The Money Files

In this video I talk about what to look out for when you are hiring someone. It can be expensive to bring people on to the team, so it's definitely worth getting it right first time! Here are some tips for making sure that your recruitment efforts don't go to waste.

Experienced project managers will agree that complex projects are a headache for lots of reasons. Complexity adds all kinds of challenges and cost. But if you can reduce that complexity then you can take some of the stress out of your project.

“If you can understand it, you can move on to reduction.”

Harvey Maylor

Here are 3 ways to reduce complexity, once you know what is making your projects complex.

1. Resolve It

Just fix it. Make it go away. Use a different technology that is tried and tested. Add more time to the schedule. Throw money at the problem. Whatever it takes.

Unfortunately, many project complexities can’t be resolved like this, but it is definitely worth a try in the first instance.

2. Reduce It

Make the complexity less severe, with less of an impact on your project. This really does rely on you fully understanding what’s behind the complexity so that you can unpick it and come up with some strategies to chip away at it.

Harvey Maylor gave a presentation at a PMI Global Congress where he shared the results of some work he had done in this area. He talked about running 43 workshops with 1100 managers and in those sessions they were asked what percentage of the identified complexities in their projects they would be able to resolve or reduce.

I was surprised that they reported that they could reduce 82% of project complexities. Even if they were wrong by a factor of 2 that’s still 40% of complex issues that could be managed down.

What’s left when you reduce complexity is residual complexity (like residual risk). That might need a different approach or strategy to address, but it’s likely to be less of a headache to put in place than having to deal with the complexity in its entirety.

Having said that, the third complexity reduction technique isn’t really a reduction technique at all…

3. Live With It

You’ve identified it. You can choose to manage it and run with it, working out a practical response to dealing with rather than passively doing nothing.

One strategy that Maylor talked about is actively choosing the right person to sponsor and lead the project when complexity is involved. Different types of complexity issues require different skills at the top.

For example, a project that is complex for socio-political reasons needs a charismatic leader who can work with stakeholder groups to share the vision and sell the benefits. A project that is structurally complex needs a sponsor with great technical skills, someone who can juggle multiple parts and bring them back together as a whole. A project that struggles with emergent complexity requires a strategic thinker, someone who can see the bigger picture and make connections.

Getting the right team in place and framing their involvement in the project in the right way can help mitigate the impact of complexities if you can’t manage them out in any other way.

In this video I talk about the costs of hiring a new employee. There are a lot of elements involved in hiring and they are all an investment!

Steve Jenner gave a presentation at the PMI Power Talks recently – a set of TED-style short presentations hosted in the centre of London by the PMI UK Chapter. He spoke about portfolio management and benefits.

Benefits, he explained, are not just one dimension of project portfolio management. They are the rationale for the investment of shareholders’ funds.

Often, he said, benefits are used as the way to justify the project. He pointed out that isn’t correct: benefits are the rationale for the project. We “go looking for benefits to justify what we want to do anyway,” he said.

Then people are surprised that they didn’t realise the predicted benefits. How could the project have done that? The benefits were made up anyway.

“Strategic alignment means nothing,” he went on to say. You can align anything with anything. Anything can be aligned up front. It’s what happens later that matters. Strategic contribution, he said, is where it’s at.

When you can’t justify a project by any other means, people call them “strategic projects”.

So how do you get round the problem of fictional benefits?

Don’t treat all projects the same way

Steve explained that it’s foolish to treat all projects the same way. Tailor the investment criteria: don’t try to rank and assess projects that relate to keeping the business functioning in the same way that you would innovation projects.

If you are investing to save money or increase revenue then it makes sense to do a cost benefit analysis.

If you’re doing it to make a strategic contribution, then benefits aren’t always clear in cost terms.

For projects that are mandatory, there is only one question that matters: Do we really have to do it? If it’s a $200m mandatory project with justifiable benefits of $300m and the project cost goes up, then we won’t worry if it now costs $250m. But if we are doing the project to be cost effective, and it isn’t really mandatory, then the cost increase matters. A lot.

Avoiding Fictional Benefits

Here are some tips that Steve gave for making sure your projects are adequately justified.

1. Be clear about the benefits you are buying

Financial benefits can be cash releasing: you can use the money elsewhere for other things, or non-cash releasing: they save money but you can’t actually access the money.

An example of that latter category would be things like process improvements that might shave a minute off a process. You aren’t going to make a staff saving on that. Saving staff time is only a benefit if you do something with it, so Steve argued that these aren’t real benefits at all.

2. Link gate reviews to funding

If your project gate reviews – the steps you go through at the end of each project stage to validate that it’s OK to move to the next point in the project – are not linked to funding or project performance then they don’t serve a purpose.

All they’ll do is just slow projects down and add bureaucracy. Unless they are meetings and project reviews with teeth i.e. that they can stop your project, what’s the point? Your portfolio, Steve said, should be a funnel not a tunnel. In other words, you need to be stopping projects, or delaying funding, and taking those hard decisions because that’s your job and how you protect the funding.

3. Expect improvement

This was an interesting point: expect things to get better and they will. Create a culture where project improvement is expected. Where project control is expected. Where generally you just expect things to be better week on week, year on year. And don’t let lack of improvement go unnoticed.

I’m looking forward to the next PMI Power Talks: I think the quality of speakers was exceptional and it was a really well-organised event. This session by Steve was very thought-provoking.

Ah, configuration management! I confess that this wasn’t the most exciting of topics to study when I was preparing for my APMP exam recently but it is important if you want to keep your project organised. Here’s a refresher on how to do it.

First, Plan

Configuration management begins at the beginning of the project when you’re putting together you project management plan. Your configuration management plan is part of the project management plan (hopefully a relatively small and easy part, but not one that should be overlooked).

The config management process and approach is documented so that everyone knows what is happening and what is expected.

You’ll get your config approach approved by whoever needs to approve it – probably your Project Management Office. Show it to your project sponsor and they might not know what you are talking about; it’s one of the more ‘technical’ and jargon-laden parts of the job.

Next, Identify Config Items

Each item that needs configuration management is given a unique identifier so it can be tracked. Use the product breakdown structure if you have one because that’s already numbered and it saves you a job. Config items relate to project requirements. They can include:

• Project documents
• Products – physical and virtual
• Anything that is going to be created or changed
• Anything that requires limited access by only a few people for security or safety reasons.

You can prepare your traceability matrix at this point too.

The project manager is ultimately responsible for configuration management on the project but maintaining the traceability matrix and version control for the items can be done by someone else: your project support person or Project Management Office team maybe.

Control Your Records

Configuration records need to be tightly controlled to ensure there is a full audit trail between the original requirement and the final version.

This is done through version control. That’s not just version numbering on documents and making sure that others are locked out while you are editing them, but also physical security of the project’s assets.

This part of the process links closely to your change control process.

Status Accounting

Status accounting is a term that doesn’t mean much outside of the world of config management – at least to me.

All it means is that you can see the status of any item whenever you want. That’s why your traceability matrix is important.

You should be able to see that an item is Open, Closed, In Progress, Checked Out (and to whom) or any other status that you’ve decided to give it.

Every time the item is changed or being worked on, the matrix should be updated so that it’s clear what is happening to the item. Then the latest version is logged too, so that you can always refer to the current version.

Finally, Audit

Configuration items are audited at their final point in the process to ensure that what was delivered meetings the original requirements, regardless of the iterations along the way.

Audits are done by an independent party outside of the immediate project team. This could be project assurance or an external body like the health and safety executive of the local council.

Generally this happens at the end of the project when you are closing it down and handing the deliverables over to the customer. Before it happens it’s wise to do your own checks so that you can be confident what the auditors will find!

That’s a quick tour through the project configuration management process. It helps you stay on top of a multitude of deliverables and ensures people don’t change things that they shouldn’t have access to, or without the knowledge of others.

It’s a good habit to get into but hopefully once you have written one config management plan you can use that as a template for future projects and you won’t have to write any more from scratch!