Project Management in under 8 minutes

okay my name's Chris Croft I run training courses in project management I much prefer the APM process that's the association of project managers to prints so I'm going to take you through the APM process really fast it's a 12 step process that allows you to plan and deliver any project on time to budget and correctly to quality so step one define the project really carefully make sure you know exactly what you're doing before you start agreeing with everybody probably at a kickoff meeting and get the agreement in writing this document is sometimes known as a paired a project initiation document and in that document you will need to define what you're going to deliver that's the quality when you're going to deliver it that's the time and the cost that the project's going to be cost quality and time whatever you do don't agree to a project you can't deliver and don't even say maybe you can deliver it because that will sound like a yes and they will think they can get it when they probably won't and it will end up badly for you and then so define everything at the beginning final thought about step 1 define the key driver which of the three circles is the most important ok then step 2 the planning begins list the tasks make sure you don't miss any tasks because that will really mess up the cost quality and time so think carefully about listing the tasks probably in three different ways have a big brainstorm meeting with your team and get a random list then get that list structured down into a work breakdown structure which is a tree diagram of tasks and then maybe ask an expert if you've missed anything or have a look at history see what happened last time once you've got a list of tasks you can go to step 3 which is to estimate the tasks think about how long they're going to take and what they're going to cost and don't promise the average because if you promise the average there's a 50% chance that you're going to fail ideally a good safety margin would not be just adding 10% you'd add a bit more than that you'd go halfway between the average and the worst-case so if you expect something to take 4 weeks it might take six weeks then put five weeks as your estimate once you've got all the tasks listed and estimated you can go to step four which is to produce a network diagram or critical path diagram I quite often call this a post-it note diagram because the best way to do it is to put all the tasks on post-it notes stick them on a whiteboard or a big piece of paper get them in roughly the right order and then draw arrows connecting them so you know what comes after what this allows you to find the longest path or the critical path but also more importantly it's the heart of all your planning because this is when you decide how you're going to actually do the project so this is a network diagram absolutely essential do not jump straight to a Gantt chart but do a network diagram first step five is to look at your network diagram and decide whether you're happy with how long it's going to take if it's going to take longer you'll need to speed it up which is known as crashing and this usually means either putting the money up on some of the tasks or reducing the quality of some of the tasks although sometimes you can overlap some of the tasks as well and by the way the ones that you need to crash obviously are going to be the ones on the critical path no point in crashing a floating task you have to keep an eye on the floating tasks though because if you shorten the critical path enough some of the floating tasks may then become critical so you've produced the network diagram without thinking about the total and then you've looked at the total and reduced it if you have to you can now move on to step 6 which is to make it into a Gantt chart the Gantt chart is the output that you really want but it's very important to go through the network diagram stage first because otherwise the Gantt chart is very difficult to draw when you draw the Gantt chart you put in the critical path first just coming down in steps you have a time scale across the top so that the longer tasks are just shown as longer bars and then once you've got the critical path all the floating tasks hang off that you can look at what they come after and what they come before to put in the floating tasks if we were doing a training course we would do examples and we would practice this of course but you can probably see from this diagram roughly how it works so you've got the Gantt chart the Gantt chart is brilliant for three reasons firstly it shows everybody what they've got to do in way and each person can see they're part of the project secondly you can look vertically and see when you're going to be busiest you can calculate the labor levels required and you can slide floating tasks if you've got too much going on at once and thirdly you can use the Gantt chart to monitor what's going on by colouring in but I'll come to that in a minute so Gantt chart completely essential you have to have one you can then go on to step seven which is to think about resources in more detail adding up vertically and possibly even adding up all of your projects because if you've got a resource profile for each one you can add up all the resource profiles to check that you are able to do all the projects that you want to do and then finally step eight the last bit of your planning is to look at the risks you probably would look at the critical path on the Gantt chart in particular and think what might go wrong how likely are those things to go wrong and how serious would they be if they do go wrong if something is reasonably likely and reasonably serious then you need to have a plan for what to do about it either to make it less likely or make it less serious so that's the end of the planning that's the end of step eight you need to do all of this before you commit to a project so there is a little loop back to step one and you may find yourself going back to the people who want the project saying I can't do it and this is why very important to be assertive but the good news is planning makes you stronger so if you've got a Gantt chart you can use it as an arguing tool which everyone can understand once the project's been agreed by you and the people who want it you then start the project and step nine is to monitor the project by colouring in the Gantt chart check that you're keeping up with the schedule you probably would have a monthly meeting but possibly even a weekly meeting if necessary based around the Gantt chart to make sure you're keeping up so that's monitoring progress the other thing that you want to monitor which is step 10 is the finance and you need to combine steps nine and ten really because if you're under spent you may think you're okay but of course if you look at progress is probably you haven't done the work by the way if you're overspent you probably are overspent so comparing the progress and the money is very important and those are steps nine and ten step 11 is to reschedule this is where you have to ask for more money and ask for more time step 11 is usually quite unpleasant the main hope you've got a surviving step 11 is to put in some contingency when you do your estimating way back at Step three and then finally when you finish the project step 12 is to do a review and to say what have we learnt usually three questions good bad and better so what was good that we must repeat next time might have just been luck but at least we can make sure we repeat it next time what was bad that we're going to avoid next time and that everybody else needs to know about so they can avoid it too and what could we have done better so there we are that's the twelve step process done very very quickly I hope that's been useful if you need to know more have a look at my website or come on one of my courses thank you you

Channel: Chris Croft

Views: 798,125

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Keywords: project management, project, projects, PM, APM, PRINCE2, project management training, training, Gantt charts, Gantt, critical path, Chris Croft, Croft

Id: qkuUBcmmBpk

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2013