of the chart is to facilitate understanding of process. Think simple.
- You can use software for presentation, but hand drawn is fine for the majority of purposes
- A picture is worth a thousand words. A flow chart procedure manual will get used far more than one based on words.
- Always draw arrow heads to show the direction of flow
Components of a simple business flow-chart
The process step box
The decision or question box
And, if you want to get really fancy, you can refer to one pre-defined flow chart within another using double edged process step boxes
Work Break-down Structures ( "WBS" )
These are used to dissect and break down our perception of a completed project into its component tasks or activities prior to the project task being commenced. The purpose is to:
- Get an understanding of the scope of work involved
- Achieve a list of component parts that can be utilised as the basis of a meaningful cost assessment and scheduling exercise in relation to the project
- Achieve an understanding of the skills required to complete the project
- Acquire early insight into means of improving the project prior to it proceeding too far to allow change
There are a number of recognised techniques for completing a WBS. The most popular include:
- Herring bone diagrams
- Tree diagrams
- Mind mapping
Herring Bone Diagrams
These find their origins in the quality assurance world. A herring bone diagram looks like this:
The main horizontal line represents the project. The diagonal herring bones represent sub project or first level breakdown elements. The other lines represent greater levels of detail or breakdown.
The list for scheduling and costing purposes is made up of the lowest level of detail from each segment of the diagram. In some cases this might be one of the 'bones' off the main horizontal. In others it could be a number of items resulting from a breakdown over several extra stages. Practitioners must be aware not to include both the lowest level of detail in a sub-project breakdown with another higher level of breakdown from the same sub-project or sub-element. If this occurs, a duplication will occur in the costing and scheduling exercises.
Tree Diagrams
These serve the same purpose as the herring bone diagram and software for tree diagrams is often found in scheduling software packages. A tree diagram looks like this:
The single upper level box represents the project as a whole. The next level represents the sub-project or sub-elements of the project, and so on. It is common for the lower levels of detail to be represented simply by written descriptions under a box in lines of activity detail dissection. The same 'rules' for finalising the task list as apply for the herring bone diagram approach apply here.
Mind Mapping
This is another approach to achieve the same end as the methods described above. It differs philosophically as well as physically in that it utilises a 'free form' approach to representing the detail. The idea is this free form approach is conducive of a less structured and perhaps more creative approach to the dissection, thereby possibly leading to a more innovative approach to the scheduling that follows.
The concept is to break from the usual in an attempt to find improved methodologies, with consequent savings in time and cost on the project.
A mind map looks something like this:
Once again the basic approach of breakdown from project to sub project to sub elements to tasks or activities is evident in this diagram.
From experience, my advice is to use mind mapping to do the initial breakdown and then organise the resulting activity list using a tree diagram layout.
Brainstorming is a less structured approach to WBS wherein all the activities of a project are identified in the usual brainstorming environment and listed on a white board or flip chart. However, experience shows that attempting to schedule direct from a 'brainstormed' list of activities can be a difficult task. I suggest that if brainstorming is used, some method of eradicating duplicated tasks etc is used. A tree diagram to summarise and categorise the 'brainstormed' results can be effective.
Scheduling
These days, in the general business environment, this is almost universally an MS Project job. However, the GIGO principle applies. If you put garbage in, you get garbage out. I have a view that nobody should be let loose with scheduling software until they demonstrate an understanding of the basics in a manual approach.
These basics involve little more than manually preparing a chart with dates along the top axis and a list of tasks to be completed down the left hand side, and then drawing in a solid think line or 'bar' to represent the period of time over which a particular task will be completed. This exercise is repeated until all tasks in the list have been addressed
Putting it all together
Following is a simple exercise to both test your imagination and provide some experience in the project management skills described herein.
Imagine you work for an event organising company and have been short-listed as the potential event organiser for a major conference involving several hundred delegates at an off-shore resort. The client is a Fortune 500 company with definite plans for expansion into Australia. The events manager for the client is a former event organiser herself. This person is known to be a hard task master with a demanding attention to detail. In order to ensure that she is employing an experienced practitioner who knows what s/he is about, she requires that the events organisers on the short list complete the following exercise to assist her to make her final selection:
- Prepare a flow chart for the process you think should be followed in the selection of speakers for the event.
- Prepare a WBS for the organisation of the entire event, presuming that there are three short-listed resorts and a decision needs to be made urgently on the one to be used.
- Prepare a manual bar chart schedule to show the general time frame and sequencing of activities that you could undertake to give the shortest possible lead time for the event. You should include the activities from your WBS in the schedule you prepare.
Good Luck, both in trying the exercise and in applying these simple project management skills in your everyday business.
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