The Project Guru

The most important piece of information at the beginning of any project/program is the "project charter". The information revealed in the project charter will direct how the project will be ran, what will the project do, who is involved, what will the project deliver, and when will it complete.

I would say roughly 88% of projects do not have a project charter hence the high statistic of project failure. It has happened that the horse came before the buggy so never could get major forward moment since the project team would always have to play catchup.

Consider the following components of a Project Charter:

• General Information: Who are the stakeholders and major participants


• Project Charter Purpose: The why


• Project Executive Summary: What the project is about


• Organizational Breakdown and/or Roles and Responsibilities: How each participant plays a role. Some advanced examples are RACIs, RAMs, and Organization Charts


• Communication Plan:


• Project Scope: Define goals, objectives and deliverables


• (part of scope definition) Project Deliverables and/or Work Breakdown: What is being delivered? Can be a list of deliverable milestones, or to an even better approach creating a WBS.


• Change Control Mgmt: Manage changes by defined processes


• Quality Mgmt: How to go about ensuring quality


• Risk Mgmt: Identification, prioritization, and possible mitigating actions


• Status Reporting: Determine schedule of standard and key meetings


• Signatures: Key stakeholders for agreement of the Charter.

Some items can be added or subtracted depending on what is important to the needs of the business and project team. Having a project charter can only lead to success and not the other way around. But it is important that if people agree to the charter that they all take responsibility in following and participating in the project processes defined herein.

Problem: you have a set a documents that are detrimental to several key stakeholders but for some reason, a one week process become a month and a half. What just happened?

Solution: Define the Handover Process and Identifying Key Stakeholders
This entails systematically knowing what are the key documents/deliverables, who are the key stakeholders and outlining the process of how the document/deliverable gets passed down to the next stages. Finally, communicate and obtain agreement.

Example:
My example deals with one that entails Process Narratives. So there was a key document which was never identified with the entire project team. So two stakeholders were out of the loop. Not until the time came that they need to develop their own materials based upon this document that they called a red flag to obtain this information. Well, as it turned out, because no one consulted the two stakeholders, the document was inadequate for use. This then required re-work so as to meet the necessary value to the other stakeholders.

In addition, because no one knew who the document should have gone to and by which order, additional time was wasted.

One of the frustrations of new Project Managers has to do with creating your project in MS Project or for some of you Primavera hoping to get everything in one fell swoop. We all wish we could have a plan in our head and put it on paper in one try. First of all don't get Frustrated and don't try to get it all in one attempt.

Go ahead and put down all the tasks and activities you can think about. There doesn't have to be any order, categorization or specific madness to put it on paper. The beauty of it is to start brainstorming your ideas then rearranging them on your project which is as simple as arranging items on MS Excel.

The next step is to determine the order but utilize the people that are working with you to develop an agreed schedule. You build rapport, you get learning and understanding, and achieve your main goal of creating a schedule.