Elements for efficient project execution

For a project to be completed, efficient execution is key.

How to execute efficiently?

First, the idea is right. Know what to do, where the key nodes are, and where the focus is.

Second, the method is good. Know how to do it, and what method to use to make it faster and more economical.

The third is to act quickly. Knowledge and action are one, and it is useless to talk without practicing.

Let’s talk about what to do first.

Generally speaking, project management is divided into five stages: initiation, planning, implementation, control and closing. Each stage has some key points worthy of the project manager's attention. Knowing ourselves and our enemies can make our management work more organized.

1. Three things in the startup phase

First, clarify the project goals and identify the problems behind the project.

Second, identify project stakeholders, especially potential supporters and opponents, and unite all forces that can be united.

Third, risk assessment, combined with the company’s internal and external environment, makes risk plans.

2. Three things in the planning stage

First, form a core team for the project whose members must meet the project’s requirements for experience, skills and resources.

Second, complete task decomposition, based on the principle of "horizontally to the edge, vertical to the end", so that the granularity of the project is sufficiently decomposed to a level that can be completed and measurable by individuals or groups.

Third, set the schedule, set the responsible person, completion time and match the required resources for each task. Special reminder is that the project manager must have the awareness to integrate resources (people and property) from outside the company, as well as appropriately "outsource" the project work, and have an overall awareness that transcends the boundaries of the company.

3. Three things in the implementation phase

First, lead the team well and motivate the team through matter-based and people-based methods.

Second, manage the project progress and advance the project in an orderly manner through meetings, documents and related project management work.

Third, properly handle communication and collaboration issues, especially cross-department and cross-department communication issues, and strive to allow all parties to realize their own value in collaboration.

Here I would like to remind you that the basis of collaboration is the sharing of value. The project manager must strive to ensure that all parties involved in the collaboration can obtain material, honorary, or emotional rewards. Such a collaborative relationship Only last.

4. Three things in the control stage

First, identify deviations from the plan, determine whether the change affects the task or the goal, and change according to the situation.

Second, make good use of control work, including cost schedules, personnel load schedules, etc., to match project resources with project progress.

Third, set and manage project milestones, and achieve "big" success of the project by continuously achieving "small" wins.

5. Three things in the closing stage

First, summarize the report, present the project results in an effective form, and make a complete delivery.

Second, project review requires an in-depth analysis of the gap between project goals, project milestones and final results, analyzing gains and losses, and solidifying experience.

Third, project knowledge management is not only about data retention, but more importantly, knowledge transfer and application.

Of course, there are far more than three tasks to be done at each stage. A good project manager does not need to memorize these contents by rote, because these points have been integrated into his overall work plan.

The most important thing is to grasp the magic weapon of project management: the project schedule.

The project schedule is an idealized forecast of the future. Effective execution requires managing project milestones, evaluating the current status, responding to changes, and striking a balance between macro and micro.

The management of project execution involves the resolution of some practical issues.

Our initial project schedules were idealized predictions of future events, but reality always taught us that our predictions of the future were naive. But this does not mean that planning is futile, but it highlights the importance of planning.

A good start is half the battle. For project leaders, a good start means establishing a realistic project plan. The role of project planning is not only to outline a roadmap for how the project will be carried out, but also to help us understand the nature of the project and allow us to prepare for project execution.

The real enemy of the project manager is the unknown. Although sometimes we may suspect that this enemy is premeditated to cause trouble for us, in fact it does not care whether we succeed or not. Only when we fail to plan carefully and cope with uncertainty will this powerful enemy stand in our way.

Therefore, the project plan is very useful on the one hand, but it needs to be constantly adjusted on the other hand. When changes in circumstances cause a plan to fail, stubbornly following the original plan is often no better than having no plan at all. But if we plan well, we have a very powerful tool for managing the future.

If the project manager doesn’t know how to create a realistic project schedule, he won’t know how to implement it. They start by hastily cobbling together a schedule that does not reflect the project's risks, quality, and means of implementation. Based on this schedule, they optimistically estimate a deadline and follow the progress of the project accordingly. By the time the problem arises, they're overwhelmed with details and don't have time to stop and think about it all. So the planning process is worthless in this case. Unfortunately, if the process is planned more properly, many problems that arise during the project can be prevented or avoided without having to pay attention to such tedious details.

How to implement?

Efficient execution, like efficient planning, requires a systematic approach. The most effective way to figure out how to plan is to analyze each element as a separate process or workflow. Likewise, you can use the project plan in different ways during execution. These methods form the following workflow:

The key factors for project managers to pay attention to are:

Outlook planning: A well-planned project will give you time to stop regularly and look to the future. What does the next milestone look like? What should be done to successfully reach this milestone?

Tracking and managing project execution: Most of your time will be spent tracking and managing project execution. How is the project going? How is it different from plan?

Assess the current status: If major problems arise or changes are requested from outside the project, an assessment is required. What does it mean if the project plan deviates from the actual situation? How should we respond? What are the implications of a change request?

Change control: Responding to changes is an essential part of project management. What are the implications of implementing versus not implementing the proposed changes? How can adjustments be made to make changes more acceptable to the project team?

Re-planning: The planning process is not complete just because you have established a baseline for the schedule! A project evaluation or change request requires more than a small change to the project schedule. In other words, you may need to make drastic changes and re-plan the project.

All work is led by the project plan, and each element also receives feedback through the project plan. Obviously, the more realistic the project plan is, the more effectively you can manage the overall project.

Your project team will be involved in every aspect of project execution. They are the ones who do the actual work during project execution and should also be involved in planning the future, assessing the current situation, and re-planning the project. This is key to ensuring teamwork and preventing mutual constraints.

　　Macro and micro, switch freely

As a project manager, everything you do should be closely linked to the context of the general environment - if you ignore this, you will definitely fail. In contrast, you are also responsible for the day-to-day details of the project.

In a project plan with a schedule as its core, the strategy depicts the overall picture, while the schedule provides a detailed breakdown of the workflow by task. Therefore, you must rely on grasping the macro with one hand and the micro with the other in order to manage project execution.

When looking into the future of a project, the first step is to outline the overall situation—strategy. What results will we achieve according to the current project pace? How does it work throughout the project? How do the various tasks relate to each other? Team members should know the answers to these questions—after all, they will help you develop strategy—but when they focus on specific deliverables, they may lose sight of the original goal. Therefore, you need to keep an eye on strategic goals and review the specific tasks that support those goals to ensure that everything is getting done. As you learn more about the situation, you'll want to make sure that the corresponding tasks are completed in the correct order.

Most of the work of tracking project execution is done through the project schedule. Work with team members to document their true work completion—the start, end, effort, or duration of each task—to see how this affects the next milestone and project end deadline. If the schedule is carefully maintained, you'll be able to spot quickly if something deviates from the original plan. Once you identify deviations from your original plan, you should sort out the overall impact against your strategy. Although you may consider adjusting your schedule to continue with your original plan, the best thing you can do is resist this temptation.

Some project managers mess with the schedule and constantly move various tasks around to show that they can meet the deadline. By the time they realize they can't do it, there's no time to save the entire project in other ways. If they had ever stopped to assess the big picture, they would have discovered that the holes in the project were too big to fix and could not be solved by changing a few links on the schedule. These project managers failed to control the details well, but were led by the details.

When the strategy is obviously unfeasible, you should withdraw from your work, evaluate the current situation, and analyze the next steps. Analyze different hypothetical scenarios and you'll know where to choose between strategy and schedule.

Once you have made up your mind, you need to re-plan your strategy. Update your strategy first, then change the tasks to follow that strategy, updating the links and durations on the schedule. This is a continuation of the work you did during the project planning phase. Pay attention to plan dependencies

As a project manager, you have the responsibility to coordinate the overall situation. While project team members are focused on implementing the details, you need to ensure that those details add up to a practical deliverable. While they focus on the job in front of them, your eyes should be looking at what's going to happen tomorrow, in the weeks and months to come.

When you develop a strategy, you first look at how you plan to build your final product over time. At each stage of this strategy, you determine which parts of the final product need to be completed for eventual integration. You need to have a thorough understanding of the current stage and how it affects other stages that follow. The importance of doing this is that once you encounter a problem in the current stage, you have to make a decision, and this decision can directly affect subsequent stages. A contingency plan thrown in hastily at one stage may conflict with subsequent stages. You later have to cancel the emergency plan. Therefore, it is best to address current problems with solutions that are consistent with future work.

As you manage your team, identify which features are essential to the final product and emphasize the importance of integrating all the project's deliverables on time. Team members must understand what work they need to accomplish to begin integrating, and that work may not exactly coincide with their personal priorities. For example, when meeting performance requirements is difficult, developers may focus on solving these constraints and ignore features that other team members need.

Then, if the overlooked functionality is exactly what is needed to begin the integration process, this absence delays the work of other team members.

Pay close attention to the details

Reflecting on strategy (i.e. the big picture) doesn’t take much time. What you really need to focus on is the project schedule and the supporting links in the project plan: quality, risks, means of implementation, etc. In terms of strategy, you should anticipate what will happen in the next few phases, that is, predict months in advance. When it comes to project schedules, you should focus on project details over a shorter time period (usually around four weeks).

When examining the details of the project, the items you need to deal with include:

The next achievement that the entire team is about to achieve: what goals must be achieved and how to achieve them. Consider how to integrate the team and avoid team members working in silos.

For which matters, time is more critical: Which ones must be completed in advance or have a long lead time? Should we speed up progress on certain matters? Team members may have different perceptions and priorities than you do, and items that you feel are time-sensitive may be overlooked by them. You need to remind them and even assist them in their work.

What are the risks? Risks should be linked to deliverables, and there should also be a timeline. As you produce these deliverables or prepare them in advance according to a given timeline, you should consider what you can do to best understand the risks to determine what measures will be effective in the initial risk plan and what actions will be taken if necessary. What other measures can be taken to avoid risks.

During the planning stage, your project plan may have to be assumed or simplified due to time constraints or the inability to predict the future. Now you have less time, but at the same time you start to see actual progress. As you review the project schedule, review your original assumptions and determine whether the original timeline still makes sense. Don’t blindly stick to a plan that has expired. However, you still have to work hard to stick to the milestones you set. You must do everything you can to avoid breaking your promises.

Tracking and managing project execution

Although forward-looking inspections are important, you should spend more time tracking and managing project execution. Tracking is about judging and recording your current progress and comparing it to the standard plan to measure the health of your project's progress. You perform a quick assessment of the project to determine whether a more detailed assessment is required. If you do this regularly and successfully, you'll be able to catch problems early on when they arise, giving you more time to deal with them.

Tracking begins with the project schedule. For ongoing or recently completed tasks, collect the following relevant parameters on a regular basis (usually one week): the actual start time of all started tasks; the actual amount of work completed; the remaining workload of ongoing tasks; the actual completion of completed tasks Time; allocation proportion of allocated resources (if different from the original allocation plan).

These are the "actual situations" you have.

The above list does not include completion percentage, as this parameter can become very subjective. There have been many times where I have been stuck for days or even weeks on a task I had completed 90% of. This parameter is very misleading: if you only update percent complete, your schedule handling software will set the actual start time to the scheduled start time, the actual finish time to the scheduled finish time, and so on. Then when the schedule should be changed, there will be no change. Updating the parameters listed above will force your schedule handling software to calculate percent complete for you. The software also adjusts dates and milestones for downstream tasks based on actual data. Now you can easily see which parts of your project are ahead of schedule and which are behind schedule.

It is necessary to conduct such tracking work regularly. Only when properly maintained will your schedule alert you to potential problems. Moreover, if the schedule is updated every week, the workload is not much. If you usually leave the update work alone, you will be miserable when you start doing it.

If your boss needs an update on the progress of the project at a meeting in a few hours, you'll either have the data readily available, or you'll be left scrambling to update a schedule that's long out of date.

Maintaining a timely and updated schedule is essential to managing a project, but it is not sufficient. The point of the project is not time, but creating a useful product. Time is only a limiting factor. Based on your expectations, you have the project team focus on important milestones that represent the beginning of the integration process. When tracking, you must identify the current status of the project: Is everyone on track to meet the integration deadline? Have they developed the functionality required and planned for the project? Are there potential risks? These answers are then combined to see the impact on future milestones. For example, do your forecasts need to be updated?

When tracking, remember that your most valuable project management tools are your ears. Listening to feedback from team members can reveal unforeseen problems and opportunities. Using this information you learn, you can go a long way toward successfully managing your project.

Also, although it is easy for project managers to get involved in the most important matters of the day, they should not do so. The project manager should be selectively involved in dealing with issues that have a significant impact on the overall situation, such as the next milestone.

Collect information

In order to track and manage the implementation of the project, you need to collect information, that is, to find out how the project is actually progressing. There are two good ways to collect information. One is to communicate with team members individually, and the other is to convene the entire team for a reporting meeting. The two methods are complementary, so you can't just use one or the other.

One-on-one communication: The best way to gather information is to stay in touch with your team members. HP has introduced a very effective management technique called "Management by Walking Around" (MBWA). Not only is this a great way to gather project status information, it also increases the value individual team members bring to the overall project. In fact, as long as the team member doesn't have any urgent tasks at hand, you can just walk up to him and start talking. Start with these questions: How is work going? Any new questions or troubles? Do you need any help?

Then you listen to him and then ask some questions. This is not only to ensure that you understand what he said, but also to enhance the effect of communication. This is a great time to discuss next milestones to be achieved and verify that the team member can complete the project in a timely manner. If you have difficulty completing the task on time, you can discuss possible alternatives and possibly reach a consensus on a solution. If this is not possible, let the team member continue to think about it. If you find particularly good or particularly bad news, you may need to call a team meeting immediately to discuss it.

One thing you need to remember about this type of conversation is that it is a brief, informal chat and not a grilling. You are talking to this member to help him successfully complete his job assignment.

Project status meeting. You should hold regular (usually weekly) status meetings with the entire team. Even though you're gathering information during status meetings, it's more important to keep the team focused on the project, especially the next milestone. Therefore, the meeting should allow everyone to quickly report on the latest progress and problems encountered, and discuss arrangements for the next few weeks. In a team environment with a strong sense of cooperation, team members will share problems encountered and formulate solutions with people outside the status meeting. However, sometimes unexpected situations may occur in the project, which are suitable for discussion in the status meeting.

Ask each member one by one whether they are ready for the upcoming project integration, and if not, in what aspects they are not ready. If you find that someone is unable to complete a deliverable in a timely manner, be sure to brainstorm the impact of this situation on other team members. Have the entire team discuss different scenarios and potential contingency plans together. Create a sense of urgency in the discussion.

Be sure to let the team discuss the strategy.

This way you are managing the pace of final product development, rather than simply managing individual deliverables or time.

Finally, the shorter the meeting, the better. Even if you originally planned to drive for an hour, you can finish it in 15 minutes. If there is no need for discussion, don't spend even one more minute. Team members are willing to hold short meetings. It's a no-brainer that more time should be spent in meetings when major issues arise because everyone is involved in discussing how to solve the actual problem.