Want more projects to succeed? Then be sure people have put when they will do the work in their personal schedules.
I have been having a running conversation with several project managers about challenging schedules and how to deal with them. What I find interesting in the conversation is that they tend to focus (1) on the inability of sales to hold the line with clients, resulting in overly ambiguous due dates, or (2) the interference of management and clients, resulting in scope creep and delays as the primary reasons for their missing milestones and deadlines. There is no doubt that sales can get a little aggressive and clients can keep thinking of more things to add. But, I have been proposing there is another place for project managers to look that is likely to give them more success.
You might think of project management as having two levels. Level one is the overall plan for the project. This is where all the really cool project management tools come in – mapping out what it will take for a project to succeed (i.e., dependencies, timeline, budget, etc.). Some people refer to this level as the “hard skills” of PM. Although this is where the overall project gets planned, this is not where the project gets done. Tweaking things here changes the plan, but not the actual execution.
Level two is the translation of the overall project plan into the personal work schedules and communications of those involved in the project. Project success depends on people doing the work as planned. It depends on how they interact and relate to each other, and how they relate to and interact with the project itself. If a project is to get done successfully, the people assigned to it must have the time in their schedule to actually do the work. If they don’t, project managers won’t get results, they’ll get excuses, justifications, delays, etc.
This sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Yet, people who work on projects (or most anything else for that matter) rarely account for the work they have to do by putting time in their personal schedules for doing it. They use “to do” lists, or “action item” lists, or “task” lists to remind them of what they have to do, but they don’t schedule when they will actually do it. You might find meetings and appointments in their schedules, and maybe some notes of things to get done that day, but you probably won’t find specific times marked out for when the work will be done, e.g., 1-2:30PM on Tuesday, May 12.
Individual schedules are plans for when work will get done. Without them, people are not in a position to know what they can and can’t get done or by when. It’s not enough for a team member to understand her accountability if she has not accounted for the work to be done in her schedule.
How can she know if she has the time in which to do the work? People tend to be overly optimistic about what they can get done and their ability to do it, even when they have considerable evidence to the contrary. This means they will promise more and deliver less.
How does she know if she can accept additional assignments in good faith without jeopardizing already existing projects? She can’t, so she may overpromise, putting other projects at risk, or underpromise, thereby underutilizing herself as a resource.
How can she communicate effectively with others in order to get things done if she doesn’t know what is going to get done or when? She won’t, so she will create emergencies for others when she realizes she is “behind”.
Hard skills are valuable, but a key to more successful projects lies in the effective translation of the project into the personal schedules of team members.
