Unrealistic Project Schedules

What makes a project successful, the answer is "a realistic schedule". But does anyone knows what are the characteristics of a realistic schedule?

A realistic schedule:

• Includes a detailed knowledge of the work to be done.
• Has tasks sequences in correct order
• Accounts for external constraints beyond the control of the team
• Can be accomplished on time given the availability of sufficiently skilled and enough resources.

Finally, a realistic schedule takes into consideration all the objectives of the project. For example, a schedule may be just right for the project team, but if it misses the customer's completion date, then it's clear that the whole project will need reassessment. Building a project plan that includes all the necessary parts and achieves a realistic balance among cost, scheduling, and quality requires a careful, step by step process.

But question comes why most of the project managers keep on revising their schedules and submitting the recovery plans throughout the project life cycle.

Following are 3 main reasons to this problem.

1. The project manager's inability to understand the technical complications in the project due to lack of experience, technical knowledge of the project.
2. Weak project managers who are always looking to make customers or their management happy and unable to defend their point of in front of their higher management.
3. The management itself who only knows the language of money this fact is little bit commendable as this happens if unsuitable people without proper knowledge manage to acquire higher positions and they influence the project managers for unrealistic schedule compression without giving proper resources, remove the resources from the project just to save few 100K dollars.

But the fact is all of these reasons make the project land up with lower profit margins, severe losses and LD penalties from the customer. 

Stress & Burnout

Any occupation without authority or ability to exert control, a necessity for perfection, pressure of deadlines, role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, crossing of organizational boundaries etc give rise to stress. Project managers are subject to a lot of stress in their jobs.

It cannot be declined that line management is responsible to provide resources on the project but the responsibility of bringing the project to completion by a prescribed deadline rests with the project manager. A project manager may be told to increase work output while work force is simultaneously being cut. Project managers are expected to get work out on schedule but are often not permitted to pay overtime.

Project managers are subject to stress due to several different facets of their jobs. This can manifest itself in a variety of ways such as :

• Being tired
• Feeling depressed
• Being physically and emotionally exhausted
• Burned out
• Being unhappy
• Feeling trapped
• Feeling worthless
• Feeling resentful and disillusioned about people
• Feeling hopeless
• Feeling rejected
• Feeling anxious

Stress is not always negative, however. Without certain amount of stress reports would have never get written or disturbed, deadlines would never be met, and no one would even get to work on time. But stress can be a powerful force resulting in illness and even fatal disease, and must be understood and management if it is to be controlled and utilized for constructive purposes.

The mind, body and emotions are not the separate entities they were once thought to be. One affects the other sometimes in a positive way and sometimes in a negative way. Stress can be harmful when it is prolonged beyond what an individual can handle. So in a project environment how much prolonged stress can a project manager handle comfortably? is a very important question for management and project manager himself.

A project manager who is aware of the stress management techniques can face this challenge objectively and make it a rewarding experience. Stress management is a very important skill a project manager should learn by getting suitable trainings.

Listening

Communications is management. Whether your goal is to get others to agree, make yourself heard, instruct, motivate or inspire, communication is key. Many if not most business problems spring from failure to communicate, leading to misunderstandings and mistrust. Whats's usually at fault is failure to start out with the most important element of communication- Listening. If you really want to influence people, you first need to know how they think, and good listening is the building block for everything else in business. The important aspects of listening which one must learn are:

• Listen actively to others
• Ask questions that count
• Identify hidden agendas
• Bridge communication gaps
• Clarify and confirm mixed messages.

The word "Communication" comes from the idea of sharing, or communing, with others. The truly great communicators know that good listening is one of the key weapons in their arsenal of techniques.

Improve Your Listening Skills: 
Great listening is what enables you to talk to people in their own terms, to build bridges, and to help people feel they are being heard and that what you are proposing is good for them as well as for you. However, nobody really teaches us to listen, any more than teach us to breath or run. It's a skill that we are presumed to have naturally, but some natural skills are better than others, and there is always a room for improvement.

Communication Skills

One of the most important characteristics a project manager should have is excellent communication skills. Written and oral communications both are very important for successful projects. Many forms of skills will exist during the life of your project. As the creator or manager of most of the project communication (project documents, meeting updates, status reports and so on) its your job to ensure that information is explicit, clear and complete so that your audience will have no trouble understanding what has been communicated. Once the information has been distributed, it is responsibility of the person receiving the information to make sure they understand it.

But my opinion is that a good communicator is also a good listener. Listening is the toughest part of communication. Everyone wants to be heard, that's the human nature and no one can ignore it. If you donot listen to people the message you are giving is that they are not trustworthy enough to be listened and will have a very bad feeling, sometimes customers react to this situation which gets difficult to handle. So we should listen very carefully what someone is saying be it your customer, you manager, your office colleague or any one else.

Quality and Grade

Grade is the category assigned to a product or service having the same functionality but technical characteristics may differ i.e lower or higher.

It is sometimes confused with Quality. Quality is basically the completeness of product or service which is successfully acceptable to the customer.

• Low quality is problem
• Low grade is not a problem
• A low grade product can be of good quality which is acceptable.
• A high grade product with low quality is not acceptable.

Very important concept from PMP certification exams point of view.

Project Managers

It is commonly seen that organizations promote their technical experts as Project Managers considering the skills which made them stars in their technical field, are mistakenly thought to translate into project management skills. This is a BIG MISTAKE which can turn a project manager to PROJECT DAMAGER.

Project Managers are people with different skills, they are problem solvers wearing many hats. Project Managers may possess technical skills but it is  not a prerequisite for sound project management skills. A few technical skills experts in the project can be sufficient on which the project manager can rely.

The actual job of project managers is to integrate all the knowledge areas and processes on their projects. Some of the key skills a project manager should have are

1. Communication skills.
2. Organizational and Planning Skills.
3. Budgeting Skills.
4. Conflict Management Skills
5. Negotiation and Influencing Skills.

Stakeholders

Before we proceed to discuss further about projects and project management, lets briefly discuss what stakeholders are:

Stakeholders are those people who are interested in your project in any sense, i.e. either they are impacted by the project or the project is impacted by their interests. Key stakeholders can make or break the success of the project even if all the deliverable are met or the objectives of the project are satisfied. If the key stakeholders on the project are unhappy then no one can be happy.

It is therefore very important for the project manager to identify stakeholders in the project as early as possible and therefore it is done in the Initiation Process group of the project and process name is "Identify Stakeholders".

Project sponsor is the stakeholder, project sponsor is generally an executive in the organization with authority to assign resources and enforce decisions regarding the project. He should be one of those on the escalation path of the project manager.

In addition to above customer, contractors and suppliers are also stakeholders. The project manager, project team, and managers from other departments all are stakeholders.

Many times stakeholders have conflicts amongst their interest, its is the responsibility of the project manager to understand these conflicts and resolve them and manage expectations of the stakeholders. In case of any doubts the conflicts should be resolved in favor of the customer.

Defining Project

Lets talk first something about Project:

Project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.
Features of project. It can be a construction Project, an IT project, a project of launching a new product in the market but 3 basic characteristics will be necessary for a project: 

• Temporary: project has a definite beginning and end.  The duration may vary from one day to even few years – but ultimately all projects must either meet their objectives or be terminated. Please note that even though the projects are temporary, the product or service created by the project may far outlast the projects themselves.
• Unique product or service: all projects create something unique which has never been created before e.g. a product or service may be unique even if the category to which it belongs is large. (E.G. A project to create a building has a unique design, location, resources, etc.).
• Progressively elaborated:  because the project creates a unique product or service, the detailed characteristics of the product or service are not known in advance – it has to be defined in steps i.e. progressively elaborated.

From a PMP exam perspective, you will be given a situation and asked to 

Determine if you are working on a project. Please use these guidelines which

will help in defining a project :

1. Does it have features of usual operational work that is done in your

    company? (i.e. if it does not have a well defined beginning and end, then it

    is not a project)

2. Is it just fixing something which is broken or making minor modifications or 

     maintenance activities (e.g. making small changes in a document or 

     website, fixing small problems etc.) These activities will not produce a unique product and are hence not projects.

3.  Will doing the work require you to follow project management rigors e.g. 

     does it cover the different PMBOK knowledge areas like Integration 

     Management, Time Management, Schedule Management, Cost 

     Management etc.? Will it require a project plan to be created and project 

     manager assigned? If answers to these questions are “No”, then you are 

     not dealing with projects.

Welcome and A Brief Introduction

PERT Consultants welcome all the viewers of this blog. Like before we will continue to discuss topics related to Project Management and topics which will be helpful for PMP Certification exams.

PERT Consultants is a consultancy firm which aims to provide quality trainings on project management and extend help to those who are looking to appear for PMP certification exams. In addition to this PERT consultancy provides consultancy services  to organization in Project Business which involves:

1. Setting up a PMO
2. Implement Project management methodoligies as per PMI guidelines
3. Monitoring and Controlling of Projects
4. Professional Development of employees in the organization.

We are available on Facebook, Twitter and for Online training we are available on skype,

So we welcome any queries and comments, if you have any problems in your practical life, share with us and we will help you.