Download Five Stages to Delivering Life Science Projects

Five Stages to Delivering
Life Science Projects
Successfully
By William M Lacey
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
1.1. Why I wrote this book
1.2. The power of projects
1.3. A five stage project lifecycle
1.4. Fundamentals of delivering projects
1.5. Why learn about project delivery
2. Concept
2.1. Writing a project brief/charter
3. Select
3.1. Project selection
3.2. Stage Gate review
4. Define & Plan
4.1. Your work breakdown structure (WBS)
4.2. Writing a statement of work (SOW)
4.3. Building an estimate
4.4. Building a schedule
4.5. Refining your schedule
4.6. Risk management
4.7. Resource plan
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4.8. Project execution plan
4.9.Define & Plan stage gate review
5. Execution & Management
5.1. Building your team
5.2. Allocation and management of work
5.3. Procurement
5.4. Project controls - budget and schedule
5.5. Reporting & communications
5.6. Issue resolution
5.7. Meetings
5.8. Managing scope change
5.9. Execute & manage stage gate review
6. Project Close-Out
6.1. Closing out contracts
6.2. Releasing the team
6.3. Handover to the client
6.4. Conducting a close-out stage gate review
7. Habits to aid project delivery
7.1. Daily habits
About the Author
Dedications
Tools I use
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INTRODUCTION
Projects are rarely spoken about in terms of how
we can deliver the benefits desired in a better,
faster, more cost effective way.
Well, that is the purpose of this book. To take the
best pieces of project management and merge
them with pragmatic thinking and come up with a
framework for project delivery. One that allows the
people executing the project to deliver with a minimal requirement for formal project management.
WHY I WROTE
THIS BOOK
Projects are a great mechanism for delivering positive change in
terms of either how we can improve what we are already doing,
or even better, how to create new and innovate ways of deriving
new benefits from previously unthought of ways of approaching
work.
Project management has for too long been assumed to be a
separate role or job. In some large scale projects this is the case.
However, I want to focus on project delivery and the role that all
project participants play in this. I have written this guide to help
people whose day job is not project management, but where projects are a relatively frequent occurrence, and the successful delivery of the associated benefits is critical to them. I have seen
too many projects either fail completely or deliver only partly
what was expect. There are many reason for this, but they can be
summarized by:
1.
Poorly defined goals.
2.
Insufficient or poorly executed planning.
3.
Lack of focus and management during the delivery
phase.
The skills and mindset required to deliver successful projects
can be learned. In this book, the aim is to start giving you those
skills. I provide the simple processes, clear examples and a set
of exercises that you can use to deliver your projects.
Projects management skills have helped me to achieve a lot of
great things in life. I believe that they can be of great benefit to
you in life also.
And so I have written this book to give you a how to guide for delivering projects. Knowledge that you can utilize on personal or
business projects. Regardless of what role you fill on the projects, the learnings you will gain from reading this book will improve your performance hugely. I trust that you will enjoy the
book and you can follow my writing at www.williammlacey.com.
The book is written in the flow of a project from the start through
to the end. It does not however need to be read in this sequence.
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If you have already decided to start a particular project and which to get into the detailed planning
stage, then by all means dive into that section of the book.
I would advise everyone to read the section on “Project Brief”. This is really the story behind why the
project is being executed and what the main expectations are. I hope you enjoy the book and feel
free to reach out to me with any comments, questions or suggestion on other topics that you would
like to hear about in the future.
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THE POWER OF
PROJECT
DELIVERY
A project can be usefully defined as a unique undertaking that
has a clearly defined start and finish time, specification and cost
targets.
Project management techniques are at their most useful when:
1.
Resources are limited and need to be optimized (think
people, equipment, facilities, time).
2.
Financial resources are tight.
3.
The viability/value of the projects is dependent on the
quality of the end product.
4.
The project needs to be carefully controlled to minimize
any effects of unexpected change.
The triple constraint.
The starting point of projects is the statement of the client’s
requirements/objectives. The success criteria for these objectives can be distilled into three targets; time, quality and cost the triple constraint.
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Time refers to the timescale within which you wish to execute the project.
Quality refers to the functional requirements, performance targets and user experience.
Costs refers to the financial boundaries with which the project should be completed.
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A 5 STAGE
PROJECT
LIFECYCLE
Projects have a beginning, middle and hopefully an end. In order
to progress through projects in an orderly way, it is useful to define a standard life-cycle, with distinct phases or stages. We will
be using a 5 stage project lifecycle, with concept, selection, definition & planning, execution & management and finally close-out.
The first two phases (concept and selection) are very much
about selecting the right projects for the right reasons. Then the
next two phases are focused on planning and executing. Finally,
the close-out is ensuring completion and reviewing how successful you have been relative to the original/revised goals. Let’s take
a brief look at each stage, as we will be referring to the life-cycle
throughout the guide.
At the end of a stage, we will sometimes have a formal review to
verify that this stage is complete and we can move to the next
stage. This exercise is called a Stage Gate Review.
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STAGE 1 - CONCEPT
The concept phase of the project is where we define the high level scope, timeline and goals of our
project. The level of detail is typically scant, but it allows us to understand how we might organize a
scope of work to achieve a desired objective. It allows us to then decide if the idea, timeline, costs
and benefits are worth taking additional time out to investigate and define in more detail. That is, enter the project into the selection phase, where we develop additional detail to allow us to propose the
project for execution and subsequent kick off the project.
You should expect that you have a number of projects which enter the concept phase but do not progress beyond this phase, or are parked at this stage and reviewed on a routine basis - perhaps every
three months.
An example of a project in this phase might be:
• In 2015, we should enter the German market. Market research shows that we could achieve a
turnover of €500k. We would need to establish an office, register a company, employ a business manager by December 2015. Paul and Laura will be assigned full-time and will move to
Germany in January 2015. The initial market entry budget for 2015 will be €1 million. Key
measures of success for the first 12 months will be:
• Revenue of 500k in 2015.
• Contracts signed by our top 5 clients by December 2015.
• Paul and Laura return to headquarters in December 2015.
At the end of the concept phase, you should have documented the key aspects of the proposed project into a high level project brief. The project brief (often called charter), will be the high level governance document that is used to capture the scope, cost, timeline and benefits for the project and
will be ratified by the people making the decision to proceed with the project.
STAGE 2 - SELECTION
Having developed a concept for a particular project, what is next? You will now have to develop a
more detailed brief on the project to ensure that a well informed decision can be made as to whether
the project proceeds to the execution phases or not.
This will involve assessing the benefits of the project, the costs associated with it, your capacity to
take on the additional workload, as well as controls that you wish to put in place to manage the project. You will also need to clearly define what success would look like.
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We will capture all the information above in a number of documents, but the key first document to inform execution will be the Project Brief or Project Charter (interchangeable terms).
The project brief will address the following questions:
• What is the purpose of the project?
• What are the anticipated deliverables of the project?
• The scope of work involved.
• Any assumptions made.
• Any known risks associated with it.
• High level milestones.
• High level roles and responsibilities - Governance and Management.
• Measures of success.
• Approximate costs (budget) with a statement on the accuracy of the estimate.
• Any affected or related projects.
The project would then be presented for approval to proceed to the next stage - this would happen
as a Stage Gate Review and key stakeholders would be involved. If this is a solo or small project, this
may not be formal, but should involve trusted advise givers and stakeholders (perhaps your partner).
STAGE 3: DEFINITION & PLANNING
Assuming that the proposed project has been selected to proceed, you will now move into the detailed definition and planning of the project, where a focus on detail is essential. This detail will be expressed as:
• A Scope of Work (SOW) document, which will detail the work to be completed in a particular
format of tasks, assumptions, risks and resources required. This activity is generally referred
to as “Scoping”.
• Developing a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of the scope of work to facilitate its execution.
• The development of a schedule based upon the SOW and WBS.
• An estimate based on the SOW, WBS and Schedule.
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This level of detailed planning is a critical phase for all projects and in particular large projects. If
your project is small in scale you can jump to the “Execution & Management” section. However, I
would encourage anybody with medium to large projects to continue reading, as the concepts presented are fundamental to the understanding of how to plan your projects optimally.
PROJECT DEFINITION (SCOPING)
Once you have a proposed project or set of projects to deliver, you will then need to break each
down into smaller chunks which will allow you to:
• Define the work required for each chunk – we will refer to these as elements from now on.
• Identify any associated assumptions you are making, as well as risks and skilled resources required to deliver.
• Define the level of effort required in terms of people plus any equipment or facilities required.
• Define the sequence to execute activities.
• Develop a plan for execution of the work.
We refer to the breakdown of the work as the “Work Breakdown Structure” or WBS.
The description of work, skill-sets required for each of the work elements, any assumptions and risks
associated with the WBS element is known as the “Statement of Work” or SOW.
PLANNING & SCHEDULING
Once the WBS has been defined, you will then need to build a plan and start scheduling activities. In
order to do this properly, the following skills are required:
• The ability to convert your WBS & SOW into a project plan using software such as MS Project
– this is just a list of ordered and indented tasks.
• Establishing both the duration (calendar) and level of effort (days or hours of real people’s
time) to execute each task.
• Sequencing of the activities into a schedule. That is, answering questions such as, what
needs to be completed before something else can start? What can be executed in parallel?
ESTIMATION
Now that a WBS and schedule exist, an ESTIMATE will need to be developed for the project. Estimation is both a science and an art. The science element is based around estimating the costs associated with the well-defined WBS elements. The art on the other hand is based on assessing how much
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RISK there is with the execution of the project. Once you have identified the risks, you need to quantify the potential costs if the risks materialize. This will be utilized to guide you in estimating a contingency estimate for the project. When estimating, a blend of learnable skills plus experience is required to develop the best project estimates.
At the end of this stage, it is essential that you hold a Stage Gate Review. On larger projects, this
phase often does not occur as one single event. Rather, certain sections of the project proceed into
execution ahead of other sections. This makes the process of conducting a Stage Gate Review critical and a competent Project Manager will know when to recommend proceeding or not.
STAGE 4 - EXECUTION & MANAGEMENT
With a good plan allied with having recruited some of your team members, you will now need to execute and manage the project. The key role here is to manage progress to plan. This requires many
skills, but the primary ones will be leadership, people management, budgetary management, communications, time management, issue resolution and other general management skills. Most of these
skills are not project management specific, but they can be honed and developed through the delivery of projects.
STAGE 5 - CLOSE-OUT
It is always nice to get to the end, but here too there is work to be done. Firstly you need to assess
whether you are completed the work and have delivered the benefits anticipated. This assessment
will be guided by reconciling the project delivery back to the agreed project brief and demonstrating
that the desired benefits have been delivered to the agreed quality within a given cost and time.
In addition to closing out the SOW, it is worthwhile to review how well you executed the project. What
worked well and what did not? Finding the real reason WHY is the key to improving next time. It is important that you get the team together while they are still available to do this review. Project teams disband quickly towards the conclusion of a project and once gone, your opportunity to conduct a review is also gone.
That’s it, a five stage project life-cycle.
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FUNDAMENTALS OF DELIVERING PROJECTS
There is no one right way to deliver a project. But there are some fundamentals that are part of every
successful projects. Let’s take a look at what they are.
SETTING AND MAINTAINING CLEAR OBJECTIVES
Why are you doing this project? What benefit do you expect from this project? That is, what is the
goal/are the goals of the project. This needs to be clear before you start any project and commit too
much time and money to it. This will ultimately act as both the fuel for, and the pulling forces towards,
achieving project success.
Once you have defined your goals, you need to ensure that the team keeps a keen focus on them
throughout the life of the project.
MAKE YOUR PROJECTS GOALS CLEAR AND VISIBLE TO ALL INVOLVED.
A CLEARLY DEFINED PROJECT ORGANIZATION.
If you are executing a solo project, then skip this section.
If not, then you will want to consider the project organization and how it evolves over the life of the project. The table below outlines the roles required to ensure that you have a clearly defined project organization and associated responsibilities.
Stage
Team Members
Notes
Concept/Inception
Senior Management, Project Sponsor,
Project Leader, SMEs, Consultants
The key roles to be filled are Project
Governance.
Selection
Senior Management, Project Sponsor,
Project Leader, SMEs, Consultants
The key roles to be filled are Project
Governance.
Definition & Planning
Project Sponsor, Project Leader, SMEs,
Consultants, Discipline Leads
The key roles to be filled are Project
Governance & Management
Execution & Management
Project Leader & Execution Teams.
The key roles to be filled are Project
Governance, Management & Execution
Teams
Close Out
Project Sponsor, Project Leader, SMEs &
Execution Teams.
The key roles to be filled are Project
Governance, Management & Execution
Teams
SME = Subject Matter Experts, Governance = Key Client Decision Makers
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It is essential that you clearly define the roles of each of the groups involved in the project. These
roles will be broadly categorized as Governance, Management & Execution. We will discuss this in
more detail when we enter the planning section.
It is important to note that most projects fail at the beginning, so having the right team together at the
Concept and Selection phases is critical to the ultimate success of your projects.
A STRUCTURED & STAGED APPROACH TO PLANNING
At the outset we spoke about the life-cycle of projects. We defined 5 phases or stages that a project
passes through, namely concept, selection, definition and planning, execution and management then
finally close-out.
These phases give us a clear structure with clear activities and deliverables associated with each. In
addition to this structure, it is also very important to ensure that we pass from one stage to the next in
a controlled fashion, checking to ensure that we are ready for the transition to the next phase. That is,
you have met the pre-requisites required at this stage to allow you to proceed to the next stage. This
is referred to as a “stage gated approach”. In tangible terms, it means that as we come to the end of
a particular phase, we take time out and review our readiness to close this activity out. We should do
this against a checklist and engage the key decision makers to participate in this review and decision
making process.
The benefits of this approach are:
• A controlled transition from one phase to the next.
• Engaging with the key stakeholders to ensure that the critical project parameters are being
maintained.
• Risk based approach to moving forward - even though you may not have completed one
phase, you can make a risk based decision to move forward to the next phase anyway. This is
a decision that needs to be made in an open and transparent fashion with all key stakeholders involved.
• A controlled release of resources across many projects (assuming you have a number of projects in flight at the same time).
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A TIMELY & CONSIDERED APPROACH TO DECISION MAKING
The ability to keep projects moving forward at the pace required is very dependent upon the ability of
the organization to make well thought through decision in a timely fashion. The responsibility for project decision-making lies with the governance team, very often referred to as the “Steering Committee”. The criteria for decision making will normally be based around setting and evaluating quality,
time and cost-based criteria.
Make sure that you have a well established and functioning decision making process that ensures decisions are made at the appropriate level. Not all decisions need to be made at steering level. The decisions that do need to be made at a senior level are those that have a major impact upon scope,
budget, timeline for execution or the quality standards that are acceptable. If any of these are to
change substantially from what is agreed in the project charter and the values of the company, then it
needs to go back to the steering committee. All other decisions lie with the execution team.
EFFECTIVE CONTROL OF TIME, COST AND QUALITY
Project objectives and success criteria are typically expressed in terms of time, quality and cost
measures in the context of the client’s overall need/requirements.
Once these key metrics have been established, your projects needs to measure, monitor and control
these aspects of your projects against the targets established at the outset of the project. This requires timely and comprehensive methods to manage your time, costs and quality measures.
As your project progresses, things will change and any of the critical success measures may also
change. The costs may increase, but this may be okay. To ensure that you manage this well, you
need to have a robust change management process that allows you to assess change and authorize
or not, based on the correct analysis. You will then need to update the new definition of success with
respect to time, costs and quality.
In order to successfully deliver your projects, you will need to master these five fundamental aspects
of project delivery.
1.
Clear objectives.
2.
A well defined project structure.
3.
A structured staged approach to planning.
4.
A timely yet considered approach to decision making.
5.
Effective controls on time, cost and quality.
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WHY LEARN
ABOUT PROJECT
DELIVERY
So that you can successfully deliver change for the good.
Projects deliver great change and create many new movements.
Think of projects such as “Coder Dojo”, a global network of free
programming clubs for young people. Or Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site that allows people to fund their projects which can
be anything from books to software to games and much more.
Learning how to deliver projects in a way that allows you to do
more of them, better than ever before and with less resources
than before, has to be a good thing.
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2
CONCEPT
All projects start out as simple ideas and grow
from there. Before one commits too many resources to a project, it is wise to do a type of “scuttlebutt” (popularized by the American investor
Philip Fisher). The mechanism that I propose for
this is a Project Charter or Brief and this forms the
main part of the Concept phase of your project.
This is a powerful tool, so don’t short change yourself by not developing a Project Brief.
WRITING A
PROJECT BRIEF
Before we launch full on into the detail of your project brief (often
call project charter; the terms are interchangeable), let’s review a
couple of useful concepts at this point in the lifecycle of a project.
The first is the habit of maintaining a list of all projects that you
have in your horizon. They may be active, dormant, stalled, not
yet started or one of many other states. You should at all times
keep a list of all projects. I would suggest that you classify them
as either pre-sanction or sanction. It may also be beneficial to
note where the project is in it’s lifecycle (concept, selection, define and plan, execute and manage or close-out), the capital
value of the project and the project lead or manager. For every
project on your list, if it is sanctioned, then you should have a project brief developed. If it is not yet sanctioned, then the first step
should be to develop a project brief. Don’t forget to step back
and look at the list and ask yourself a few questions:
• Do I/We have too much on?
• Is anyone in the team overloaded?
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• Are we clear on why we are doing all the projects?
Developing the brief and addressing the questions are valid for all projects; regardless of whether
they are work related or not.
For the pre-sanctioned projects, it is well worthwhile doing a scuttlebutt. The concept of a scuttlebutt
in the context of a project is a process where you ask some basic question to establish:
1.
Do we have a clear objective?
2.
Is the timeline associated with the proposed project clear?
3.
Is there strong backing amongst key decision makers for the concept?
4.
Is this worth doing?
5.
Do we have the capacity to do it?
6.
Is now the right time?
7.
What are the risks associated with doing it?
8.
What if we either don’t do it or defer it - will it impact us greatly?
Based on the answers, you may have a good idea of whether it is worth pursuing at all or perhaps
whether it is worth putting your best people on and fast tracking it.
And so to the actual work of writing a project brief.
ACTUALLY WRITING THE PROJECT BRIEF!
All projects start out as simple concepts.
Drawings on the back of a napkin.
To move them forward, writing a project brief is a useful first step. In order to do this, follow the process outlined below to arrive at a project brief which will allow you to decide how much time, money
and resources (people, office space and so on) you want to put behind delivering the benefits. Or
perhaps it will highlight that now is not the right time to go after this particular project.
A project brief is a short document that defines the key information relating to a proposed project. Projects are often ratified through the approval of the Project Brief. Whether your project is small or large,
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the investment of time in creating a project brief will repay itself many times. It makes you ask and answer the important questions on your project at the outset.
Your project brief should address:
1.
A name for your project. Give your project an identity so that when people speak about it,
everyone recognizes it.
2.
The objective of the project. What is the purpose of your project? The WHY!
3.
A list of deliverables which are expected from the project if it is sanctioned.
4.
An outline scope of work involved. What needs to be done? Break the project down into
smaller chunks that you can work on. Once you have this done, consider the sequence in
which you will need to execute them.
5.
Any assumptions you are making.
6.
Any known risks associated with the project.
7.
Some high level milestones. This may just be a set of 4-5 key milestones for smaller projects
and perhaps twice that for larger projects.
8.
WHO is doing WHAT? High level roles and responsibilities.
9.
Key measure defining success. Here you should identify the key metrics and what will
equate to success.
10. Approximate costing and an indication of the level of accuracy of the estimates used.
11. Any dependency on other projects.
It may seem like a lot of information, but it is well worth doing. If you have in flight projects that do not
have a project brief, then develop a 1-2 page brief for each of them now.
For larger projects, the project sponsor, customer and project manager will approve the project brief.
For smaller projects, it may be just the customer and project manager. For solo project, it is a form of
contract with yourself.
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