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International Legal Project Management Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS, Lic. Spec., LL.M. What is project management? A project is distinguished from regular work in that it’s a one-time effort to change things in some way. Project management is everything you need to make a project happen on time and within budget to deliver the needed scope and quality. International Legal Project Management 2 The project balance quadrant International Legal Project Management 3 Stakeholders Stakeholders are the people who feel that the project might affect them and care about its outcome. It’s important to identify your stakeholders so that you can understand their points of view and predict the pressure they may exert on the project. Talk to people who will be affected and actively seek out those who you think will care most. Understand their concerns and think about how to involve them in the project. International Legal Project Management 4 Stakeholders (cont.) The role of the project manager is to make sure that the different parties’ viewpoints are heard, and that everyone agrees to respect the course of action chosen, even if, as individuals, they would have made a different decision. Project success depends on the involvement, trust and contributions of the stakeholders. International Legal Project Management 5 Stakeholders: The project sponsor The project sponsor is the embodiment of the project customer, that is, the person for whom the project is being delivered. Ultimate decision-making authority resides with the project sponsor. The project sponsor must be actively involved and take the project seriously. He or she equally needs to be senior enough to have the authority to make the very big decisions—even the decision to cancel the project if necessary. International Legal Project Management 6 Stakeholders: The project board The project board is a small group of people whose main responsibility is to make the really big project decisions. Meet with the project board regularly to provide progress updates and discuss any key decisions. The role of the project manager is to present options and recommend a course of action. Much of the true value of project management is in communicating to the stakeholders and project board, rather than the project team. International Legal Project Management 7 Stakeholders: The project team Ensuring that you have the right mix of abilities on the project team is key. When you’re starting a project with a new team, sit down, one on one, with each individual. International Legal Project Management 8 Stakeholders: The project team (cont.) Collaboration requires excellent communication and is about working together as effectively as possible. As project manager, you’re responsible both for leading the team and for fostering an environment in which the team can collaborate effectively. Collaboration is about forming relationships. International Legal Project Management 9 Stakeholders: The project team (cont.) Putting individuals together makes them a group, but only when they can work together effectively will they really be a team. Helping your people to become a team, rather than remaining a group, is one of the most important roles you have as a project manager. International Legal Project Management 10 Project team building The stages that a group goes through as it becomes a team are: FORMING: Need for a relaxed kick-off meeting. STORMING: Differences of opinion (usually on project planning) come to the fore. NORMING: Agreement on standard ways of working and the ways in which issues and conflicts will be dealt with. Beware of Groupthink! PERFORMING: Reliance on each other for help and support, healthy ways of dealing with disagreement. ADJOURNING: Sense of loss on separation. International Legal Project Management 11 Managing the project team A project manager has two roles: manager, coordinating the efforts on the project, leader, making sure that the project delivers the right results. International Legal Project Management 12 Team management tips Set up a regular team meeting. Encourage team members to raise concerns or ask for help from each other in this forum. Define an issue reporting and resolution process. International Legal Project Management 13 Remote team management tips Share lots of contact details. Pull together a skills matrix. Create group spaces. Be respectful of time and routine differences. Invest in relationship building. Become a contact hub. Become a facilitator. International Legal Project Management 14 Hershey and Blanchard model of behavior International Legal Project Management 15 Communication The only thing worse than confusion is when there is absolute clarity … over different versions of events! Being able to communicate effectively is a key skill for any project manager. International Legal Project Management 16 Communication (cont.) Communication is an area in which it is particularly important to understand organisational culture. Ask the people you’re trying to communicate with whether your communication is actually working —don’t just keep doing what you’re doing, and risk having everything explode at a later date. International Legal Project Management 17 Forms of communication Interpersonal Presentational Many to many One- or two-way Push Pull International Legal Project Management 18 Content of communication Whatever the subject, you need to make sure that you’re clear on three issues: Purpose: What are you trying to achieve? Structure: How are you going to present the information? Outcome: What should the people receiving the communication do once they have it? International Legal Project Management 19 General communication guidelines If it’s personal, individual, or sensitive, deal with it one-to-one. Separate meetings that have different purposes. Choose the appropriate form for your purpose. Presentations are good for informing groups of people, they aren’t a good format for discussion. Similarly, turning a team meeting into a series of one-to-one discussions with individual members isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time except yours. International Legal Project Management 20 General communication guidelines (cont.) Some methods support different forms of communication better than others. For instance, email is a good method for one-to-one and one-tomany communication, but terrible for many-to-many discussions or conversations. Electronic communication lends itself to misunderstandings, particularly when a difference of opinion occurs. International Legal Project Management 21 General communication guidelines (cont.) Assess people’s expectations of each communication method. Some people view email as a high priority, others believe that it’s a low-urgency form of communication, and that if something’s important, people will pick up the phone and actually talk to one another. Don’t try to impose your preferences on others, but understand theirs so you can communicate more effectively. International Legal Project Management 22 General communication guidelines (cont.) Have a team discussion about communication to identify personal preferences. Draft a simple communication plan outlining channels and forms of communication, frequency of communication and parties involved. The communication plan should cover everything from monthly email updates to daily meetings (for the project team) and fortnightly board meetings (with the project board). International Legal Project Management 23 Improve the efficiency of email Write a good subject line. Indicate the action needed. Place a summary at the start of your email. If you need something done, set a clear deadline. Use lists and bullet points. Be specific about responsibilities and make it very obvious who’s meant to take ownership for a task or next step. Keep it short and simple (KISS). Know when to step outside of email! International Legal Project Management 24 Feedback Make sure that everyone knows how to communicate back to you! You need to know about great ideas, issues popping up on the horizon, and potential risks and opportunities. Some methods: feedback sessions during meetings anonymous “ideas box” (or webpage) informal meetings and contacts International Legal Project Management 25 The project cycle International Legal Project Management 26 Initiating: General If Initiating isn’t done right, you often end up in a situation where the project team members have very different ideas about the project’s purpose. Good initiation will also ensure that you identify all the project stakeholders up-front. Initiating is also the best chance you’ll get to define success and agree on the project’s success criteria. International Legal Project Management 27 The project initiation document Draft a document summarising: the project’s objective (what you’re trying to achieve) the key deliverables (how you’re going to achieve the objective) the overall rationale for the project (why you’re undertaking it) the initial timings (when it will be achieved) the initial organisation (who is involved) key assumptions and constraints success criteria. International Legal Project Management 28 Definition of project objectives The objectives should be SMAC: specific, measurable, actionable, and consistent. The key feature is that at the end of the project, you should be able to say “yes, we did that” or “no, we failed.” There should be no gray areas. Throughout the project, you should be able to track the team’s progress towards those objectives. International Legal Project Management 29 Initial project timeline Plan the project timeline, listing major deliverables against the week or month in which they’ll be delivered. Gannt chart example: International Legal Project Management 30 Planning: General Planning a project is similar to planning a long-distance drive. Task-based planning vs deliverable-based planning: jobs vs products. The rolling wave approach: plan the project’s immediate future in detail (tasks), and plan deliverables that lie further out at a higher level. International Legal Project Management 31 Planning: a 6-step process Break down the project into pieces small enough to work with. Identify dependencies. Estimate how long each piece will take. Add some contingency. Consider the risks. Present the plan in a format that the team, board, and stakeholders will understand and follow. International Legal Project Management 32 Planning: Step 1 Break the single end-goal of your project into individual deliverables that are SMAC, small enough to be both achievable and measurable. International Legal Project Management 33 Planning: Step 2 Identify the dependencies: which deliverables depend on other deliverables, forcing a sequential implementation. resource dependency or work that by its nature demands to be done in sequence. International Legal Project Management 34 Planning: Step 3 Build an initial project schedule. The person (or subteam) who will actually undertake a given piece of work should create the estimates, so that the estimate can be realistic. Estimates are neither wild guesses nor deadlines. International Legal Project Management 35 Planning: Step 3 (cont.) How to estimate time? Use experience Break down the deliverables further Use averaging techniques: (Most optimistic+least optimistic)÷2 [Most optimistic+(4xmost likely)+least optimistic]÷6 Delphi technique International Legal Project Management 36 Planning: Step 3 (cont.) Use a rolling wave approach that gives very rough, broad-based estimates for any deliverable that’s too far out to estimate (typically more than eight weeks away), and only putting the effort in to breaking down in detail, and estimating properly, the work that’s coming in the immediate future. International Legal Project Management 37 Planning: Step 4 Add contingency, ie. extra time that is incorporated in the schedule to cover unexpected events as well as expected events that will have an impact on the schedule (task switching, other work, personal commitments). Add contingency to risky tasks. Contingency is another concept that is often misunderstood by project stakeholders. International Legal Project Management 38 Planning: Step 5 Create a Risk Management Plan: Identify potential risks. Rate them by likelihood and severity. Choose which risks to plan for. Make plans for dealing with those risks. International Legal Project Management 39 Planning: Step 5 (cont.) Rate each risk, first on the likelihood of its occurrence (how likely is it to actually happen?) and then on its severity (how bad is it, if it does happen?). International Legal Project Management 40 Planning: Step 5 (cont.) Decide on a response to each risk ahead of time: Accept: There is nothing that can be done to reduce the risk, you can just hope it does not occur. Avoid: The project plan can be modified so as to avoid the situation that creates the risk. Mitigate: What will you do to minimize the impact should the risk event occur? Transfer: Pass the impact should the risk event occur (for example, buy an insurance policy). International Legal Project Management 41 Planning: Step 6 The total project plan should cover: deliverables and milestones: the items you’re actually going to deliver, broken down into logical, manageable chunks schedule: timing of the deliverables, based on the estimates you’ve compiled assumptions and constraints: the circumstances or factors you’ve assumed to be true, and that you’ve identified as limitations. risk management: anticipated risks and the steps you will take to mitigate them if they materialise. International Legal Project Management 42 Planning: Step 6 (cont.) A plan review is a short meeting (of not more than 30 minutes) in which you review the project plan with a specific group of stakeholders, taking people through the plan at a high level, and only going into the detail that is relevant to them. Take advantage of these meetings to clear up any confusion and deal with misunderstandings. International Legal Project Management 43 Planning: Test question (hint!) You find yourself in the midst of a project for which no planning has been done, but a final deadline has already been set. What do you do? Break down the deliverables, gather the estimates, and decide how much contingency you’d have liked to have. Remember the balance quadrant. Ask for time or other resources. Take the emotion out of the discussion. International Legal Project Management 44 Executing: The “owner” Each and every deliverable needs to have an owner. That individual is personally responsible and accountable for making it happen. That individual will either work alone on the deliverable or will co-ordinate the work of the others involved, will escalate issues to the project manager if it looks like things are going off-track, and will ask for help when it’s needed. International Legal Project Management 45 Executing: The “owner” (cont.) Assign ownership to the pieces of work that you and your team will be focusing on for the next 2-3 weeks (it can be difficult to make good ownership choices for work to be completed further out than this). Hold regular short (stand-up) update meetings with the deliverable owners, making sure that they walk away from the meeting knowing their next steps. International Legal Project Management 46 Executing: The RASCI matrix The RASCI matrix defines the involvement of individuals in deliverables and work: Responsible (owner) Accountable (project manager) Supportive (provides help or resources) Consulted (controls quality) Informed International Legal Project Management 47 Controlling: Understand, track, adapt Understand how you are doing: are deliverables being delivered? Track your progress: consult the deliverables’ owners. Adapt to changing circumstances. International Legal Project Management 48 Controlling: Project progress indicators Scope delivered: which deliverables have been completed? Percentage time that has passed vs time planned: ahead, on or behind schedule? Budget used to date, compared both to the scope delivered and the time that’s passed. Quality. International Legal Project Management 49 Controlling: “Issues” Issues are risks that have come to life; they are problems that mean you cannot carry on with the project as planned. Unidentified or unmitigated risks are handled at the level of the project manager, the project team or the project board, in increasing order of severity. Instead of dealing with the issues individually, a completely different tack may be needed to achieve the project itself. International Legal Project Management 50 Controlling: “Issues” (cont.) Issue lists are used to keep track and help with assigning ownership of issues. They also help in building records and experience for future projects. International Legal Project Management 51 Controlling: verification vs validation Verification is checking that you have delivered what you intended. Validation is checking that whatever you are delivering is actually going to have the intended value. Validation can make you change course mid-project, even if you are delivering everything on time, within budget, and to the correct scope and quality. An average project manager cares about making the project happen; a great project manager cares about delivering what the customer really needs—not necessarily the product, but the value underlying it. International Legal Project Management 52 Closing: 4-step process Review the project, presenting the product or process that has been delivered, based on the success criteria that were agreed in the Initiating phase and possibly amended in the later phases of the project. Agree on exactly what remains to be done before the project can be officially closed. Complete the final tasks and deliverables that were agreed to. Pay attention to detail! Last, but certainly not least, celebrate the end of the project! International Legal Project Management 53 Towards future projects A “lessons learned” session is an opportunity for the project team to reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and what could be done differently in future. Focus on the positives as much as the negatives. One of the happy side effects of having created all the project documents, from project plan to issue lists, is that they make managing multiple or future projects much easier. International Legal Project Management 54 Credits and notes This course was prepared for the 2014 Summer School of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University by Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS, who drew heavily on the excellent ‘The Principles of Project Management’ by M. Williams and ‘Effective Project Management (7th ed.)’ by R. Wysocki. Additional material from the TACIS – INOGATE Project 96.07 (www.inogate.org), in which the lecturer held a key position, served as a case study. Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS holds Master’s degrees in European Community Law from the University of Brussels (License spéciale avec Grande Distinction) and in International Law from the University of Bristol (LL.M.) under academic scholarship from the A. Onassis Foundation. He has been the head of international legal teams and a key expert in several major energy-related projects of the European Commission (INOGATE) and has extensive experience in technical assistance activities and investment support in the Balkans and the former Eastern bloc regions. He has provided high-level advice to the governments of Greece, Romania and the Ukraine on matters of energy legislation and foreign investments, as well as to the EBRD and the EIB on several (mainly energy) projects in Moldova, Georgia, the Ukraine and the Black Sea. He is the managing partner of a law firm based in Athens, Greece. International Legal Project Management 55