The Best of Project Life Cycle by Jason Wesltland

The Best of Project Life Cycle A selection of professional insights from the Blog archive

Since 2008 our project management professionals have been sharing knowledge, experience and learning with online readers via the Project Manager Blog. Their collective wisdom provides a wealth of how to, top tips and best practice advice, for project managers, teams and businesses. To make their writings more accessible we’ve created a series of “Best of” project management topics available free to download and share. Here is a collection of excerpts that discuss the importance of planning and communication at all stages of the project lifecycle. Enjoy!

Jason Westland CEO ProjectManager.com

Preventing Your Project Launch From Being Scrubbed at the Last Minute ................................................ 3 6 Tips to Start your New Project ................................................................................................................. 4 The 5 Things to do when your project is over ............................................................................................. 7 What is Project Planning After the Project is Complete? ......................................................................... 11 How to Plan a Project for Closure ............................................................................................................. 14 Using Project Planning Software for Project Closure ................................................................................ 17 Five Steps to Protect Project Initiation ..................................................................................................... 19 How to Kickoff a Project ............................................................................................................................ 19 Typical Project Phases ............................................................................................................................... 19 30 Day Free Software Trial ........................................................................................................................ 20

Preventing Your Project Launch From Being Scrubbed at the Last Minute It’s like the Space Shuttle is about to take off and it’s T minus 10 seconds. The countdown begins and someone pipes up to say, “Scratch the mission,” because they noticed a fingerprint smudge on one of the windows. To prevent feedback from coming in so late in the process: Get Everyone Involved Early On: Yes, this sounds obvious, but the emphasis is not so much on the early timing as it is on ‘everyone.’ Make sure you have identified everyone on the approval path. You may find a handful of people that show up later in the process to have a tendency to slow things down. Verify that these are the ONLY people that have the final say about the application going live. Otherwise, you’ll be chasing approvals for the rest of your career. Set Expectations: Once you’ve identified everyone on the approval path, make sure to set the expectation that they need to give this project the attention it deserves. Recount experiences that demonstrate how last-minute feedback almost always throws the delivery date out the window. Correlate cost with substantial delays in the project. Make a Big Deal Out of Not Getting Feedback Early: Don’t assume silence is consent. If you have not received feedback from someone you know must provide feedback, go get it. It means that they have not taken the time to form an opinion in order to give feedback. All systems are NOT GO until you have heard what they have to say. Define What Is Considered a Show-Stopper: It’s almost impossible not to receive lastminute feedback on a project. However, part of setting expectations should be to define what a showstopper is—a legitimate concern about functionality that would prevent the application from going live. For example, if an engineering program was found to have some incorrect calculations— that would stop the show. Conversely, if the wrong shade of color was used on a button, it would not be considered a showstopper. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

It’s not that it won’t get fixed; it’s just that it won’t prevent the application from going live. Nothing is more frustrating than counting down to an application’s official launch only for the mission to be scrubbed due to last-minute feedback. Minimize the chances of this happening by expecting it to occur and taking steps to get the feedback early on. What happened to this revolutionary new technology project we were working on? Eventually, everyone had their say and this feedback was incorporated into the final application. Unfortunately, this extended the timeline that the application was to be released by approximately 4 weeks. The application ended up being that much better due to the feedback, but it would have been nice to have delivered on schedule. Take the steps above to provide you with this invaluable feedback early on and you’ll end up with the best of both worlds. A great application delivered on time!

6 Tips to Start your New Project 1. Assemble Your Project Team What is a project without a team? You may already have a good idea of who needs to be on the project team, but if not, talk to your project sponsor about who would be best placed to contribute to the project. You may need to involve other managers as well and ask them to make their own team members available on a full or part time basis to provide their specialist skills to the project. Think about all the business areas that will need to be represented on the project and aim to include someone from all of them. You may also need some technical resources, so talk to the relevant technical team leaders to see whom you can bring on to the project.

2. Hold a Kick off Meeting When you have your project team in place, get everyone together for a kick off meeting. This is a great opportunity to have everyone meet for the first time. Use the meeting to do introductions to all of the team members. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

There are a number of icebreaker-style games that you can use to get people talking. My favorite is to ask each person to find 5 things they have in common with everyone else in the room. This could be something as simple as liking the same type of food or having children at the same school, but I’ve also done this exercise with teams and found people who have lived abroad in the same country (albeit at different times) and who play the same sports. It is an easy way of focusing on common ground. If you can get people working together during this meeting, perhaps on putting together a project charter or some ‘rules of engagement’ for the team, then even better! You can also use the time to clarify the roles and responsibilities for each individual as well as the project aims and objectives.

3. Set up Your Project Schedule Your project schedule will need to be created with input from the team, but some of the basic stuff you can put together yourself. For example, set up the right resources in your enterprise project management tool and make sure everyone on the team has access to the online system. You can enter some of the project tasks that relate to project management, such as the preparation of key documents, reporting milestones, the overall structure such as phases or stages and budget milestones. If your Project Management Office has provided templates as part of the online tool, you can use them to save yourself some work. Once the basic project schedule structure is in place you can work with other people in the team to prepare a list of tasks that can then be transferred to the project management tool for everyone to see and update.

4. Set Up Your Project Filing System Many online project management systems have document repositories or the ability to store documentation in a central place online. If yours does, set it up now so that you have a strong foundation for your project filing system.

Decide on how you will name documents and whether you will use version control (I recommend that if your project management tool has a version control feature that you switch this on for your project). Create folders and sub-folders if you need to and ensure that everyone on the team has the right level of access. For example, you may want to grant core project team members access to read, write, delete and edit documents, but some other stakeholders may only need access to read what is there. If you aren’t using an online project management tool, you can do the same exercise with shared network folders (or even paper folders and files!).

5. Write a Project Initiation Document A project initiation document explains what the project is going to achieve and provides some detail about how you are going to get there. You might also hear it referred to as a project charter or a project definition document. Whatever the name, you need one! It is a good idea to use a template if you have one so that you can save some time putting the document together. The project initiation document should include aims, objectives, key success criteria, an overview of the major project milestones from your schedule, a list of people involved and what their role is, a high level estimate of the budget and a reference to any standards that you intend to use during the project. In practice, you can include anything you like that sets the scene for the project and helps explain clearly about what you are going to do. Get everyone on the project to agree to the contents and ask the project sponsor to sign it off – it is a great way to confirm that you have really understood the brief and the document helps everyone understand what is expected of them.

6. Create a Risks and Issues Log Finally, your project needs a risks and issues log. Again, use a template if you have one. If not, you can create a simple log in a spreadsheet package, or any other tool that works well for you and your team. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

The log should include key information about the risk and issue as well as your action plan to address it and the name of the person responsible for carrying out those actions. You’ll also probably want to include the date it was identified. Once your columns are set up, you can start populating the log with the risks and issues you have identified during all your initial discussions and preparation for the project. Work with your team to come up with as many things as possible that might cause problems for the project in due course, and log them all.

The 5 Things to do when your project is over The great thing about projects is that they have a beginning, middle and an end. You know that there will always be an end, and while that might be a sad time as it means your wonderful project team going off and doing different things, it is also a time to look back on the work you have achieved together. Just because you have reached the end of your project doesn’t mean that the project manager’s job is over, though. There are still a number of things for you to do before you can truly say that this project is closed and you can move on to working on another project. Here are 5 things to do at the end of your project.

1. Make Sure Your Plan is Up to Date Your plan is up to date, isn’t it? That means all the tasks on the schedule have been ticked off as completed, everyone has submitted their last timesheets and your online project management tool has no tasks outstanding. It’s very easy to be in the final weeks of your project and stop updating your project schedule – everyone knows what they need to do over the last few weeks, so there isn’t much point, is

there? Actually, it’s really important to leave everything tidy, especially if you are using an enterprise project management tool that collates data for reports and dashboards. You should make sure that everything is up to date so that you have accurate data.

2. Review the Risk Log Take a look at your project risk log. Now the project is over, you’d expect all those risks to have gone away, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately that might not be the case. There are sometimes risks that have been identified as part of the project that do or could relate to the ongoing running of the product or deliverable. Double-check the risk log and make sure that there is nothing on it that you should be passing over to the operational team to manage now that the project team isn’t controlling the mitigation activities for the risks. Examples of risks that fall into this category could be things like a reliance on a small group of resources for support, or the risk that user documentation may fall out of date if someone doesn’t keep maintaining it. You can probably think of other things that you identified during the project that might not be ‘over’ when the project is technically finished. The likelihood or impact of the risk may be different when it is moved to an operational setting, but that is for the operational team to decide. Include any outstanding risks when you do a handover to the operational team, then update the risk log to say that this risk has been handed to them to manage. You can then close the risk on the log, which is a tidy way of making sure the loose ends are dealt with.

3. Carry Out a Post-Implementation Review What went well on your project? What didn’t go so well? The purpose of a postimplementation review is to look at what happened on your project and learn the lessons for next time. A post-implementation review ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

takes a bit of planning as you will want to make sure that the right people are available to attend and that you create an atmosphere that allows people to share what they learned. Ideally, you will have been capturing lessons learned throughout the project so this can also be a good time to review those. If you are concerned that with the whole team together you won’t actually get at the truth, consider having separate post-implementation reviews with different sections of the project team, and then bringing everyone together for an overview session once the detailed sessions have been completed. Document the output from the post-implementation review meeting or workshop and make sure that you share it both with the people on the project team (so they can be more effective when they work on projects next time) and the Project Management Office (so they can share it with other project managers in the company). The risk of completing the review but putting the findings in a drawer is that you don’t build up an organizational knowledge repository and the company will find itself making the same mistakes on projects over and over again.

4. Archive Your Project You might think that your project filing system today makes perfect sense, but come back to it in 6 months – will you still know how to find your way around the folders? Spend a little time going through any online document repositories and shared network folders and tidy them up. Make sure there are copies of the latest documents and that everything else is clearly marked as an old version (your online project management tool may handle version control for you so there might not be anything for you to do here!). If there are files with obscure names, rename them something that will make sense to you or a colleague if you have to come back to them again in the future. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

If you had any paper files, box them up and send them off for storage. Again, make sure that you and the Project Management Office know how to get hold of them again if you ever need to, perhaps, for example, if you have to run a similar project in the future and want to reuse some of the paperwork or materials. Of course, most project documentation is entirely electronic these days, so you are more likely to have to tidy up online files and folders. Remove access to the documentation from people who are no longer working on the project team. This could be as simple as requesting that the IT team revoke access to the project management tool for those people who no longer need it. Once all your online housekeeping is done and the project documentation is in a good state, officially close the project in your electronic project management tool so that everyone can see that this project is no longer active.

5. Celebrate! Yes, you deserve it! Have an end-of-project party or at least a little celebration in the office to mark the completion of the project. There are a number of ways to celebrate, and you can no doubt think of things to do that will mark the end of the project for your team in a way that is memorable for them. Cakes, a team picnic, a dinner or drinks out, go-carting, a thank you letter from the chief executiveâ&#x20AC;Śthere are lots of things that you can do, and you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to spend a lot of money (or any at all) if that is a constraint on your team. The point of a celebration is to say thank you for all the hard work that the project team has done over the course of the project, and also to draw a line under the project tasks. It also signifies the time that project team members move on to other projects or go back to their day jobs if they were seconded to the project.

Closing a project can be an exciting time as you can look back and see what you achieved as a team. Don’t leave things undone in your haste to move on to another project – take the time to do these 5 things and you’ll gain a reputation for finishing your work in a professional way.

What is Project Planning after the Project is Complete? Project planning is sometimes thought to only occur at the beginning of a project. But, doing a post-project review session can definitely feed into the beginnings of the next project planning session. The following are some guidelines you can use to put together such a comprehensive review.

What Do You Need? A big part of answering what is project planning after the project is complete is to have the answers to some of the questions below. You can pull these items together as the project manager or let your team members know that you’re going to be doing this at the end of the project and for them to keep up with the collateral you’ll need through the course of the project. Did the project meet its objectives? – The project may have technically come to completion and is considered closed, but did it accomplish what it set out to do? This really speaks to the business value of the project and whether that met its realization. Many projects may be “technically correct, but fundamentally wrong” meaning that the original intent or purpose of the project was missed once the project was complete. How was the Schedule Performance? – Did the schedule stay on track during the entire project or was there some scrambling or adding of resources that needed to be done in order to make sure the project finished on time? This is an important answer to consider in order to get a sense of how good the original project estimates were. Did Resource Expenditures Stay within Budget? – This is a different view of the question above that allows the team to get a sense of the financial impact of the project estimates that were assembled. What Problems Arose During the Project? – Problems ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

are going to surface during any project. You may wonder what good is project planning for if you can’t eliminate all problems from a project. It is rare, if not impossible, for a project of any magnitude or complexity to make it from start to end without some type of issue to surface. Be sure to document these along the way and bring them to your post-project review session. Was the Customer Satisfied with the Project? – If this is an external project that a customer is paying for, what is their reaction to how things went? The answer to this question could go either way. You could think the project went terrible as an internal project team but the customer might be thrilled. Or, you might think the project went exceptionally well as a project team but the customer was terribly disappointed. How can you find out? Ask the customer. Was Management Satisfied with the Project? – This is the same question as above except that you would ask your management as to how satisfied they are with the success of the project and the impact it had on the company. How Did the Project Management Processes Work? – Every organization has at least some form of project management process in place. It could be as simple as getting sign-off on a statement of work before work begins to a full-blown enterprise wide process with gateways and checks and balances all throughout. How did it work? Was it the right amount of processes or did it slow things down unnecessarily? What Lessons Were Learned? – As stated earlier, lessons learned are one component of understanding what is project planning after the project is complete. There may have been some “a-ha” moments where the light bulb went off in yours or your team members head. It could be that a different way to do something presented itself or you came across a much faster way of getting something done. Document these lessons learned and be prepared to bring them to the session.

How Do You Run the Meeting? Once you have all of this information in hand, assemble the team. Consider everyone that touched the project at various stages of its lifecycle. It’s sometimes easy to forget those at the beginning of the project (salespeople, estimators, analysts, etc.) since their work is long done by the time the end of the project is reached. However, it’s important to pull them into the process as well. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

It’s not necessary to have every single person involved, but at least a representative from each of the major functional areas. If the project was of considerable size and spanned 6+ months or more then you should plan for a half-day minimum and most likely a day to cover the topics that need to be addressed. Smaller projects that spanned less time could of course take less time to review. Make sure you state up front that the purpose of this meeting is a learning experience on what can be done better the next time around (just like reviewing the game after it has been played) and not to point fingers at anyone. NOTE: You really need to make sure it doesn’t turn into a blame-storming session or your trust factor will quickly deteriorate and your meeting will be rendered useless. How can you do this? You can start with having people identify what others did very well. Then, you can have members examine how they performed themselves (starting with you) and any areas they feel they could have improved in. Over time the defense mechanisms in the room will come down and you can have a constructive, non-threatening, adult conversation with a group of people whose motive is to improve. You can start with the purpose of the meeting and any particular objectives you want to make sure are accomplished before the meeting concludes. Then, in the high-trust atmosphere you have created, you start digging into the questions above and discuss project performance (results, schedules, resources, processes, etc); discuss any items that were of special note or consequence during the project; review customers and management’s reaction to the project; review problems and issues; talk about lessons learned and then how to apply all of this toward the next project the team undertakes. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

How to Plan a Project for Closure When you think about how to plan a project for closure, you may wonder why this is so difficult. There are a number of reasons why this is the case:

1. The Devil is in the Details To use another cliché, the devil is in the details. When a project begins, most people that are involved are excited about the prospects that it will bring to increase revenue, decrease cost, help with sales and marketing, or get paid for by a client. The big picture looks exciting and everyone is anxious and ready to go. Once the project has sloughed on for a couple of months, however, everyone begins to realize what a grind this project has become. There are a number of unanswered questions and decisions that need to be made in order to finish the project. This requires meetings, time, and bandwidth and has a tendency to keep project closure at bay.

2. Requirements Change Depending upon the duration of the project, the requirements that were in place when the project started may have changed. This could be due to a host of reasons, ranging from legal considerations to a change in plans. You should count on these changes occurring as it will happen on nearly every project. Have plans in place to allow for this type of change to occur and make sure everyone knows that this will extend the closure activity related to the project.

3. People Change There’s horror story after horror story of how one person may have initiated a project and then that person leaves the company or moves to another department. They are replaced with a brand new person who has a very different view of the world, and more importantly the project. “We’re not doing it that way anymore”, are the first words out of their mouth as they sit down at their desk for the first time. You will definitely need to know how to plan a project for closure when the new sheriff comes to town.

4. Clients May be Extremely Picky Clients come in all shapes and sizes. There are those clients that are great to get along with, they are easy-going, flexible and just focus on the big picture. Then, there are those clients that are fastidious, demanding, persnickety, and finicky. These are the clients that come with a punch-list of items that must be done in order to close the project out that is an inch thick. This certainly presents a challenge when it comes to wrapping a project up, and more importantly, getting paid.

How to Plan a Project for Closure There are a number of steps that can be taken to deal with the various situations described above.

Begin with the End in Mind We’re back to the expression, “beginning with the end in mind“, but there is definitely value in it when it comes to closing out a project. This is where you establish and define your project objectives, what the project is designed to accomplish accompanied by objective measures and specifications. The key is “objective” measures and specifications. There is a big difference between saying that the result of the project will “look good” (very subjective…who is it supposed to look good to?) and “the color will be green, the size will 6’ x 6’, and it will be made of a particular type of wood”. The second is very specific, objective and is easy for people to compare and validate.

Prepare a Checklist of What Must be Done to Close the Project Out With the specificity of the objectives described above, it is now time to put together a checklist of all of those items that must be complete before a project is considered finished. This list should include the following questions: Are all project activities finished? Have all the meetings been conducted that are necessary to complete this project? Have other departments or the marketplace been made aware that this project is complete? Are there any other activities that may have been missed up to this point that need to be complete?

Are all required deliverables complete? This is a good time to reflect on the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Take an objective stroll through this document and ask yourself if all tangible deliverables have been completed. This includes documentation, training guides, and other deliverables that may not be “mission-critical” but are nonetheless important to the closure of the project. Have all necessary acceptances and approvals been obtained? This is one area where newer project managers run into trouble when it comes to how to plan a project for closure. Not to be negative here, but the reality is that you sometimes can’t take people at their word. Putting their name in writing guarantees that selective memory will not be an issue. I cannot stress enough how important it is to get sign-off and approvals in writing during the lifecycle of the project. You never, ever want to stray too far away from these approvals. This makes the person providing their signature accountable for their actions and forces them to look at the deliverable prior to saying it’s ready to go. Have all required administrative tasks been performed? This includes closing out any open contracts, making sure any and all time has been entered against the project, billing is complete and people on the project have been released and/or are assigned to new projects. Is all project documentation and deliverables archived? You want to make sure that all documentation related to the project is in a central repository for easy access later. This may serve as the basis for a similar project in the future, or you may need to answer questions that arise about this project. It’s also a good place to store the Lessons Learned from this project. But, make sure you have these in another location as well where you are actively implementing these in future projects. Include Project Closure Activities in the Project Plan Once you know how to plan a project for closure, you need to include these activities in your project plan. It’s easy to take these steps for granted because they occur around the end of the project, and many times even after the project has been delivered. But, answering the questions above, pulling the proper documentation together and related activities takes time. You need to budget that time into your plan; otherwise, you will find that this most important step may not get done.

Using Project Planning Software for Project Closure Closing out a project is never easy. Before we delve into how project planning software can help with this task, let’s discuss some of the challenges that people experience when it comes to closing out their project.

Project Closure may be Difficult for the Following Reasons You Don’t Know When It Ends: All the right questions may not have been asked while they were putting the tasks together in the planning software. One of the first questions that needs to be asked when a project kicks off is “what do we need to do to close this project out?” This means there must be a clear goal or set of objectives that must be met in order for the project to be considered complete and closed out. There needs to be an understanding that once the list of activities in the planning software is complete that the project will officially be wrapped up. Otherwise, the project can live on and on while the client or project sponsor looks for more and more things to be added to the project. The Team Moves On: The project may be just close enough to finishing that the team begins to be picked up by other projects. There are still activities that need to be finished in the project planning software, but these items are now left to those who were (un)fortunate enough to be left behind. They are now strapped with their work plus the work of the person that left. People Just Aren’t That Interested Anymore: Many projects are a long slough that can really drain you and the team of energy. The project may have started over a year ago and is still going on to this day with no end in sight. There’s nothing wrong with long projects, but they do need to be broken down into bite-size and achievable chunks of activity where the team can feel progress. Some projects may come to a grinding halt in the QA cycle testing gets underway. Every day there may be 10 defects fixed and 11 new defects found. ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

Week after week of this type of testing can really begin to discourage people and they begin to wonder if the project will ever be complete. This causes people to lose interest, begin to look for other projects that may be more appealing, or worse. Sounds like real relationships, doesn’t it? The point is that you need to expect 100% project closure to be difficult and account for this in your project planning software. It’s always amazed me how challenging that last 2% of the project is to wrap up. Focus on closure and clear everyone’s plate to be able to work on the next project.

How Can you Use Project Planning Software for Project Closure? Begin with the End in Mind: You can use your project planning software to clearly identify what requirements must be met in order to completely close out the project. Don’t leave it to chance that everyone will know when the project will be complete. Include building lists of acceptance criteria for the client (either internal or external).The purpose of this list is to establish an agreement that says “we all agree that once these things are done, then the project will be complete.” This is a very important document to generate at the beginning of the project to prevent unwanted scope creep. Use a Punch List to Keep Up with Open Items: Another item you want to include in your project planning software is to create a punch list. This is a list of items that must be complete prior to the project coming to close. Include Work Closure Items in Your Project Plan: Part of your Work Breakdown Structure that you built your project plan from should include closure activities. You can include as long or as short of a list as you see fit. This list should include closing out all project documentation, finalizing contracts, moving team members over to new projects, compiling lessons learned, obtaining all necessary signatures and approvals from necessary parties, and other activity that is essential for closing the project out. Keeping these activities in your project planning software will help ensure a smooth closure to your project. What’s more, you won’t bring any baggage with you to your next project relationship where you can start fresh!

Five Steps to Protect Project Initiation Watch the following video and learn the 5 core steps you can take to get a project across the start-line http://youtu.be/SLYWKAdq7j8

How to Kickoff a Project Learn the 4 essential items that you should know when you’re ready to kick off a new project http://youtu.be/qxjuo4Vnp6U

Typical Project Phases Learn the typical phases that project moves through, as it progresses from start to finish http://youtu.be/sLgdRO5IS9U

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