A Failure to Plan is a Plan for Failure

A Failure to Plan is a Plan for Failure

I am frequently asked to describe the role (and hence the value) of the Project Manager. As our clients review our proposals, one consistent area of focus is on the time and budget allocated to “Project Management”. Even in good economic climates, and certainly in poor ones, our clients are always looking for ways to reduce the costs associated with an implementation project, and the project management line seems like an obvious area to cut back. I am very confident that this approach is a serious mistake, with both short-term and long-term implications.

Let me begin by offering a definition of the role of Project Manager: The individual responsible to the customer and the consulting management for project delivery and execution. The Project Manager schedules and coordinates project resources, ensures that technical and application consulting resources are successfully executing on the established project plan. The Project Manager ensures that both time and budget targets are being met and has approval authority for all project-related time and expense charges. (adapted from the role-tailored learning plans from Microsoft).

Based on this definition, the role of a project manager seems very cut and dried. Source and allocate the appropriate resources, monitor their progress on specific project tasks, provide periodic reviews of progress, and keep a close eye on the budget and timeline.

If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there?

Consider the example of using a car to drive yourself from your current location to your desired destination. The PM definition above is all about the mechanical activities involved in driving the car. Start the car, be sure it is full of gas, put the transmission into Drive, and release the brake and so on.

But you should be saying to yourself, “hold on, something is missing from all this. Where is the vision?” You would be exactly correct. In the analogy above, the critical missing element is the map. We have answered the question of “How do we operate the car”, but completely ignored the question of “Where are we going?” Reaching your destination is the result of knowing BOTH where you want to go and how to get there.

So far, our definition of a Project Manager is solely focused on the tactical aspects of project management, but a successful PM must also bring a robust set of strategic skills to the implementation as well. The PM must have a vision of what needs to be accomplished, beginning with the desired final result in mind, and then working backwards to ensure that every aspect of the required elements of that vision are present and accounted for.

In my current role as a system architect and solutions consultant, I make every possible effort to develop and define that vision before the PM has been engaged on the implementation. Working with the key members of the client’s project team, meeting with their executives and managers, it is my responsibility to transform their desires and goals into a more concrete set of specific requirements. These requirements and the statements from the client as to their desires and goals provide me with the basic elements I need to create the overall vision of what the project is intended to produce.

However, my time on the engagement is limited, and I cannot produce the level of depth and detail needed to move from the “big-picture” view to the discreet tasks and activities that will make up the tactical activities within the project plan. Continuing the driving analogy from above, it is the Project Manager that provides the turn-by-turn instructions needed to reach the destination, and to monitor our progress along the route.

It is the Project Manager who fills this critical gap between the initial, high-level project vision and the highly detailed project plan’s task and resource assignments. It is their wealth of experiences, both in industry and company-specific processes and standards, as well as the software being implemented, that creates the bridge between the 50,000 foot view that I can provide, and the boots on the ground work of the technical and application consultants who will perform the bulk of the activities.

At first glance, it may be tempting to try to reduce the role (and hence the expense) of having a Project Manager playing a prominent role in the implementation, but without a knowledgeable and experienced PM first defining and then driving the project, the probability of successfully reaching (and exceeding) the goals and requirements of our clients is greatly reduced. In the short-term, this will mean delays and frustrations, while in the long-term the project will suffer from costly overruns and potentially a total failure of the project.

With this in mind, let’s restate our definition of a Project Manager:

The individual responsible to the customer and the consulting management for the project’s vision, delivery and execution. The Project Manager, working with the client’s executives, first defines the goals and objectives of the project, and then creates the project plan. The PM then schedules and coordinates the project’s resources, ensures that technical and application consulting resources are successfully executing on the established project plan. The Project Manager ensures that both time and budget targets are being met and has approval authority for all project-related time and expense charges.