Article
The Principles of Project Management
Picking the Best Projects
Choosing the best projects to work on involves a three-step process:
- Identify the opportunities.
- Compare the opportunities.
- Rank them and decide which to undertake.
Identifying the Opportunities
There are many approaches to identifying opportunities, some of which are more sophisticated than others, so let's start by considering some of the basic tools that you'll probably already have come across.
The most obvious option is a brainstorm. Get people in the organization together, and ask them to think of anything that annoys them, anything that could be done better, or things that aren't being done yet that could be started.
The Stop, Start, Continue Approach
One model that you can use to get people to focus called Stop, Start, Continue. Here, you essentially ask the people in the room to name one task they want the organization to stop doing, one task that it should start doing, and one task that it should continue to do.
If it's obvious that a particular business process or set of processes is causing a lot of pain, manual work, or rework in the organization, it might be worth charting that process. You can do this using any tool -- from the good old marker and whiteboard, through to bespoke process-flow mapping tools or UML diagrams. (UML stands for Unified Modeling Language, and constitutes a set of standard formats for creating flow diagrams of processes, data, etc. UML tends to be popular with usability professionals and software engineers. As always, think carefully about the tools you choose—they need to be understandable and accessible to everyone involved.)
Once you have drawn out the business process, look at each step and ask, "Why do we do this?" If there isn't a good reason to take the step, remove it! If the step is necessary but could be done more intelligently, ask how. If the question of what needs to change isn't answered easily, a project to fully investigate the options and create a solution could spring from your analysis.
Example 2.2. Innovate or Improve
One example of the need for innovation is made clear by the anecdote about an early 20th-century buggy whip manufacturer. The organization was focused on making whips (used on horses that drew buggies and carts) faster, cheaper, and better ... at a time when horse-drawn carts were rapidly being replaced by motor cars. Making the buggy whip cheaper was not going to increase sales, since price was not the problem.
Remember, though, that sometimes the opportunities that are the biggest -- the projects that will make a huge difference to the business -- might be those that don't represent incremental improvements. In many cases, the real way to make a difference may be to realize that there's a completely new direction to take, product to focus on, or way to operate.
Comparing the Opportunities
Once you have a list of opportunities that could be addressed, you then need to work out which is the most important. You might want to start by identifying what benefit would be generated if the process was fixed, the gap was filled, or the new service was created. Would it reduce the amount of work for someone? Make the company more money? Bring in new customers? Reduce risk in some way?
Typically, the reasons why a company decides to approach an opportunity are one -- or a combination -- of the following benefits:
- to increase income (higher sales, new market, new service)
- to decrease costs (make it cheaper, faster, lower inventory)
- to improve productivity (same work done with less time/cost/people)
- to reduce risk (increase tax compliance, improve audit score)
Once you've identified what the benefit of each project is, you need to work out how big that benefit will be. Ideally, you'll want to be able to measure the benefit in numbers somehow -- whether it's that someone can get 50% more invoices posted, that sales increase by $50,000, that widgets now cost only ten cents, or that your accountants smile for the first time in living memory.
What's the Problem?
At this stage, you're still comparing the opportunities, not the projects! Think of problems and gaps at this stage -- we'll be looking at the solutions (projects) soon enough.
Later on in this chapter, one of the discovery tools we'll look at is value creation -- an approach to working out the value that will be delivered by a project.
Ranking and Choosing Opportunities to Pursue
Now that you have an idea of the available opportunities, and how much of a benefit could be gained from addressing them, you need to work out which one to tackle. You may have uncovered an opportunity that's so big that you feel it's imperative to go ahead and deal with it immediately. More likely, however, is the eventuality that you'll have a number of options, and will need to decide which is the most important.
First, rank the opportunities in order of their potential benefits. Second, work out what a project might entail in very, very rough detail -- literally just a sentence or two describing how you'd go about solving the problem. If you have no clue, the project may well focus on researching and finding a solution that can, ultimately, be implemented!
For instance, if we think back to our earlier case study, the problems had already been ranked in the order that was most important to the customer service organization. Their focus was cost saving and productivity. It was when the marketing folks (who are more focused on increasing sales) got involved that the equation changed, as they were interested in the increased income.
In this situation, we might rank the opportunities available through a project in terms of the number of areas each would affect. To do so, we could use a matrix like the one in Table 2.1, "Ranking and Roughing Out Opportunities and Benefits".
Ideally, the next step would be to quantify the benefit by working out the numbers. In the case of a clear cost saving, assigning a figure is easy. If you predict that reducing paperwork will mean a monthly saving of the funds currently spent on paper, printers, photocopiers, and so on, you can simply total those numbers. When you start to predict increased sales and productivity improvements, however, the calculations become fuzzier. Don't get hung up on representing everything in cash terms; instead, express the benefit as clearly as possible, so you can get it in front of the right people to have a decision made about the project.
Next, try to rank the projects in terms of which are easier or cheaper to complete. Depending on your situation, the questions of ease and affordability may be of greater or lesser importance. If people within your organization could be assigned to a given project, you're probably more concerned with how quickly they could make a difference. On the other hand, if you'd have to pay a third party to come in and deal with the project, the project's cost may be a bigger issue.
Having worked out where the greatest benefit can be gained for the lowest cost, you can, in collaboration with the relevant stakeholders, pick a project or two to proceed with.
It's Only a Rule of Thumb
Don't forget that at this point, all you have are initial estimates. You haven't spent a great deal of time making sure that the potential benefits and projected costs are really accurate.
This is a "rule of thumb" type tool -- in the project Initiation phase, you should make sure that both the cost and benefit sides of the equation are investigated and validated. If you find that an element of the project is considerably different than you'd predicted, you might even come back to the discovery phase and pick a different project to work on.
Is the Best Project for the Organization the Best for You?
This process is focused on finding the best projects for the organization. As an external contractor or service provider, you also need to care about the benefits your business will gain from the projects you work on.
You might also want to conduct a similar comparison of the projects you have the option of undertaking -- across all your clients -- and picking the ones most likely to benefit your own organization. The process will be the same, but some of the considerations might be different. For example, you might choose to undertake a project that will make less profit, but has strong potential to lead to more work in future. You should invest as much energy in choosing the right projects for yourself as you do in helping your clients select the best projects for their own needs.