Worldwide Success

Most people have a list of projects to work on.  Many times your personal goals need to be accomplished through projects.  What most people don’t know is that project management is a science and a profession.  Some of the same tools and techniques used by professional project managers to build bridges, buildings, and complex software systems can be used by ordinary people to accomplish more mundane goals, such as finding a job, starting a business, or renovating the kitchen.  In this article, I will highlight some project management concepts that you can use in your quest for success.

Scope Management

Define the scope of your project and stick to it.  This will keep you focused, avoid distractions, and increase the likelihood that you will achieve the desired end result.  What is scope?  It’s the parameters that define the limits or the breadth of your project.  If your project is to find a job, in what locations are you going to look, what functional areas are you going to pursue, what salary range is acceptable to you, what employers are you willing to work for?  If it’s renovating the kitchen, are you just replacing the cabinetry, or does it also involve the flooring and the plumbing?  Put down the scope of your project in writing.  This is one of the most important project management techniques.

What if the scope of your project changes mid-stream?  What if you find out that the locations where you were searching for a job need to expand?  What if you find out that you can’t replace the cabinetry without also impacting the countertop?  In this case you invoke change control.  In a formal project this would mean writing up a document explaining the changes and the consequences of the changes.  It would also require getting formal approval.  In your case, this would mean stopping to think about what the changes mean to you.  If you expand the locations where you will search for a job, does that mean you may have to relocate?  If you replace the countertop in addition to the cabinetry, how much more will it cost?  How much longer will it take to get it done?  If you write down the consequences of the change you can more clearly think about whether the change makes sense, or whether you should reconsider.

There is a big difference between making a change to the scope of your project through a well thought out process like the one delineated above, and simply making changes willy-nilly.  If you start searching for a job in your local town but suddenly decide to contact a national recruiter without considering the consequences of getting a job in another state, you may get distracted.   When you get the out-of-state job offer, and only then realize that you are not ready to relocate, you just wasted a lot of time that could have been put towards a more focused search locally.  If you start you kitchen renovation project with the intent of replacing the cabinetry, but suddenly decide to also change the flooring without considering the consequences, you may end up with an unfinished project because you may run out of cash.  Worse yet, you may run out of time, and you kitchen may look like a total mess when that important out of town relative that you wanted to impress with your renovated kitchen arrives.

As you consider making changes to the scope of your project, you may want to ask some important questions:  Are the changes really needed?  Are there alternatives?  What is the impact of the changes?  How do you minimize the impact?  Most importantly, realize that the later a change is introduced, the higher the cost and the risk of the change.  If you are going to change, try to do it as early in the project as possible.

Change control may seem a bit over the top for your small little project.  But let me see if I can convince you of how important this is.  Scope creep, which is the uncontrolled increase or change in project scope, is the number one cause of project failure.  Projects that never finish usually do so because the scope was not well defined in the beginning or kept changing throughout the project.  After a lot of time and money is spent on a project that never ends, someone eventually asks the question: why should we continue spending time and resources on something that is not delivering any benefits?  And at that point the project dies.  In a personal project, the problem is usually that you get so distracted by changes in your project that you never get anywhere.  Then you get discouraged and quit.  It is the same problem, but in a different dimension.

Time Management

Another important technique in project management is time management.  This is the process in which you breakdown the project into small tasks, set dependencies between tasks, estimate how long each task will take, and monitor how you are doing against your time estimates.  If you get off track, and find out that you will not get the project completed in the amount of time you originally estimated, you may want to make changes to your project plan in order to get it back on track.

Continuing with the job search example, a simple list of tasks might look like this:

1. Define the scope of the job search – 2 days
2. Prepare a resume – 3 days
3. Distribute resume to your network – 4 weeks
4. Search job ads – 4 weeks
5. Respond to job ads - 4 weeks
6. Interview –  4 weeks
7. Negotiate – 2 weeks
8. Accept job – 5 days

In the example above, you can’t distribute your resume until you have completed it.  This is called a dependency.   However, you can distribute the resume to your network and at the same time start searching job ads.  These are called parallel tasks.  After you take into account your dependencies and parallel tasks, you will be able to figure out how long the entire project will take.  In this example, if we assume that a week is the equivalent of five working days, and  if we consider, for the sake of simplicity, that tasks 3, 4, and 5 can be done in parallel, but the other tasks cannot start until their predecessor is completed, your job search project would take 12 weeks.

Write down your project schedule.  Use your experience to estimate how long each task will take.  Allow for unexpected events and build in some contingency time.  If there are tasks on your project that are on the critical path, meaning, if they get delayed the entire project gets delayed, focus your efforts on those tasks.  If a change to the scope of the project gets introduced, how does it impact you project schedule?  Go back and re-estimate so that you can understand the impact.

Scope management and time management are two critical areas in project management that when done well, can greatly increase your chances of having a successful project.  In the next article in this two part series we will cover cost management, quality management and risk management. 

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