I’ve noticed a certain feeling attached to high quality products of our day. We can all think of these products that seem to define us and help build our identity. We feel like these products satisfy a need we didn’t even know we had and that feeling influences a positive emotional response for us to buy the products. That feeling we get from these high quality products is actually built into the product by how it is designed and developed right from the beginning.
In order to build that feeling into the product, we also have to have a high quality design and development process. If our teams can feel like they have a high quality design and development process, the products they develop will also carry that feeling of high quality. Building a solid foundation allows our project teams to feel free to manage projects successfully and influences a positive emotional response for them to develop the high quality products of tomorrow.
A high quality design and development process is often governed by a project management system. We have to put in the effort at becoming experts at the basics of project management if we want to develop a high quality design and development process. Let’s review four basic elements of a project—scope of work, time management, cost estimates and defining the desired grade of quality.
When I think about project management, I tend to draw similarities to sporting events. In this case, when we think about how a running race is set up, we’ll see the basic elements of a project. Think about how we plan a race. We need to know how long the race will be, the route it will take and quite importantly, where the finish line will be. We may need to know where the check points will be, or aid stations so we can make sure the racers are doing well along the way. All of these details are brought together to create a collection of project parameters.
A collection of project parameters is generally called a Scope of Work. A scope of work sets the limits of our project in some fundamental ways. The scope of work may change throughout the project, but the key here is to keep the scope of work up-to-date when changes happen. This will become very important as more people are involved in our projects. Let’s put the scope of work down on a single sheet of paper called the One Page Plan as well as the rest of our project fundamentals that we will cover next.
With the scope of work capturing the general parameters and outputs of a project, we now need to get more detailed to define tasks. Continuing with our running race analogy, we want to know more specific details like what the date of the race will be, when registration will close and categories for the racers as well as many others. These detailed tasks define action that need to be taken to complete each one of the more broad project scope of work items.
Project tasks also include time estimates of actual work to complete each task as well as the overall task duration. There are whole industries and software dedicated to time management, but once again, we will keep it simple and add these time estimates to our One Page Plan. Estimate the number of hours it will take to complete the task, then estimate over how many days the work can be done. For example, we might estimate that a 4 hour task (task hours) will be completed over the next 4 days (task duration).
Most things in life cost money and our project requires us to identify and estimate these items. Even the entry fee for our running race is a representation of estimating costs. We understand how much time it will take from our time-estimating step, and we know the dollar amount of what an hour of our time costs, so we multiply the time estimates with the dollar amount per hour to get our labor cost for our project.
Labor costs are not the only costs of a project so we also need to look at materials and supplies or any other directly related cost of a project and add that to our overall project costs. Projects never go the way we think, so we need to add a bit more money to the project to make sure we don’t run out of money. Plan on about 10 to 15 percent of our cost estimates to add to the total project costs as a contingency. With cost estimates complete, let’s add them to the One Page Plan as well.
Scope of work, Time, and Cost are three main components of a project, but the final project component may be the most important; at least to the end customer. Customers mostly care about whether the product influences them to feel like they need it, and that feeling influences them to take action with their wallets. For our running race, it may be having a course well-marked out, an easy registration process or a large triumphant finish line with music cheering you on toward the end of the race. This level of detail and consistency is defined as the Grade of Quality we intend to assure our product will have.
“What is the acceptable workmanship of the project outputs so that we can meet or exceed the scope of work parameters?,” is a perfect question to ask when deciding on a grade of quality. As an example, if we are making a pen and we choose a mid-level grade of quality like the brand Parker, we wouldn’t accept our output if it only had the quality of a low-level grade BIC pen. This grade of quality is also important to establish up front so when project changes happen, we have a standard to measure the changes against to know whether we should accept the changes or not. To follow suit with the other basic project elements, add the quality grade we choose to the One Page Plan.
At the end of this planning session, we are looking for ways to take action as soon as possible. It’s similar to someone signing up for a running race far in advance, but they aren’t yet ready, so they can take action and start training. Taking action as soon as possible is also one of the biggest lessons I have learned in my career so far. Planning enough to have a direction to take action gives us the best chance of discovering if our product is high quality and strikes the correct feeling. Iterating and trying things will produce a better result than planning every detail and not taking iterative action.
We should start a project and take action as soon as we feel like we know where we’re going, but that stretches us just a bit to grow. Focusing on the 20% of activities that affect 80% of the results at the start of a project will get the best results as we take action. The final details will fill in when the major activities are complete.
At a very basic level, we just defined a project with these elements:
Project Scope of Work (Scope of Work)
Task Time Estimates (Time)
Project Cost Estimates (Cost)
Deliverable Quality Standards (Quality)
Now is the point where we take action and start running the race. Think about these elements and what feels right to manage during a project. The next time you start a project, write down the project parameters as simply as you can on a One Page Plan, and keep them up to date as things change. Feel free to manage your projects instead of how so many of us have felt before; the projects are managing us! Let’s feel that positive emotional response in the project management process, so our project outputs having that certain feeling of a high quality product.