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The
12 Best Strategies to Keep Prepared by: Carl Angotti Introduction Engineering product
development or improvement projects can be kept on track.
The following strategies will allow a manager to improve
significantly the probability that a project will complete
successfully on time and budget. These have been accumulated
as a result of working on engineering projects for 20 years
as an independent developer, and seven years as a high tech
manager. a. Planning (specifying and organizing the task to be accomplished, including what resources are to be used) Strategies 1. Learn to value the early days of the Project as if they were the same as the final days Many managers
consider the days near project completion as much more
valuable and important than those at the beginning. Momentum
gathers slowly during the early phases, and moves rapidly
toward the end. In reality, a day lost at the beginning, or
the missing of an early milestone, can have as significant
an impact on completion date or budget as missing the final
deadlines. Similarly, a project kickoff meeting emphasizes
that the project has begun and starts the focus on project
outcomes and process. This is the time to discuss goals and
objectives with the significant team members. It is
surprising how many projects are started without such a
meeting, wasting valuable time and focus at the project
beginning. Nothing can be more
crucial to the success of a project than to have a Detailed
Functional Specification and System Block Diagram. These
need to outline important system characteristics and be
written down, and signed off by all critical team members.
These specifications alone can often make or break a
project. The trick is to have them detailed, but not too
detailed. The experience of the manager counts a lot at this
phase. Identify the unknown
or undeveloped approaches, circuits and techniques involved
in the successful completion of the project. These can then
be broken out into a special project by themselves, or at
least partially developed before even beginning the formal
project. This is another critical judgement call. Be committed to
creating a detailed, written, plan for the project. Even a
small project, but especially a large one can not be
controlled without a written plan. This plan must be created
by the persons working on on the project. Plans need to be
detailed enough, but not so detailed as to obscure what is
going on. They are not just produced at the beginning of the
project, or because upper management wants them, but because
they are crucial to getting things done within a reasonable
time and budget. Unk-Unks are the
unknown-unknowns that come up during the period of a
project. They are important tasks or delays that occur that
were not, or could not, have been planned for. These can be
especially vexing to a project. This is not the time to
"throw the plan out the window". It is a time to update it.
The best strategy is to carefully follow the project being
on the lookout for these situations. Try to locate them as
quickly after they occur as possible. Once they are
detected, the plan must be immediately recreated, taking the
new situation into account. Be sure that project tracking
reports note the occurrence of this event for later
reference. There are many
methods to track progress and costs on a project, but most
of them are too detailed to actually get useful data for the
project manager or others to use. This is especially true
for modern project management software, developed for large
construction or government projects. It is a full time job
entering information and creating reports. Often the reports
don't even help the manager in decision making. Every project of
duration over a few days needs to have review meetings
involving the manager and critical resource persons. This
eliminates the communications problems attendant with the
belief that "everybody already knows what is going on".
Often they do not, because they are busy on their own work.
Weekly or bi-weekly meetings are often enough. The challenge
is to avoid meetings that cover too much territory, or that
allow a few people to dominate what is communicated to the
others. This creates the feeling of boredom and frustration
that resource persons often complain about at such meetings.
These meetings are a good time to feedback project status
reports that are generated for the upper management to the
team. The concept of the
supporting team of members is a difficult to define, but it
grows out of the experience of the manger and a few basic
concepts. Most effective project managers of complex
projects have learned the ability to coach, rather than
overly direct the team. This can be a style foreign to many
engineers, but it can be critical in effectively achieving
overall project goals. One important coaching skill is
learning to really listen to the team members and what they
are saying. Be sure you understand their project related
comments and needs completely. Refrain from judgement until
all of the information is gathered. Then take action on what
is heard. Another important coaching skill is to give, as
appropriate, positive feedback to the team. These are agreements
that are made with a team or a team member to receive some
form of support from upper management. This can involve
everything from handling excessive work schedules, to the
purchase of capital equipment critical to a project, to
adding additional resources, etc. Some project managers try
to sidestep these agreements, because they can often be
difficult to resolve or accomplish. This can create a sense
of a lack of upper management concern for the team members
or the project. If this occurs, it can definitely impact
team productivity. As appropriate, keep team members
informed as to the progress on these agreements. Of all of the time
during the life of the project, the time at the end seems to
drag out much more than was planned. This is where every
error made by all team members accumulates. It is rare that
a project plan can take into account the large number of
tasks that can occur at this time. In addition, team members
often can not work at tasks in parallel, instead, many of
them must be done in series, delaying the project each step
along the way. It is very rare that
a project does not overrun its cost budget. A good plan can
minimize its impact. A lot of the problem has to do with
Unk-Unks at the beginning of the project. Additionally, it
is rare that the resource persons planned for use on the
project remain on it from beginning to end. Most upper
managers do not want to consider a plan to overrun the
budget, but if methods are created to track costs all along
the project time frame, they can allow the magnitude of the
potential overrun to be contained. A good approach to force
the tracking of project cost is to schedule formal project
cost and status reviews. If timely and accurate cost
tracking is available, it can lead to decisions to implement
alternate courses of action at the earliest possible time.
This can be invaluable in containing costs. After a project
manager has completed a project, it is a good time to use
what has been gained during the actual project period to
improve their management skills for the next one. This is
accomplished by studying the difference between the
estimated and actual times and costs during the separate
phases of the project. Determine where project time phases
and costs were under and over estimated. |
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