Project Set Up as Critical Success Factor

August 3rd, 2007 by Carmen Schubert

While numerous articles and books have been published on how to run projects successfully, most of them focus on formal aspects of project management: How to make gant charts, manage the critical path and how to do proper project controlling. In our experience, it is important to know the theory, but during the practical application, we experienced project management theory to contribute only a smaller part to the success of a project. In our series, we try to shed some light on some of the more informal aspects of successfully running a project. Usually, it is said that running a project requires good coordination. Well, yeah!

However, there is no single best way to coordinate a project

Project Set Up

Project success is highly dependent on the project characteristics and initial set-up. The size and form of the project hereby plays an important role. It is a major difference if it is a new, innovative project or a “standard project” that has been done before, or if it is made up of 5 or 30 team members (actually, we do not cover here very large projects, but rather the majority of the projects. The larger a project gets, the more important formal project management gets).

Running a project where team members know each other saves time and effort of building relationships. Due to the fact that they have already worked together, the team works more efficiently. If the members of the project team have not worked together before, time has to be invested (and planned for!) to get to know each other and to form a team.

Whether team members work full-time or part-time in a project also effects (or restricts) coordination and as a consequence, the results of the project. It is much more difficult to organize meetings and coordinate activities if a team member only works three days a week on the project. The physical distance to other team members also has impacts on communication and coordination. If the team works together in one office, information, problems, findings and results can be shared more easily and quickly. Whereas if the team is separated (either through separated offices or locations), it takes longer to communicate with each other and therefore, also requires higher efforts to coordinate.

Therefore, before even try to establish coordination procedures in a project, it is worthwhile first to try to optimize the initial settings to minimize potential hazzle:

• Try to get full-time project members.

• Try to get a team which has worked together before. I consider it preferable to have team members with known strengths and weaknesses. This reduces the unknown risk factors: You can plan with known weak team members, but it is much more difficult to keep a project on track where you find out about weak team members in the middle of the project.

• Try to get your team at one location, on one floor level, or, if possible, within one room. Fight for that! This reduces the effort to communicate relevant information, and reduces time to handle information gaps and misunderstandings. Even with all modern communication tools, nothing beats personal face to face communication with no set-up effort.

Only after you tried everything to optimize the project set-up for internal communication (and there will be always real-world restrictions in your way), you should think about communication and coordination channels, such as

• Formal team meetings,

• Status reports,

• Email distribution lists,

• Video conferences,

• Steering committees meeting,

• Wikis

• and all the other ways people invent to work around a sub-optimal project set-up.

Upcoming next: The two things to know about project management: “Managing risks and expectations”.