Project Management 101 30 July, 2009 By Carolyn Heinze

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Underpromising William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Services: I Can See Clearly Now Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cutting the margin so many times William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels The Sign of Success - High Maintenance William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Question for the Times: Build or Resell? Gary Bixler - AMD

The key to a successful, on-time project is defining its scope, says Erick Simpson, vice president and CIO of Garden Grove, Calif.-based Intelligent Enterprise and founder of MSP University. "Once you've developed that scope and get the client to agree to [it] so that you have a finite box of what the project entails," he explains, "then you can develop a project plan from that scope."

To do so, channel partners have to be very savvy about how they analyze their customers' immediate needs, as well as their overreaching goals for the organization.

"Business analysis goes after not just what they say they want, but what they think they want and are not telling you because they don't know how to express it," says Linda H. Schumacher, a certified project management professional at Pittsburgh-based Schumacher Consulting Inc., and author of Ready, Set, Succeed! How Successful Projects Triumph Over Business as Usual. "You have to make sure you establish your identified requirements as well as the implied requirements."

CONTROLLING SCOPE CREEP

Rudolf Melik, co-founder and CEO of Tenrox, an international project management software and workforce management solutions company headquartered in Glendale, Calif., describes the two approaches that his firm applies in a preemptive effort to control scope creep: the waterfall method, in which requirements are defined at the outset with the understanding that if a change is requested, there is a chance that the schedule and budget will be modified; and the agile method, in which a set number of days are allocated to the project, along with a list of prioritized goals.

If, for example, only 16 of 20 tasks were completed within the deadline, there is an understanding that this still constitutes a successful project. "The unfortunate part is that a lot of people who do these projects try to mix the methodologies, and that's where projects fail," Melik says. "They go in with hard requirements, but the customer is not ready to commit to them."

Every project should be broken down into specific phases, and channel partners need to develop guidelines to measure the risk and success of each phase. "There has to be a point at which you either go forward and implement the phase, or you roll back because you encounter a situation or a problem," Simpson explains, adding that each phase should have a point of no return.

The risks associated with each portion of a project should be discussed ahead of time so that both the solution provider and the client can take the proper precautions. "There is risk in a project because you are doing something that probably hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done quite this way before," says Schumacher. When evaluating the risk of a project, channel partners and their clients should implement elements to mitigate it.

COMMUNICATION IS KING

Any number of factors can prevent the timely execution of the "next phase" of a project, be they client-driven (the customer may not have allocated the agreed-upon resources), partner-driven (the solution provider may have made an error along the way), or supplier-driven (a vendor may have delivered the wrong part).

This is where good communications can save the day: By notifying the client before, or when, a problem occurs, channel partners can manage their customers' expectations and keep everyone on the same page.

"Even if we come up with all kinds of impediments and the project doesn't go as smoothly as we had all hoped it would, as long as we are communicating to the client about what's going on, we have a much better chance of maintaining their satisfaction about the way we handle these situations," Simpson says. Reasonable customers will understand that issues will arise, but it's how you resolve them that counts.

One of the biggest obstacles to effective project delivery is the change order: the last-minute request that threatens not just the schedule, but the budget as well. To keep change orders under control, channel partners should develop a policy that the client agrees to up front, which lays out the process the company will follow when a modification to the original plan is required.

"If you don't have a change-control process, and you have enough of these occurrences pop up involving a few hours here and there, all of a sudden, at the end of the project, you're 10, 12, or 14 hours beyond what you had originally quoted the client," says Simpson.

It's extremely difficult to go back after the fact and build in those additional hours, forcing many providers to simply write them off--and lose money. This is why, Simpson underlines, it's so important to clearly define the project's scope in the first place.

TAKE STOCK AT COMPLETION TIME

The last stage of a project should include a review of the overall effort, with the goal of the client signing off on it at its completion. This not only provides a venue for clients and channel partners to discuss the issues that surfaced throughout the process, but it also facilitates the processing of the final payment.

"Having that after-action review with the client is important," says Simpson. "[Providers] need to have that project completion authorization signed off by the client so that they can invoice the project."

Schumacher notes that in the past, experienced project managers may have been viewed as extraneous, because they were associated with overhead rather than sales. "I think that companies are learning more and more these days that this is not the case, because they fill a key role that's pretty unique," she says. "Developers may not make good project managers. It's not an expendable skill."

For More Information

* Ganthead.com: The online community for IT project managers. www.gantthead.com

* IT Project Management Blog: Strategies for listening, providing leadership, using effective communications, and more. itpmpro.blogspot.com

* MSP University: Provides IT and managed services business transformation training and resources for solution providers. www.mspu.us

* PM Solutions: White papers that address a range of project management issues and challenges. www.pmsolutions.com/white-papers

* Schumacher Consulting Inc.: Project management books and CDs. www.schumacherconsultinginc.com

* Tenrox: Project workforce management solutions. www.tenrox.com

CAROLYN HEINZE is a freelance writer/editor. Reach her at carolynheinze.blogspot.com.

This story was originally published in ChannelPro-SMB.