What's amount of PM efforts in project?

Hi Thomas, thanks a lot for sharing your experience! What about approximate size for the projects? I usually see projects which are between 200 and 2000 hrs of work for the project team. And I put 30+% of efforts for little projects and 20-30% for bigger ones. Otherwise we'll just don't have enough time for weekly communications with customer and proper management of project.
Can it be that you're talking about projects with budgets more than 100k USD/EUR?

True, Alexey, there is a difference between large and small projects.

I had projects with small teams of 3-4, up to 7, when most of the PM tasks are done by this team as part of their SME work. Those PM tasks tend to be more outward focused (reports, customer meetings) and not so much formal, sometimes plans are rudimentary, as everybody on small teams already knows what is going on by talking to each other every day.
For these projects, I have seen less than 15%.

If you put 30% efforts in project management tasks, I would assume this might include some contingency (which should be separate). For my experience it is way to high, it could mean for a team of 3-4 you have one exclusively acting as a PM.

Thomas

Project size doesn't scale well for PM hours. In some situations, scale improves economy. If I have 5 people working on a project, all 5 people are crucial at most times. If I have 1000 people, I can tailor the message to the audience and focals can cascade the information to others.

Often the level of PM involved involves the governance requirements, how much technical integration is considered PM and not the complexity so much as how much is new and novel.

Governance matters a lot. If it was a government project, you might have a lot of administrative tasks on top of what you would any other project. Also, if I have to provide status 5 days a week, much of my time will be spent there.

Technical integration is often lumped in with PM work. Is it a "technical PM" role like a project engineer? If you must be a systems engineer on top of the PM, that is a lot more work.

If you have a very complex project with very stable technology and processes, it will not require nearly as much effort as when you are implementing new technology, new business processes, or a new organization structure. When you combine any of those new disruptions, the difficulty level rises quickly.

Hmm.. Let's say, 8 full-time employees, 8hrs per day, 22 days per month. And approximately 3-6+ months for average project duration. So it means from 4224 hours for team to 8448+ hours of work. I would say this is 100k+ EUR project. For such projects I can consider 20% of team efforts for PM and even less in some cases, yes.

But what if we talk about smaller projects, like 400 hours for implementation team in total, and duration is 4 months for example? 15% for PM will be 60 hours. 15 hours per month, less than 4 hours a week, how to manage project with this?

Alexey

if I saw lots of those small projects with as you say 400 hours or 50 days each, I also saw that they do not have fulltime staff and several of them serve the same customer. In this case, we tried to bundle them and either established an umbrella project, a program or even a portfolio ( for example 20-30 projects to continuously adapting a HR system to legal and other changes).

In this case it can be an option to establish an agile team and let them work on features in a backlog. The required PM efforts are largely hidden by the agile framework.

Thomas

I do not agree that it depends on the project complexity. I still sustain that it depends on the project management style that the organization is using. So, I still sustain that 15%-20% of the total project time is the rule that works. The point is to achieve this percentage you need a way of working in the project team to support that. When I was in your situation and I can not convince the customer no matter the numbers I present then I put on the table the conditions needed in the project team, mainly people on customer side, to achieve those percentages. As you know, you can plan all your activities and times related to project management in advance and you know what to need for that. For example, having 30 minutes meeting two times a week to remove project impediments.

Thanks a lot for input Sergio!

Could you maybe give an example of total efforts\duration\team size to get a better understanding of average project, please?

As I mentioned in my example, for the project with 400 hours for implementation during 4 months with 15% RoT we could have only 60 PM hours in total, less than 4 hours a week. And sometimes we have even smaller projects, unfortunately. Is it a realistic estimation as per your experience?

A couple of additional thoughts based on your problem:

Your estimate should be based on your ability to measure the work performed. Project management activity is carried out across the org chart. The project management role itself is a discrete assignment.

As a PM, my charging is easily separated from the teams performing the technical work. So is time from other business administrative teams IF they charge their time directly to the projects.

The performing teams still do PM work, but if they just charge it to the project, and it's not broken out as PM vs. technical, then it is very difficult to measure, and prone to error if you try to separate it out. Groups might estimate their own level of effort based on number of releases, support of major reviews, and their internal PM, but it all gets charged to the same project account rather than asking people to split their hours by the type of activities performed during the day.

Doing the math, if a project has 100 hours for simplicity, 10% are from my PM team, 90% from the technical teams, and those teams spend 10% of their time doing PM related work then:

10hrs (PM) + 90hrs *10% (technical) = 19% PM activities total. Only the PM hours are measured as PM. The other hours aren't hidden. It is a compromise to avoiding much more PM time to try and slice the pie into many more pieces with arguable business value.