NP- Project Management #5 Get Going

Assembling your team.

So now that you’ve got your specifications signed off, understand the needs and priorities of your stakeholders and have a WBS you can start to develop your team.

Mind you in the non-profit world you may have had the team from the beginning as an outgrowth of a committee that decided on the project. In any case you need to assess the various capacities of your team members and it’s often useful to dig for some hidden talents. Most people have talents you’d never know about unless you pushed them. For instance, someone might play the guitar and you might want a soundtrack for the video you are producing. The individual may not think they have enough talent, but you may want something very simple that is within their capability, but if you don’t break that task down into it’s simple form and communicate it to your members and stakeholders you might not have them step up to the plate purely due to a lack of confidence. This is more prevalent in non-profits and volunteer run projects. In business one is often developing projects using specialized skill sets from individuals whom are focussing on that aspect of their career. You may still find a guitar payer if you ask though.

Dealing with The Time

So more often than not, you don’t have the luxury of time. Either the end date is already fixed., i.e, the event is scheduled or your resources force a time limit.

But setting the schedule is one of the key elements to the whole process. You need to be very good at assessing the ability of your team to get their tasks done within the time frames you’ve set or negotiated with them.

How long does a task take? You can make guesstimates based on your experience in the field. You can make guesstimates based upon the experience of the person with the task. You can search the web for metrics on various standard projects. You can use your time frame and break it down to match the individual units and set that as the time necessary to complete the task and then monitor and adjust. But if you have never done this type of project before nor have your team members, you will be experimenting for sure, so be ready to adjust and adjust as you go.

Scheduling the project is in one sense pretty straightforward. You have to ask yourself.. “What’s the drop dead date?” When you know the date that the project MUST be completed you simply start working backwards from there. You use the Work Breakdown Structure to define the tasks and dependencies and create your list of tasks.

Make sure you assign a deliverable to each task otherwise you won’t necessarily know it’s complete. Construct your timelines around the deliverables…they are concrete elements and give shape to the project. Find out what possible bottlenecks there might be and find the best methods for getting around them. Make sure you have time built in for reviews and communications which will keep all your stakeholders up to date. One of the worst things you can do is to have people out of touch and starting to make assumptions about your progress.

So a question you may have at this point is how do you organize this?

You need a critical path to follow and project management software is designed to enable the construction of critical paths.

You need to compute the beginning of each task and the expected completion dates. The first beginning date and the last completion date is the time line of your project and with luck and or good planning it’s prior to your drop dead date.

Tags: project management software