Project Management Never Takes a Holiday

As we get into the holidays, this is the perfect time to take stock of your current projects and make your resolutions for next year. Things get a little bit quieter, and that creates a fantastic atmosphere for catching up on all of those things that you should be doing all the time... but just don't quite get to. "Project management" covers a wide swath of activities- but they all come back to one constant theme: control. Without clear knowledge of the progress along each of the lanes of your project, you will quickly lose control. Even the most experienced project and program managers can lose control.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take long for a project to spin out of control without proper measures in place. First, you have to look at your project scope. Is it a many-tentacled monster with smaller sub-projects sprouting out of everywhere? Is it growing rapidly (and by rapidly, I mean by 25% or more over 6 months)? Is it complex? Does it have built-in reporting requirements? if the answer to any of these questions are yes, you need project control in the form of tracking mechanisms and documentation.

Your first response is likely that you know what is going on and you certainly don't need to bury yourself in paperwork that gets completed and then stashed in a drawer, never to be used. I like to call that stuff "shelfware." That's why you have to design your methods of control to fit into what you're doing- specifically to your project and to the way you work, the way your team shares information- both internally and with your stakeholders. There are lots of great ideas, and you can force yourself to get the templates built and the information flowing by scheduling a meeting with your major stakeholders on a regular basis, with a structured format. That structured format will get them used to what you need them to know. Look back over the last 90 days and see where your "fire drills" were. If they were cleared up with a bit of explanation and additional communication- learn from those experiences and put that information out on a regular basis, in a format that the people who need it can relate.

Now that you've done that, it's time to tackle the big beast. Here's how you do it:

• Break your project into "lanes"
• Assign each of those lanes personnel who have those day-to-day responsibilities
• Put in writing (to share with your team and stakeholders) the SCOPE of each of those lanes
• Break up all of your tasks into those major lanes
• Write task charters to lay out what's in scope for that part of the project
• Create a project milestones chart (I like to use a plain-old Gannt chart because it doubles as a calendar of when things are due and where your dependencies are)
• Post your chart where people can see it and follow along

Make sure that if you were to be kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, that the people you work with would know exactly what was going on across your entire project- what people were doing, what those activities are in support of, and WHY.

If nothing else, it will make your life a little easier as the project manager, and the regular investment of time in "housekeeping" sorts of activities like this will afford you control over your project, real oversight, and maybe even some extra time to celebrate holidays... you know, while you're not working.