I’m my wife’s longest running project

A lot of people go into marriage thinking that they can change their partner.  They are usually wrong.  Nonetheless, it’s a good example of a project.  It has a definite start, on the wedding day, and a definite end, death or divorce! There is a clear brief for the project: changing the behaviour of the partner.  There are clear outputs: total obedience!

Few organisations can avoid project-based work these days.  It doesn’t matter whether you want to change the culture of your organisation or upgrade a batch of PC’s, it’s a project.  If you are keen on the idea of projects, you could even say that something like each trading day in a restaurant can be viewed as a project.  Each day has a finite period of time when the restaurant is open, during which you produce a range of meals and delight your customers with the results.

Clearly (!) we all know that projects undertaken by experienced project teams will always succeed.  That’s because they all work together to the common goal, instinctively knowing what to do to solve problems.  The strength of the team will be founded on effortless communication that avoids any misunderstanding.  Project failures happen to lesser individuals who do not know how their team mates will react in a given situation.

Now, back in the real world, good project teams sometimes manage to deliver project outputs despite an ill-conceived project that has been poorly planned.  The timescales and resources allocated are inadequate.  By the time the project team has battled through to deliver the project on time by working long hours for no thanks, despite opposition from elsewhere in the organisation, they discover that the world has moved on and no one will ever want to use the system they developed or there are no customers for the product they have designed.

Most people will have encountered some element of that second scenario.  What everyone needs is some common sense to give their projects a sporting chance of success.  First, there needs to be a good definition of the project, what is it trying to achieve and why?  If these very simple questions can’t be answered, no one ought to start a project.  Then it helps if the project is broken down into manageable chunks of activity.  Each of these chunks of work needs to be sensibly planned so that you know how much time and effort they need…oh and throw in a bit of additional time and resources at this planning stage to allow for Murphy’s Law.  Then plough through each of the chunks of activity, check the outputs are as expected before planning the next piece of the project.  All of this will work much better if all people involved in the project use the same language to describe what’s going on and are willing to stop a project if it becomes obvious that the anticipated benefits of the projects will not be forthcoming.

This common sense approach to projects is called PRINCE2.  It’s probably best described as a framework for managing projects successfully.    The Office of Government Commerce owns PRINCE2 and offers it as a best practice model for managing projects of all sizes.  However, the best reason for using it is that it works.  Some of the well-known organisations that use PRINCE2 include Tesco Stores, Glaxo Wellcome, Norwich Union, the RAF and GCHQ.