Lessons Learnt from Project Management

There is a famous quote that says "Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail". This statement is so true ! Planning is one part of the project management. The Project Management Institute defines 9 bodies of project management (PMBOK). I am not going to bore you with the theories of PMBOK. Rather I will share my experiences and in the process provide few tips that, I hope, will be useful to you.


I have seen many technical engineers not giving due credit to planning. In their view, no amount of planning guarantees that the schedules will be met. I make a counter-point that "You do NOT need a plan if you know that you can meet all the schedule milestones". What the planning does is to help you track the tasks, so that you can plan contingency actions for any slips in the schedule. Without a proper plan, you will not know when and for what tasks you should take any contingency actions.


A typical R&D project has three degrees of project management freedom - Scope, Resource and Schedule. As part of the project boundary agreement a flexibility matrix is created, which essentially tells which of these degrees of freedom is least critical, medium critical and most-critical. At the beginning of the project a schedule is drafted with a defined set of resources for a defined scope of the project. Rarely does a project go as per plan with zero variance on all these three degrees of freedom. When the project slips then you need to use the flexibility matrix to decide if scope has to be changed, or add more resources or accept the schedule slips. If schedule is least flexible then either scope has to be limited or additional resources should be added to the project. Having a project plan and tracking it will help in taking these contingency actions at the correct time.

Following are the lessons in project management that I learnt :

1. SCOPE is KING - In my experience I have seen that schedule slips not because people do not put in their best, but because they under-estimate the effort. When they estimate the duration of a task it is based on their gut feeling. Scoping the task is crucial to make better estimates of the effort. You have to list the assumptions that you make for coming up with the effort estimates. Listing these assumptions can bring clarity in the scoping of the task and hence results in better estimates. So next time you are asked to estimate the effort, list the assumptions and scope it better. If you are the project leader, ask the team member to list the assumptions used to come up with the estimates. If you find any discrepancy in the scoping, you should point it out. This will help the persons make a better estimate next time. What applies to making a better estimate of the duration of the task also applies for the project. At the beginning of the project quality time should be spent on the scope of the project. Involve all the team members and experienced people to scope the project.

2. Tracking is Key : A good plan is only the start of effective project management. Good project management calls for effective tracking of the project. Most often the tracking of the project at the beginning of the project is not rigorous. Because of this the project starts to slip. If you rigorously track the project from the very beginning, any surprises that can derail the schedule can be found upfront and you have more time to correct it. In order to effectively track the plan, the project plan should have milestones that have reasonable resolution of the task duration, say a week or more. Having a project plan with tasks of 1 day or 2 days will be a nightmare to track.

3. Task-based Scheduling : Do not schedule tasks based on resources. It defeats the whole purpose of effective project management. If a resource is slipping the current task, the person's unavailability to work on the next task will make the project plan show a critical path that is not the true. Always schedule the tasks based on their dependency. This gives the flexibility to re-assign resources on the tasks that are slipping so that the critical path can be alleviated.

4. Murphy's Buffer: When you ask a person to estimate the duration of his tasks, his estimates are usually padded with some buffer. This buffer gives him a feeling of comfort that he can meet his schedules easily. However, in reality Parkinson's law takes over - Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion, and in the end the schedules may not be met. Eliyahu Goldratt in his book "Critical Chain" talks about student syndrome , students working on their homework at the eleventh hour, due to which the person working on the task does not get serious till he approaches the deadline. There is reasonably a high probability that he may miss the schedule as his start was late. These little buffers at the end of each tasks blow up the project schedule. The approach to counter this syndrome is to ask people to plan their schedule a bit agressively with no buffer for the task. Add the buffer at the project level for the tasks in the critical paths to address any uncertainities. So remember project buffer is for Murphy and not for Parkinson.

5 Early Contingency actions : If you track the project rigorously from the start then you get an early warning on any slips in the schedule. I have seen project leads reluctant to act early on any contingency actions. I have also heard them complain that getting a extra resource from other team would not help as they would have to spend time ramping this new resource and it would not be worth it. Get over this reluctance !!. Investing in the new resource early in the project will help a long way when the project gets under more schedule pressure towards the end. Remember the last 10% of the task takes 90% of time. So having extra resources never hurts. Again when you involve the resource from a different group early, it gives him time to do a complete job. His sense of belongingness to the task increases. So you can potentially get to use his services even beyond the official time-line of help. Remember never say NO to the extra resource you can get, to pull your project back on schedule.

6 Continuous Communication : Keep communicating with all the team members of the project continuously. Show them the connect between the tasks they do and how it relates to the project goals and to the organisational priorities. Over communication never hurts.

These are not the end of the lessons - with every project I learn new lessons. If I keep up this momentum of blogging perhaps in the future I would come up with next revision. Till then I hope these few lessons I learnt doing project management was useful to you. Happy reading.



- Ram