When’s the right time to engage a Project Manager on a project?

A question in the Linkedin PM Questions & Answers list prompted this posting – the focus of that question had been on identifying the appropriate time to engage a project manager in a pre-sales situation.  The same question faces organizations when they are dealing with internal projects.

The ideal situation is if there are more PMs than project requests – in that Utopian situation, a PM can be assigned as soon as the gleam in a requestor’s eye is formalized into a project request.  Even in a projectized organizations, this is not realistic.  PM skills are in high demand and low supply and it becomes hard to justify consuming this valuable resource during the pre-commitment stages of an internal or external project.

You could draw an analogy to project risk management – some organizations refuse to commit resources to project risk management as they feel that it is not worth investing effort in managing uncertainties when there are more than enough certainties (e.g. project scope) to spend time on.  Project failures and excessive firefighting at these same organizations would lead one to believe that this is a myopic approach.  Wait till a project is approved and launched before PM skills are involved and you could face the same issue of “pay me now, or pay me more later!”.

It does not have to be the same person engaged before and after although this can obviously address continuity and knowledge transfer concerns.  The key is that PM skills get engaged at the point in the work intake process where key decisions get made – these skills can help surface assumptions, develop or validate cost & benefit estimates and identify and assess risks so that governance bodies can make well informed decisions.  It does not even need to be a resource wearing the title “Project Manager” so long as they possess PM skills.

The challenge lies in convincing the leadership team that this commitment of skilled resource up front should be considered a normal cost of doing business.  In the same way as the organization pays premiums to support business continuity and transfer risk, effort spent on project analysis before launch could be considered an insurance policy.  Extending this analogy, it is important to measure how much effort is expended on these activities to ensure they are appropriately balanced against the benefits achieved.

So the answer to the question “When is the right time to engage a PM on a project” is: At or shortly after the point at which the effort expended on “pre-sales” activities matches the benefits of improved project predictability.

Five lessons that Project Managers can learn from golf

Many project managers play golf as a recreational activity, but did you know that there are some project management lessons to be learned from the “gentleman’s game”?

1. There are fourteen different clubs in a bag – all have their purpose.  One-Club Golf competitions aside, most golfers learn the value of picking the right club for each shot.  The same is true for projects – having a cross-functional team of resources is a good way to avoid tunnel-vision, to be versatile and to solve the trickiest issues.

2. Consistency is critical – anyone can hit a good shot once, but getting low scores is about being consistent from tee to green.  Even the most chaotic person can successfully manage a project on occasion, but project managers that follow a consistent procedural “swing routine” will experience a higher percentage of successful projects.

3. Learn to balance risk against reward – pulling out your driver to cut across a hazard on a dogleg might be needed on the PGA tour, but an average golfer may be better served by playing the hole conservatively.  Neither an ultra-conservative nor an uber-aggressive approach to planning and managing projects works – projects possess uncertainty so risk is ever present, but project managers need to learn how to manage risks appropriately to optimize their projects.

4. Never stop learning – even the top ranked natural golfers use swing coaches and will switch coaches to “shake up” their games.  The older we get, the easier it is to believe that there is nothing new to be learned in our profession – improving soft skills is a life-long pursuit, and project management practices and theory are constantly evolving so make sure to allocate time for professional development.

5. Don’t let a bad shot or hole spoil your round.  Projects have good days and bad days and sometimes it seems that issues are insurmountable.  A positive attitude is a key attribute for a project manager – no one expects you to have a smile permanently glued on your face, but it helps neither the project nor your team if you are visibly and chronically weighed down by the burden of issues and risks.

Keeping these simple “swing thoughts” in mind will make you a scratch project manager in time!

What is the “right” number of project risks?

Ask someone that has managed a few projects what the “right” number of risk events is to track on a project, and the valid, though academic answer given may be “as many as are required to effectively address the unknown”.  My (somewhat cynical) addendum to this response is “that the project team and organization are willing to manage effectively”.

Even though there is no absolute answer that is correct to even a small set of similar projects, there is definitely something to be said for defining guidelines as to how many risks are tracked when an organization starts to adopt consistent PM practices.

With too few risks identified, analyzed and responded to, you leave yourself more exposed to uncertainty.  The greater the volume or magnitude of this uncertainty, the greater the likelihood of firefighting consuming a significant percentage of the (limited) resource availability you have for delivering the project’s scope.  With too many risks identified, the challenge becomes one of attention dilution – after all, risks are a potential, not a certainty.  It is hard enough to get risk response owners to focus on responding to a small set of risk events, and if you drown them in too many, they may simply become numb or turned off to the discipline.

The four key elements that a PM must learn to balance are the complexity of a project, the volume & magnitude of assumptions (another word for uncertainties), the discipline & diligence that the project team (including stakeholders & sponsor) will commit to risk management and the commitment that risk response owners will have executing risk response plans.

You could establish a rule-of-thumb tied to a qualitative evaluation of the complexity of a project – for example, a small project shouldn’t have more than 5 risk events identified, while a large or highly complex one could have up to 15.  While this is not an ideal approach, it can help to “effort box” risk management activities until the discipline matures within the organization.

Another approach is to evaluate a project’s overall risk using risk factors – these are generic sources of risk that will affect a project to greater or lesser degrees.  During initiation or even high-level planning, risk factor scores can be determined and the magnitude of these scores could help to guide how many risk events are identified for a project.

Regardless of what approach is taken, consistency is important since it is the only way to get useful feedback which in turn will help to improve the effectiveness of the discipline.