How to Think Big While Managing Small Projects (Part 2)
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
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By Kevin Korterud
My last posthttp://www.projectmanagement.com/blog/Voices-on-Project-Management/20344/ offered two tips for project managers who want to develop a big-project mindset while executing small projects: leverage support resources and implement quality assurance practices. But why stop there? Here are two more.
1. Understand Change Management
It’s easy to think small projects don’t require many business change management activities. But even a project that has a modest projected budget could face unforeseen change management activities.
For example, I worked on a project several years back that was straightforward to implement but required specialized support for remote locations. The original project budget estimate had not considered this.
Even for projects of modest size, project managers should examine the need for business change management activities such as business process transitions, different types and levels of training materials, and measuring the timely adoption of the functionality the project creates.
2. Validate the Project’s Complexity and Forecasting
Project managers running small projects are often handed a budget and schedule that allow for neither timely nor successful implementation. This usually comes about from poor estimation processes that don’t take into consideration the necessary complexity analysis typically found on big projects.
This in turn can create budget and schedule errors of a much larger percentage than the small project can absorb. In addition, small project schedules can be affected by adjustments of large projects if they share a project or technical dependency, which creates unanticipated impacts to schedule and budget.
Project managers can save themselves a lot of future pain by initially confirming the complexity assumptions for the project before proceeding. In addition, project managers running small projects still need to undertake the same level of forecasting rigor found on large projects: resource availability, work planning, milestone progress, cross-project and technical dependencies, business outage windows and other considerations that can more greatly impact a small project.
When project managers “think big” on small projects, it allows them to be successful no matter the size of the project. Do you have any advice for project managers running small projects on how to think big?
Posted
by
Kevin Korterud
on: May 06, 2016 05:26 AM |
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Comments (4)
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RMA GOYAL
PM Consultant| Self
Fl, United States
Hi Kevin,
Great post! What do you suggest to do for point 2. Validate the Project’s Complexity and Forecasting for smaller projects with very little budget for core management tasks, smaller budget of overall delivery and unorganised project implementation team structure?
This is mostly noticed in small orgs with missing PMO or technical leads/managers acting as managers.
Any thoughts that can be helpful?
Kevin Korterud
Associate Director | Accenture
New Albany, Oh, United States
Hi Rma...glad you liked this post!
What we have done in our firm is to make up a checklist for both core solution complexity as well as necessary supporting resources (e.g. PMO).
The core solution complexity has items such as business change management, technical architecture, deployment and other key considerations that go beyond the effort and funding required to create a solution on a project.
This checklist can be initially built by you and your team members...and could be further built out by any subject matter experts from consulting firms...
Hope this helps!
Very useful knowledge. I think the challenge for point 1 is how to convince the client (and the company) that, yes, even small projects have change. Probably more difficult to the client as majority of small project will be lump sum.
What is actually categorized as "small" project? Is it a small value? Or, is it a low risk? I normally do not consider small value but high risk as "small" project. That being said, I think that the most important aspect to point 2 is to validate the risks. Low value projects are often underestimated to be a low risk project.
I had one small project in the past, low value and low risk, but, even then, during proposal stage the process of approval was not established, the scope and acceptance criteria was not clearly defined and it led to project delay. The point is never underestimate any project.
Kevin Korterud
Associate Director | Accenture
New Albany, Oh, United States
Greetings Ben...a great perspective on your 2 points.
Most companies do leave out change effort...till someone does an analysis on how fast new solutions are adopted. When they see people using spreadsheets in place of a new system that usually is a compelling event to put the right amount of change effort in projects.
Your second question is related a bit to the first question. As projects became more complex we built a complexity matrix based on different factors. This matrix was very helpful to show if a project was really small when it was truly inherently complex.
A few yeas back I had a small project request around the implementation of changing system signon processes. Although technically easy it was actually a medium sized project as the training for this effort had to be in multiple languages as well as the support....
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