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When the Rubber Hits the Road: Managing the Project Plan
By Blair Witzel
December 6, 2004

Introduction
Robert Burns insightfully noted, "The best laid schemes of mice and men oft go agley." He probably was not writing about project management in that poem, but this particular line could apply to almost any project ever conceived. The team develops an excellent project plan during initiation, and soon find themselves off the beaten path.

Lola experienced this also.

She created a plan to develop a contact database for an upcoming fundraising campaign. The project was on schedule until the work began. She then found that activities took longer and were more work than expected.

Project managers call this a "challenged project", or in more common parlance, "life in the real world". She and I were discussing how to manage a project plan during our latest session at the restaurant.
What "Managing the Plan" Means
Remember when Lola developed her project plan? It included activities, resources, effort, duration, and dependencies. All of these are important, but Lola must focus on the duration and effort when managing her project plan. The database must be completed on time and require no more work than originally estimated. If either deviates significantly from the original plan, the project is considered "challenged".

For example, Lola originally estimated that it would take forty hours to program the database over two weeks. The estimated effort was forty hours and the estimated duration was two weeks. If the programmer works for eighty hours over a period of four weeks, Lola has a problem with both the duration and effort. The project is late and requires more work than expected.

Managing the plan means trying to keep it on schedule and to use no more than the original amount of effort expected.
Tips to Keep it on Track
Lola laughed when I told her that the trick to delivering a project on schedule and within the allocated effort is to let it not get out of hand in the first place. The idea of an "unchallenged" project was a fantasy for her. It is a fantasy for most project managers, and often quite difficult to achieve. However, there are a few basic tips that are easy to implement and may help you emerge relatively unscathed:

Have regular project team meetings
Project team meetings should happen every couple of weeks with all of the key people working on the project. These are opportunities to discuss whether deliverables are being produced on time and within the original effort allotted. They also provide a venue for discussing issues threatening the project and for resolving them. Meeting every couple of weeks for half an hour prevents the schedule and effort slipping out of hand.

Write regular status reports
The status report does not have to be long just one page of bullet points! It includes activities and deliverables since the previous one, and the major tasks and deliverables to be completed before the next one. This helps the project team stay focused on the critical work. Distribute and discuss status reports at the team meetings.

Manage the dependencies
Remember those dependencies from a previous article? Dependencies are the activities that are linked together. One must finish before another starts. For example, the programmer needs to design the database before he can program the database. On the other hand, creating the user manual can happen anytime before the training session when the project is nearly done. If you do something early in the project that is not absolutely necessary until the end, do not worry too much if it gets delayed. Worry instead about those tasks that are linked together.
These tips may seem simple, and they are. They are easy to implement, but will go a long way to keeping the project on track and your sanity intact.
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Lola is a good project manager. She is doing all of the right things, but she still finds her project behind schedule and over the allocated effort. Luckily, there are a few ways to bring the project back and again grab hold of the reins:

Eliminate non-essential deliverables
Many deliverables are not absolutely essential to successfully delivering the project. Remind yourself why you are doing the project. Are there any peripheral deliverables that can be eliminated? Can you reduce the scope of some of the key deliverables? This will save you both time and effort.

E.g. Lola decided that the user manual did not have to provide step by step instructions on using the database. She reduced it to a "cheat sheet" of tips on how to do basic tasks in the database. She significantly reduced the size of non-essential deliverables, thereby reducing effort and duration.

Run activities in parallel
Look at your project plan again. Is there an activity that is currently dependent on another finishing that could be done at the same time? Doing two activities at once will speed up the schedule, but usually not reduce the effort.

E.g. Lola was going to completely design the database before starting on development. She later realized that the development could begin before the design was completely done. It would not affect the database quality, but would save her two weeks of duration.

Use one deliverable for more purposes
Use the work that you did for one deliverable and reuse it towards the completion of another. This can only happen in certain instances.

E.g. The programmer wrote step-by-step instructions for testing the database. Lola was able to clean these instructions up a bit and use them as the cheat sheets for training.
And once you have done all of the above, don’t forget to update the project plan! The project will have changed and you need to document it and make sure everyone knows!!!
Summary
Managing the project plan means trying to deliver the project on schedule and within the allocated effort. Lola found that despite all of her best planning and management, it still fell behind schedule. Her project became challenged. This is common for all projects at one time or another. Fortunately, we have some tricks that we can pull out of our project management hats to rescue the project…and ourselves!! Eliminating non-essential deliverables, running activities in parallel, and reusing deliverables are three tricks one can use to put a project back on track.

Lola is not done yet though. She still has to worry about project risks, budget, communications, and all of that other stuff. It could be a long few months. But she will get through it. And so will you.

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Blair Witzel (blair@mcdoane.com) is a member of the Project Management Institute and a consultant with McDonnell Doane + Associates, an information management and technology firm focusing on the not-for-profit and public sectors. His work centres on managing multi-project portfolios and working with organizations to develop project management methodologies to more effectively deliver projects.