Lamoureux CSE

What is Project Management?

Project Management is one of those things that polarises people: you either love it or hate it.  The Project Management Institute says that 25% of a project budget should be spent on PM; but if you have an R&D project worth $50,000, 25% is going to seriously affect the amount of work that can be done.  When applied correctly, project management is merely a tool to help you successfully bring a project in on time, on budget, and on target.

Gantt Chart

At Lamoureux CSE, we see PM as a necessarily evil.  Without a doubt it is necessary to actually say “this is a project” and to define the project’s remit.  Then it’s important to plan the project so you have some guidelines about what you’re going to be doing, when, and so you will know when you’re actually done.  This plan enables you to make better decisions when (as invariably happens in R&D) someone comes along with a suggestion midway through the project.  Is this suggestion within the bounds of what was originally planned, or is it extra?  If it’s extra, how will it be accommodated?  Is something else going to get dropped, or do we have the extra money, time and resources available to do this extra thing?

PM's Triple Constraint

This latter point brings us to a model that Lamoureux CSE uses a lot when planning and managing a project: that of the Triple Constraint.  The Triple Constraint is described in the Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK) as Scope, Time and Cost and is often represented as a triangle.  Some commentators have elaborated on cost as a function of resources, time and scope, and have added quality to the constraint.  However, Lamoureux CSE prefers to think of the Triple Constraint as a pyramid constraint, where the Scope of the project is related to the Schedule of the project is related to the Resources available to the project is related to the Quality fo the project.  In fact, we could probably extend this metaphor into a 3-dimensional diamond with the addition of Budget (imagine it was behind Quality in your screen…).

In fact, it doesn’t matter what shape and what items we try to represent in this description of constraints.  The important thing is that whatever change you make to your project is going to have knock-on effects elsewhere in the project.  This is something you will already have come across with reference to systems, if you’ve read the section on Human Factors.  Returning to our ‘quintiple constraint’, take the simple example of increasing the scope:

• You almost certainly need to increase the budget to add resources to accommodate the increased scope without extending the schedule;
• Or you need to extend the schedule to accommodate the additional scope (which means increasing the budget to cover the cost of resources for the additional time);
• Or you need to reduce the quality of the project across the board to avoid having to increase the budget, add resources, or extend the schedule.

Proper project planning makes it easy to assess the impact of changes to any one of the quintiple constraint, so decisions can be made on the basis of as-near-as-possible-to-hard facts.  Changes to the plan are documented and thus the plan is updated.  This way, Project Management is just a tool, invoked as-and-when necessary, rather than the driving force of the project.  Project Management is a benign force that helps everyone, the customer, the project lead and the project team, bring the project to a successful conclusion, on time, on budget, and on target.

Of course, there can be a lot more to project management.  On smaller projects, there is no doubt that the project leader is also the project manager, and the scale of the project is such that the risks can be identified and mitigated more informally.  However, on larger projects with diverse teams and skills and long timelines, often there is a need for a dedicated project manager who will maintain very formal lists of deliverables and risks, etc. in order to more easily and clearly communicate them to the team.  This way everyone knows where they stand and can query anything they don’t understand or with which they disagree.  For more information we’d suggest looking at the PMI website and maybe ordering the PMBOK, and figuring out what aspects of project management you can usefully incorporate into your work.