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Early Engagement and Project Planning

August 19, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Plan Development

Early Engagement and Project Planning
By Barney Austen

Project managers often have contention with line management when it comes to the allocation of project team members. The skill of the project manager to overcome this contention will directly effect the overall success of the project planning process and indeed the project as a whole.

If the project manager can get a line manager “on-side” from the off-set through early engagement and active communication, in turn the line manager will ensure that the project manager gets the right information needed to resource plan correctly.

Why is this important in project planning?

Simply put, the project manager is reliant on the line managers resources to make the project a reality. The line manager understands;

  1. The skills that are available within the team and consequentially who is best placed to deliver optimally for the project.
  2. The availability of those resources over the expected course of the project. Team members go on vacation or have other commitments. Are there available replacements?
  3. The operational constraints that the team members experience. Could they be called away at a moments notice to work on an operational issue? How can this be managed?
  4. The standards and techniques that the teams applies to its day to day operations. These may impact the project estimates.

The above four elements are key for project managers to understand and to build into their planning process. Often, an inexperienced project manager will not consider the impact of these elements on the plan and produce a linear plan based on best case scenario.

Lets use resource availability and skill set as an example.

The assumption in the initial planning process may have been that a resource is available 100% of the time for a four week project deliverable. However, early in this planning process, the project manager engaged with the line manager and discovered;

  1. That the expected resource was on a weeks vacation during that four week period.
  2. That there is another team member available to cover that week, but he is less experienced and it is likely to take longer for the work to get done.
  3. That the team resources were committed to completing another project at the time.
  4. That operational issues are at an all time high due to a problem with a key piece of IT infrastructure and this is taking more time than expected for the team. These issues look like continuing for the next number of weeks.

The project manager is now armed with totally different information against which the plan can be built. It gives options to him in the planning process such as;

  1. Factor in the holidays and make an allowance of a couple of days for the duration of the activity to occur.
  2. Request that the line manager take on contract resources at the expense of the project to cover the operational issues. Sometimes this may be possible and is worth considering.
  3. To work with the project manager of the other project the team are engaged in to consider whether anything can be moved around to free up resource time.
  4. Factor in an allowance within the timeline for the resources to work on the expected operational issues.

All of the above can have a significant impact on the planning process. Like anything, if the potential issues are detected early solutions can be found and the likelihood of success is dramatically increased.

Early engagement works for everyone.

Do you engage sufficiently early with key players to make sure your planning is as effective as possible? What works for you?

Barney Austen is the founder of http://beta.myprojecttracker.com/ (still in Beta), an easy to use, cost effective, powerful tool to provide both business owners and project managers the key information needed to run their projects efficiently and effectively. Barney Austen’s passion is to help businesses through the provision of functionally relevant, but intuitive products. You can read more from Barney on his company’s blog, available here.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 and is filed under Project Plan Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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