November 2004

By Jan De Messemaeker, Project MVP

The adoption of project management methods and tools within organizations has taken some unexpected turns in the past few years. It has become known that to ensure quality in projects, they should be managed using a fixed, proven method. But when a few years later you take a look at what really happens in these organizations, you often see very few results. Typically, what remains of a solid project management methodology are project leaders hurrying to fill out some forms to send them to management, who will or will not draw some conclusions from the data. Filling out the forms is generally regarded as "busy work" or worse, "occupational therapy," which are terms used by a manager at one of my customers' firms.

What you need is a solid project management methodology that is not excessively time-consuming for lower management, provides accurate reports for upper management, and helps drive the business toward its goals. But first you need to have realistic expectations about project management software.

What software won't do for you

First of all, organizations need to set their expectations correctly before going down the road of project management and its software. Here are some things that project management methodology or software cannot do for your organization:

• Make your team members plan.
• Improve the estimates you get from your team members.
• Force people into meeting unreasonable deadlines.
• Provide you with additional resources.
• Remove and fix unforeseen issues in your process or product.
• Discover the scope you missed.
• Change the scope of your project to meet your budget.
• Negotiate with management for a new date.
• Tell you good news all the time.
• Turn you into a project manager automatically.

Conquering resistance

Implementing a project management process throughout an organization will likely lead to some initial resistance. Resistance to change is likely to come from two areas. First, resistance can result from professional pride. When someone tells a manager to throw away old methods (which have contributed to past promotions) and act differently, some psychological resistance is inevitable. This kind of professional resistance is stronger than the usual "resistance to change," oftentimes because the manager will consider himself or herself to be the inventor of the method.

Second, upper management will often look for their own needs in the method and may load it heavily on financial reporting that will not help the project manager lead the project. No wonder some call the new methods "pure administration"!

Consider the following strategies when encountering resistance:

• Keep it modest and adaptable   By implementing a bare minimum project management methodology within your organization that can be applied across all projects, you make it easier for project managers to adopt new practices. As your project managers' skills advance, so can your methodology.
• Incorporate sound project management methods that are already part of your organization's history  Look at how leaders in your organization manage projects to identify the strong points in their methods. Try to integrate these methods, or at least to create a method that is open-ended enough so that the project leaders do not have to entirely give up their own. When you can integrate the project managers' methods into the overall organization's process, you turn opponents into advocates.
• Limit the reporting requirements  Remember, the first and most important customer of a project management method is the project manager. Of course, management doesn't stop at this level; it is the responsibility of upper management to control projects at a higher level. However, each time you ask a project manager for another report or even a new piece of data, you should ask yourself if the extra cost incurred is really offset by increased management performance.
• Plan and track projects, not maintenance activities  Avoid tracking activities that aren't projects but represent work without clear objectives or work that is redefined each day. Many organizations do that because they want homogeneous reports for project activities and nonproject activities. Remember, a project is an undertaking with defined results, to be achieved within time and resource limits. It is not merely a financial accounting of ongoing or random events.

What software will do for you

Project enables you to calculate the plan and helps you to decide where to act first, to register what has actually happened, and to analyze how best to correct deviations. The origin of the resistance to any project management software, such as Project, is often its automated nature. "It keeps changing my dates," is the refrain often heard in the hallways. Well, yes indeed, that is one the major purposes of Project. Project managers don't often understand that Project, like any scheduling program, is not a simple spreadsheet like Microsoft Office Excel, nor a drawing tool like Microsoft Office Visio. Its primary purpose is to calculate plan data, such as dates, from input supplied by the project manager. This implies that to use Project, you have to adapt your planning methods, but also that you need to understand how Project performs these calculations. One doesn't easily find that out just by using it. It is often best to enroll in a Project training course before starting to use it. Trying to learn on your own may cost you many times the cost of a good training course.

Fortunately, once all project managers use Project, it is relatively simple to consolidate all plan data and obtain very interesting information, such as resource usage across all projects, without asking for any more information. And there will be less "administrative" detail to fill out, since all necessary data is in the plan. Now you can show that using Project is a time-saver for everybody, with minimal change and little wasted effort or "occupational therapy."

Jan De Messemaeker is self-employed, and he teaches project management and Project in Belgium. He consults on the use of Project and has developed comprehensive Visual Basic for Applications programs for improving the results of multiproject leveling, reporting through multiproject consolidation, and coupling Project to time-recording applications.