For projects, standardization involves two distinct areas; one is project management.
Standardization involves using tools and executing activities to build plans and manage according to those plans. The other area is technical. Standardization involves identifying requirements and specifications, and constructing a product that satisfies both.
There are many options for moving toward standardization when managing projects.
People can join professional organizations, thereby exposing them to what has and has not worked in similar environments. The organization can also purchase or develop a standardized process for managing projects. Regardless of how the organization obtains a standardized process, the key is to develop or adopt one that people can agree to and that is compatible with the company’
s culture.
5. LEARN FROM THE PAST
The great philosopher Santayana once said that he who fails to study history is destined to repeat it. Unfortunately, because few people learn from the past, history often repeats itself on projects. In fact, many projects are dismal reminders that nothing changes.
Contrary to Henry Ford, who once commented that all history is bunk, learning from the past offers several benefits. It helps organizations avoid costly mistakes that occurred on similar projects in the past. In addition, it helps companies capitalize on previous successes. It also builds confidence and reduces risks for people who have worked on earlier projects.
Learning from the past involves learning both from oneself and from others. Of the two learning levels, learning from oneself is more difficult because it requires introspection. While learning from others can also be difficult, it is less so because there may be documentation or people may be available to provide an oral history or insights.
From personal experiences, team members can visualize the current pro ject in the context of one from the past, identifying similarities and dissimilarities, and determining what worked and what did not work. This requires considerable introspection and objectivity. From the experiences of others, team members can also identify similar projects from the past, and then interview the participants, or read audit reports and “lessons learned,” if they exist. Of course, the challenge is to obtain knowledge about the projects and gain access to their information.
6. MAINTAIN ONGOING COMMUNICATIONS
More projects have probably failed due to poor communications than from any other factor. Ironically, while everyone recognizes the contribution of good communications to success, it still remains in a dismal state.
One reason is that people confuse the medium with communication. A medium is the vehicle for communicating, acting as an enabler of communication, rather than a substitute for it. With the growing presence of email, videoconferencing, and World Wide Web technologies, many people assume that they will be good communicators.
All too often, the medium simply gives a poor communicator a louder voice. At least from a project management perspective, the medium is not the message.
The other reason for poor communications is the lack of team members’
distinction
between data and information. While data is unprocessed, information is data that is converted into something meaningful. When team members confuse the two, they send data rather than information, whereupon the recipient must go through the data to derive the information. Because this confusion manifests in electronic as well as paper format, many project team members generate countless data files and emails, and build innumerable Web pages replete with data but not information.
By contrast, good communication is providing the right information at the right time in the right amount to the right person. When that occurs, people operate on the
“same wavelength.” They take part in better dialog, reducing the number and magnitude of misunderstandings. As a result of good communication, team members are also better able to adapt to change.
To realize the benefits of maintaining good communications, team members can perform three actions. The first is to concentrate on generating information rather than data. This requires focusing on the needs of the audience, in terms of format and level of content. The second way team members can improve communications is to ensure that data and subsequent information are current and relevant. In fact, all too many projects produce data and information that are outdated and irrelevant.
The third method of improving communications is to use the chosen medium as the principal means of communication to obtain the necessary data and information. For examp le, while a project might establish a Web site for this purpose, some people might be intimidated by the technology. In such cases, good communications cannot occur, despite the best technology.
7. RECORD THE WORK BEING DONE
On most projects, team members perform considerable work in management and development. Unfortunately, the work often goes unrecorded, and the knowledge and expertise is lost due to turnover and time constraints. This is a tremendous loss to companies that could have saved this knowledge and expertise, applying it on future, similar projects.
If companies made an effort to record the knowledge and expertise of what went well on a project, they would gain several benefits for future projects. Such a history improves performance among team members, because people can focus on issues not dealt with previously, which may not be “showstoppers.” It also forces people to think about their actions, and determine where and when to spend their effort and time. In addition, a recorded history tells people what has worked in the past, enabling them to predict with reasonable accuracy the impact of their actions on the current project.
On an existing project, team members see the value in creating a trail of activity and auditing previous performance; they thereby gain an understanding of what was done and how, and why things were done a certain way. Finally, sharing the recorded information with everyone fosters good communications among team members.
If recording offers many benefits, why is it not done more thoroughly and more often?
For one, it easier to react and see some tangible, immediate results than to take a proactive approach, which produces long-term rather than immediate results. In addition, such a process requires administrative overhead. Finally, even if it is done, it often gets buried, so it is overlooked and eventually lost.
Obviously, these are monumental challenges. However, organizations can take steps to ease the burden. First, they can see the time and effort to record activities as a necessary activity, establishing it as a requirement rather than an option. Second, they can establish an agreed-upon format and approach before the project begins.
Waiting until after the project starts only slows momentum, frustrates people, and often becomes a futile attempt at reconstruction.
8. REUSE PREVIOUS WORK
While it is good for team members to feel creative on a project, unfortunately, their desire for creativity often leads to reinventing the wheel. There are major consequences when that occurs, including wasted effort due to repeating work, slowing of the project’
s momentum, a failure to capitalize on the success of the past, and extension of the project’
s life cycle. In other words, it is nonproductive.
Reuse enables organizations to use what was done before again, in a similar situation. The benefits include expediting the project life cycle, allowing team members to focus on more important issues, increasing the product’
s reliability, and
enabling team members to make modifications quickly. Because plans and products are built modularly, reuse also reduces complexity. Finally, it allows more accurate planning.
Reuse occurs on both the project management and technical development levels. For project management, teams may reuse sections of schedules from similar projects, segments of files loaded into automated scheduling packages, report formats and contents, and forms. Examples of reuse related to technical development include code, models, files generated from software tools, and specifications.
Teams can take several actions to maximize the benefits of reuse. They can acquire knowledge of what occurred previously on other projects, enabling them to
“cannibalize” what was done well. To obtain information about previous work, team members can review the documentation of earlier projects, interview participants on those projects, and read case histories in professional journals of similar projects.
Team members can also rely on personal experience to maximize the benefits of reuse. Wide exposure to many projects in different environments results in a greater breadth of experience from which the team can learn. That knowledge, in turn, makes it easier to determine what to reuse. In addition, teams can use professional and business organizations as a source of contacts with individuals who can provide, for free, insight on what worked well on similar projects. These organizations can also provide materials for reuse, such as forms and checklists.
9. SEEK BUY-IN BY THOSE INVOLVED
Perhaps the most powerful way to get a project to progress rapidly is through commitment by the people doing the work. Because buy-in provides people with
ownership and a sense of empowerment, it generates a greater sense of responsibility and accountability. In turn, less effort is required to follow up on tasks.
Buy-in also encourages initiative.
Unfortunately, because many projects become one- man shows, there is little commitment. As a result, estimates are often unrealistic, representing scientific wildly assumed guesses (swags), rather than being based on reliable, statistical calculations. There can also be a lack of commitment to the schedule, with team members filling in to be determined (TBD), rather than actually estimating task schedules. As time moves on and such consequences become aggravated, the lack of commitment can affect the project’