Schlagwort-Archive: Project management

How much remains for managing a project

The image that we have of project managers is determined by our imagination. A project is a temporary undertaking of different size with a clear start and end as well as the required resources – personnel, budget, and infrastructure. Managers are personalities with the role that includes controlling the activities with wide-ranging authority and responsibility for the results. In the end, a project manager actually is a doer, founder, employer, entrepreneur, or leader. The fact that this task is often limited to the role of a clerk or a coordinator without power, explains the fact that projects often do not achieve their objectives.

The company founder normally starts one business at a time. The wrong expectations towards project leaders result in a lack of empowerment and are reflected in the number of parallel projects to be managed – a single project has 100% attention (40 hours per week); each of four projects 25% (10 hours per week); with eight projects 13% each (5 hours per week). Depending on the modus operandi (e.g. PMBoK, PRINCE, GPM or even agile approaches) the activities may differ. However, in any case, communication with the participants has to take place, the team has to be led on request and daily and weekly reports have to be prepared.

  • Required communication
    This includes the taking care of emails, phone calls and meetings. On average, we have to deal with 21 to 50 daily emails and 11 to 50 phone calls. In addition, meetings with the project teams, managers and external parties are needed, each of which takes between 15 to 60 minutes or even more. With several projects, the project manager sometimes only has one hour per week for this exchange.
  • Appropriate leadership
    Leading includes personal alignment with employees and managers (e.g. feedback, target agreement, personal career), solving disputes and crises, and providing motivation and support. With in a year, this quickly accounts for 20% of working time – i.e. one day per week across various projects. Of these eight hours per week, sometimes only one hour is available for leadership per initiative.
  • Mandatory reports
    Comprehensibility is the essential purpose of the reports. Many addressees assume that up-to-dateness, accuracy, consistency and significance come at the push of a button. However, the project manager ensures through random samples that the data and figures provided by the team members are in a timely and correct manner that fit to each other. Daily controlling is the prerequisite for always up-to-date data that are regularly integrated to overarching reports.
  • Overarching tasks
    The summary of the daily data to weekly, monthly, quarterly milestone and final reports regarding the progress of the project, the employees deployed, the financial consumption as well as the need for action and decision making creates for various stakeholders a current overview. In addition, certain tasks take place weekly, such as the start and end of the week, including lessons learned and plan adjustments. The number of reports can vary from one project to another. With multiple projects, the project manager may merely spend an hour a week to produce conclusive reports in the respective initiative.
  • Remaining time
    The rest is available for other spontaneous tasks – content-related, relational and personal activities. With several projects, the project manager may have only one hour per week for unexpected tasks.

Bottom line: It should be clear that this workload cannot be compensated by overtime. Projects are the form for today’s tasks. If one takes the objectives seriously and really wants to achieve the desired results, then those ordering parties should offer under all circumstances the project management the chance to commit oneself to one project or to accept the fact that the project will fail with a two-thirds probability. Otherwise: Project managers with five parallel projects have only eight hours per project and week.

Probably we’re doing something wrong

History is visible until today in those everlasting monuments that everybody knows. This includes the enormous stone buildings, like Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids or the Chinese wall, but also in the discoveries of the world by Zheng He, Christopher Columbus up to the landing on the moon. All these large-scale projects took place without what we call today project management. Our current large-scale projects fail ever more frequently. Probably we’re doing something wrong.

bigprojects

The participants of those activities did not lose their momentum in the construction, until the monuments were finished – over years, decades or centuries.

  • The creation of the world
    The very first large-scale project at all was accomplished within seven days. Everything began with the definition of the time frame. In the second step the spatial framework was specified. After the functional areas were developed and in principle equipped on the third day, on the fourth day the important energy sources were installed. Resources were distributed on the fifth day. On the sixth day the management was developed and the project manager examined his project and thought it was good. In the last step the project manager had a break and concluded his project.
  • Stonehenge
    The „hanging stones “in close to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, Britain, is perhaps one of the oldest projects. It started 8000 BC. The three main phases began 3100 BC. with a circular earth mound. For the second phase in the early 3rd millennium BC. are no proofs available. The third phase extended from 2600 BC. until 1600 BC. and resulted in the well-known stone structures. People are speculating until today, how this monument could be built with human power. We do not know anything concerning the project managers and the project teams.
  • Chinese wall
    One of the largest project results is the Chinese wall with more than 21.000 km. The overall project spans from the 7th century BC until the 17th The coordination of the hundred of thousand people probably did not take place in an unstructured way. The project plan, the project responsible people and employees are not handed down.
  • Panama Canal
    The Panama Canal with its 82 km shortened the trip from New York to San Francisco to a third – from 18,000 to 6,000 nautical miles. Building upon the efforts of the Frenchmen (between 1881 and 1889) the Americans terminated between 1906 and 1914 the shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific for 386 million US Dollar. In the six years at the end of the project between thirty and forty thousand people worked in Panama. In this period of time 5,609 workers died. It is unknown, how the huge movements of earth were managed.
  • Apollo program
    The Apollo program had the goal to bring an American on the moon and unhurt back to earth before the Russians. George E. Mueller was thereby the director of the Office of Manned Space Flight and jointly responsible for the program. To the originally planned seven missions three additional ones were added. The program employed in the ten years of his duration 400,000 people and cost at that time nearly 30 Billion US Dollars. Details of the project management are not available.

Bottom line: There were always large-scale projects that required the planning and coordination of many people. The results were so stable that we can still admire them today. And that, although they were accomplished without the nowadays existing project management. Despite the well-prepared PM structures of today, many projects fail. Probably we’re doing something wrong.