November 26, 2017
What determines success or failure of a project
A project is “ a temporary endeavor undertaken to care a unique product, service, or result.” (BOOK). The successful project happens when a group of people is able to complete all the deliverables and meet all the requirements on time within budget. The deliverables should include all agreed upon features. The outputs of the project should please customers and allow them to use the output effectively. There are some factors can determine the success of a project, such as people, good project plan, open communication, and careful risk management, as well as strong project closure. In this paper, I will briefly identify and discuss these factors. And then only analyze three of them that I think are the most important and deeply analyze them in the remaining pages with use cases.
People
People contributes most as a factor on determining a project’s success. Without the right people at the right place, a project with any good strategies and plan has potential to fail. Due to this reason, the project management, staffs, contractors, and the other stakeholders should make agreements and commitment to the project group. All of the involved people have the same goal and try to maximize the outcome of the project.
Project Managers are the key person in a project because they are responsible to monitor project progress. They need both soft skills and hard skills to work more effectively. When a staff is beckoned by other works, a project manager needs to persuade the staff to focus on the project. Strong communication skills and leadership skills are required for a project manager to build relationship with the subordinates.
It is also important to assign tasks to the right people who are good at the specific tasks. Project manager should make sure people are working well together and efficiently. Regularly meetings with team and sponsor is necessary. Project Manager needs to schedule meeting times and submit weekly status report for sponsor. The project team can take advantage of online communication tools for team communication, such as Google Hangouts, Skype, and Free Bridge.
Good Scope Planning
Interpreted planning contributes a success of planning from scratch. Once a project starts, actions will be taken based on the sequence of tasks on schedule sheet. In order to have a good scope planning, the team needs to identify stakeholders, collect requirements, and define the project’s scope, as well as create a work breakdown structure. A successful scope planning makes further planning on scheduling, budgeting, and resourcing easier because it’s the bias throughout entire project.
The team should have a stakeholders list before taking any other actions. The list should contain all the involving people that will be affected by the project, such as clients, project team, contractors, expect resources, and etc.
A project will fail if project expectations are unclear. Once stakeholders are identified, the team will collect requirement. The goal of collecting requirement is to identify stakeholders’ needs to meet project objectives. The team will acquire a deeper understanding of the project objective, which helps to know the benefits of the project or the problems may raise during executing phase.
Project scope refers to the work or the services the team needs to perform to create the project output (BOOK). It is important to have a clear project scope because it’s a bias of any changes in the project, such as adding other planning, controlling, and excluding tasks for the project. Therefore, a project scope has to be clear and correct. All the team members should stay on the same pages because any changes in the scoop not understood or agreed upon will lead to project fail.
Then the team can create a work breakdown structure (WBS) for the project, which outlines all the deliverables with various functions. It allows the team to breakdown major deliverables into smaller pieces and add new deliverables when necessary. The team can assign important functions into each deliverables, such as resources, cost, and expected duration. This systematic process is helpful because it helps the team to remember all the deliverables and understand the details of the deliverables. Sponsors can also get aware of project progress by looking at WBS.
Careful Risk Managementa
Careful risk management is important for a successful project because usually a project has many possible risks. The project team is responsible to produce a risk plan and a corresponding response plan. The risk plan does not only help project team to get prepared for potential risks, but also solving problems quickly if something really happens. The team will target one specific problem and find out the root causes of the problem, then make actions to solve it.
The project team needs to collect information and list all potential risks. They could collect information by interviewing stakeholders. When they do it, they don’t only have clear understanding of stakeholders’ needs, but also know their concerns. Stakeholder’s concern can be included as risks. The team could also brainstorm ideas. Everyone’s idea is valuable because different people have different perspectives.
Once risks have been identified, the project team will create a response plan. It’s a process to develop actions to reduce risks and enhance opportunities of project success. They may have more than one actions for each risks because stakeholders likes to see more plans for problems solving. More than one actions also increase stakeholders’ confidence of projects. There are some project common risk strategies, including transfer, mitigate, accept, and etc. If something is threatening project, the team can transfer risk, for instance, if no one in the team knows how to develop a database for client, the team can hire expert to do it. The team can use mitigate strategy to lower probability of risk, for instance, in order to keep the key resources available, the team can train more than one people to manage key resources. If one of them quite the job, the team have another person to take over his job. However, some risks can’t be avoid or transferred, the team has to accept it and deal with it.
If problems arise, the team should focus on solving one problem first and then solving another one later. The Japanese have a saying: if you chase too many rabbits, you won’t catch any. Usually people get more things completed by focusing one task at a time. If people try to completed to many task at the same time, they usually end up frustrating themselves. In the Florida Power Light Quality Improvement case, the vice-president of the Northeast division, J.N. Scott decided to go after only one rabite. Back to 1987, the company ask customers to do a survey to help the company better understand customers needs. The results of the survey showed participants had too much wants–to many rabbits. Scott had realized they couldn’t accomplish too much objectives because it wouldn’t be efficient or realistic. Therefore, he set up only one objective, was to improve service availability by reduce 20% of service unavailability(CASE). With their efforts, the company was able to accomplish the objectives.
Once have the target problem to solve, the team could conduct a risk analysis to find root cause. One of a useful tool is cause-and-effect diagram. It also known as the fishbone diagram because the many lines make it look like the skeleton of a dead fish. To construct the fishbone diagram. the project team first lists the risks as the effect in a box as the head of the fish (BOOK). In this example, it is customers interruptions caused by vehicles. Then, the team needs to name the big bones (BOOK). In this example, there are three big bones named man, environmental, and methods. There can be more than three big nones as long as it makes sense to help the team find root cause. Then the team proposes as many as possible reasons on fishbone diagrams, for instance, people who failed to yield or fell asleep tends to cause car accident. Why people fall asleep? It might because of drugs, tired, or alcohol.
Open Communication
Listening to co-workers and creating a productive working environment is imperative to the success of a project. Having a open communication at work is important. If a problem arise in the project, there are other problems will occur that caused by that problem. So proper communication helps to reduce the probabilities of problems. Open communication should be focus on both internal in the team and external with stakeholders. The team can have weekly meetings to discuss project progress and make sure everyone is on abord. The project manager should keep an eye on everyone to ensure they finish their job as scheduled. Any questions on project can be discussed via email or conference call. To help stakeholders knows about what’s going on with project. The project management should update project progress with them weekly. A status report is necessary to send out to sponsor weekly.
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