The African Project Manager - Just In Time

Just in Time

Every Project Managers should be cognisant of the “iron triangle” of project

management. Sometimes called the triple constraints of projects these three
elements by definition ultimately determine the outcome (successful or otherwise)
of any project. They are project scope, time and cost. We covered Project Scope in
the last chapter and here focus on time, the management of which is the nemesis of
innumerable project managers and the bane of many a project.

As human beings, one of the things we always think we have most abundantly is
time whilst what we really have most inadequately during a project is time. For this
reason, time is one of the most difficult elements a project manager has to manage.
Nowhere else does the popular saying “Time is money” find as much resonance as
in the management of projects. It is a matter of fact that Project Managers who
succeed in meeting their project schedule deadlines invariably lay the path for
staying within their project budget. One of, if not the most common cause of
project budget overspend is an inability to properly plan for and manage the timing
of project activities.

Project environments can be extremely turbulent with management activities

ranging from team and project meetings, report writing, guiding, directing, conflict
resolution, planning and re-planning through to stakeholder communications and
crisis management. Whilst in an ideal situation, the project manager manages these
activities, in Africa, project managers will often find themselves juggling their time
between managing them and actually carrying out some of the activities
themselves. This is because of the invariably uncertain nature of the project
managers role in project execution.

As time is a project constraint, effective time management principles must be

employed to manage it as a resource. This begins with the ability to accurately
estimate the time required to complete individual project activities during planning.
Accurate time estimation is a fundamental skill essential for good project
management whose value cannot be over emphasised. It’s important for two main
reasons:

1. It drives the setting of deadlines for delivery and expectations of projects,

and will therefore play have a significant impact on all stakeholders (sponsor,

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The African Project Manager - Just In Time

team and users) assessment of your reliability and competence as a project

manager.

2. It forms the basis of determining project costs and budgets for the delivery
of the project. It will also form the basis of the projects terms and conditions
in the contract and its profitability (or lack thereof) if it is a commercial
undertaking.

Planning for Time

Understand the Expected Outcome

To effectively plan for time in your project, as a project manager the first thing you
need to do is to fully understand what it is you need to achieve as an outcome of
the project. This is referred to as “planning backward” or as Stephen Covey puts it
in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, beginning with the desired
end result in mind. I strongly advise that you write down a description of the
completed project as the start of this exercise. Then review each step of the project
at an activity/task level in detail making sure there are no "unknowns" or grey areas
that have not been properly identified. Finally, make sure that any item that will
consume project time as a resource is known. I have found that the best way to
carry out this review exercise is to quite literally list all the component tasks you
have identified in in writing. Whilst it could be time consuming (no pun intended), it
pays of greatly down the line as it gives the project manager a clear sense of what
the project needs to accomplish in time.

Determine the Sequence of Activities

As a project manager you must always remember that you don’t actually manage a
project! What you really do is manage a set of events and activities made up of
tasks which put together make up the project. Therefore to prepare the project
schedule, after you’ve figured out what these activities and tasks are as previously
described, you’ll need to determine in what order they should be done. This means
the list of required activities you developed have to be put into the right sequence.

Sequencing can only be properly done with the necessary dependencies and
preconditions in mind. Starting with the pre-determined end result, you just keep
answering the question, “What has to happen for this outcome to occur?”. This
helps in determining predecessors (what tasks must be completed before) and
successors (tasks that can't start until after) each task. It's actually quite simple and

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The African Project Manager - Just In Time

straightforward once you know how. For example, think of a project you perform
daily called "Getting Dressed" whose expected outcome is a fully dressed you. It
comprises of a number of activities such as “put on underwear”, “put on dress”, “put
on shoes” and “put on coat”. The activity "put on shoes" may have a longer
duration if you’re wearing laced shoes than if they’re slip-on shoes. Whilst it
doesn't matter which order you complete the tasks "put on right shoe" and "put on
left shoe", it’s important to complete the "put on underwear" activity before starting
the "put on coat" activity. A good way of achieving sequencing is using the “work
breakdown structure” (WBS) which helps break a project down into a single tasks.

Allot time and resource to each task

Once you have detailed all the tasks that you must achieve to complete the project
in the sequence in which they need to occur, you can begin to estimate how long
each will take. Remember that if you skip any task, the project won't be completed,
and likewise, if you underestimate the length of time or the amount of resources
required for completing the task, you will miss your deadline. Therefore, you must
accurately list the duration and resources required for each task in every activity
that makes up the project knowing that every element (task, resource and time) has
a direct bearing on the schedule.

The challenge in managing a project schedule is that there are seldom enough
resources (people, money and time) to achieve any objective instantaneously. To
help, project activities that are not dependent on each other can be overlapped so
they happen simultaneously.

Here are some tips for allocating time and resources to project tasks and activities:

1. Generally speaking no activity duration should exceed two weeks or ten

working days. If it does, you should be able to break it down into tasks that
can be accomplished within shorter periods that make u the activity.

2. Have enough planning details to show the reality of what’s going to happen
with each activity (and component tasks) of the project. You don’t need to
overdo it though, remember that too much detail means additional effort
updating the plan.

3. A project is controlled by its scarcest commodity. Identify if the project is

schedule (i.e.time) or resource (i.e. people or money) driven and track
accordingly throughout the project.

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The African Project Manager - Just In Time

4. If the project is schedule (i.e. time) driven, identify and carefully monitor the
critical path which is the activity duration path that will take the longest to
complete.

5. If the project is resource (i.e. people or money) driven, identify in advance

where you expect the bottlenecks to occur and be prepared to manage them.

6. Ensure you understand and clarify with each stakeholder group involved with
the schedule when you’re working with optimistic, pessimistic, or most-likely
time estimates.

7. Use graphics to communicate the big picture and show people how their part
of the project contributes to the whole.

Managing the Critical path

When all activities and their tasks have been listed, sequenced, resourced and
timed, you should find that some have a little flexibility in their required start and
finish dates. This difference between required and available is called the float. Tasks
that have no such flexibility are said to have zero float. The timeline through all the
activity tasks with zero float is called the critical path. All tasks on this timeline,
(noting that there may be multiple, parallel paths) must each be completed on time
if the project is to be completed on time.

The Project Manager's key time management objective therefore is to manage the
critical path.

The critical path is not a static one and tasks are added to or removed from it as
circumstances change during the execution of the project. For example the
configuration of an application system may not be on the critical path at the
beginning of the project during planning, but if its purchase and delivery is delayed,
it may become part of the critical path. Conversely, welding the pipes in a gas
project may have been on the critical path at the start of the project, but if the
project obtains an addition welder and the welding is completed early it could come
off the critical path or reduce the length of the critical path.

By knowing, tracking and managing the critical path activities for your project,
through the resources assigned to critical tasks, you can determine which activities
affect your project's finish date and whether or not your project finishes on time. To
bring in the project finish date, (known as crashing a project) you need to bring in

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The African Project Manager - Just In Time

the dates of your critical path tasks by doing one or more of the following as
appropriate:

• Shortening the duration or work on a task on the critical path.

• Changing a task constraint to allow for more scheduling flexibility.

• Breaking a critical task into smaller tasks that can be worked on

simultaneously by different resources.

• Revising task dependencies to allow more scheduling flexibility.

• Setting lead time between dependent tasks where applicable.

• Scheduling overtime.

• Assigning additional resources to work on critical path tasks.

Time Up
Through what has been said so far I trust you understand that accurate time
management is a critical project management skill. Without it, you won't know how
long your project will take, and won't be able to get commitment from the people
who need to sign it off. Every project, from preparing a baking a cake to building a
new house, takes time. The relationships between the project’s scope, time and
cost must be balanced to guarantee success.

Project Managers career and reputation are often determined by the perception of
their projects historical successes or failures depending in large part on whether the
projects were delivered on time and to budget. So to have a chance of being
successful as a project manager, you need to be able to negotiate sensible budgets
and achievable deadlines. That you can achieve by following some of the best
practice time management activities I have outlined here.

If time management were easy, most managers would succeed at it and we would
have less failed projects. The unfortunate truth is that most make a hash of it
because resource and schedule planning, which is the single biggest input to
effective time management is often treated casually or sometimes even overlooked.
Identifying the activities required to execute a project and effectively estimating the
time required to accomplish them right from the outset is a fundamental pre-
requisite to project success. It is then the responsibility of the project manager to

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The African Project Manager - Just In Time

control project schedules and resources by keeping an eye on activity duration

estimates, the actual time expended and using a mixture of experience and
intuition to make refinements to both as appropriate. This art of managing time is
one of the best skills any individual can learn while on earth and project managers
would do well to master it. After all is said and done, there are only twenty-four
hours available to each of us every day. Some of us will make the best of those
hours whilst others will no doubt make a mess of them What I hope is that this
chapter helps you as a project manager do the former.

Harry Tomi Davies, Oct 2013