Question your way to successful project delivery

Profit and ratio’s tell the tale of business performance while projects punctuate the story of your organisations development and growth.

These are the initiatives that prepare you for the future but are invariably in conflict with the tasks of the present. They compete for yours and your key resources attention along with the core day to day activities of running the business.

Faced then with delivering one of these critical initiatives how do you approach it to ensure you get the result you and the business want rather than taking what you get.

The answer is, of course, project management and by applying it as business technique around the core principles of resources, time and money. The objective is to remain on course, recover when straying and deliver all by iterating through six questions.

Its purpose is to remind you why you are pursuing this exercise, what needs to happen and when. It will ensure you know who is responsible for the delivery of each product/service and that they are acceptable. Finally it will make you think about any threats to success and how they can be mitigated.

Why are you devoting time and energy this initiative? The project mandate. What benefit will the business see realised, (P&L for a new product, cost savings achieved by outsourcing, reduction in the volume of customer service issues, etc)

What needs to be done to deliver? The project brief and approach. For example, install a new voice and data network, IP telephony, create a customer service department, execute a Internet and email marketing plan.

When does this need to happen by? The timeline and products leading to a critical path.

Who is responsible? The resources to deliver each product or workpackage, both internal and external.

How is “fitness for purpose” demonstrated? The assurance, how will quality be presented, measured and accepted.

Identify the Risks & Issues. What can go wrong and how will anything identified be mitigated.

The above is dynamic and subject to the duration of the project should be asked at a regular frequency. At least every Project Meeting for projects running over a few months or longer. For short projects that run over days and a few weeks every day.

This approach has been used in anger in a number of industries for both large and small projects. With projects as short as a couple of weeks to those that run over months and years. The key to its success is to use it regularly and to answer honestly whether it’s a small or large team.

This helps identify issues by exception and when a project is in danger of going off course. The two ends of the spectrum being scope creep, Q1 where the initiative is attempting to be too many things to the business to be anything successful. Or Q5 whereby having not paid enough attention to the quality or the things that can trip you up the project goes over budget, fails to meet the launch date or worse has inherent critical flaws.

To download a single page template designed around the approach of this article click here. For more information on using and/or advice in completing the template for your projects email enquiries@graltd.co.uk.