Project Management Project Management is a fairly new phenomenon in the Kenyan property development industry.

The consultants generally associated with the industry are architects, engineers and quantity surveyors. Project management is fundamental in ensuring project success which revolves around four elements: performance, cost, time and scope. A project manager should ensure that the project meets the quality standards as set out, is completed within the budget and on time, and as per the defined scope of works. Project managers should be equipped with project management skills, basic technical knowledge and the necessary social skills to manage the many different interest groups involved in the project. A project involves many interest groups, all skilled in their areas of profession: architects, quantity surveyors, engineers, land surveyors and planners, geologists, environmental experts, contractors, landscapers, real estate agents, lawyers, bankers, statutory bodies (city/municipal councils), among others. Project management involves integrating the entire project team including the developer, and creating synergies that lead to the achievement of the project objectives defined by the four elements: performance, cost, time and scope. A project cycle is made up of four phases: the initiation, planning, execution and close-out/termination phases. Each phase is critical to project success and should be managed professionally and in consultation with the relevant parties. Without going into the specifics of what goes on in each phase, let's look at some of the project managers' tasks. A project manager undertakes the feasibility study for a proposed project. The report should be objective and based on facts. The manager is also responsible for drawing up the project proposal. The project proposal, which includes the feasibility report, is required by financial institutions when appraising the viability of projects. A project manager should help structure a project's financial structure to ensure the projected return on investment and equity are adequate and achievable.

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In the planning phase, costs and timelines/schedules are drawn up and used as the baseline during monitoring and evaluation. The manager should strive to ensure that there are no variations between the actual versus planned costs and time lines respectively. Cost management through the direct contracting of specialists and sourcing of "client supplied" items is one way of reducing project costs.

Determining a project's critical path is vital to managing the time element in a project. The critical path items are those that require special attention and should be completed within the prescribed duration times. Communication management is an essential component in project management. A project manager should regularly send out reports to the project team. The reports should be tailor-made to suit the information requirements of the respective team members. I read an interesting article a while ago question the need for a Project Manager since Agile teams are self-managed. Its a very divisive question on multiple fronts, and requires an in-depth review of the overall maturity of an Agile team, as well as an assessment of capabilities and bandwidth. In many organizations, its no secret that the relationship between Project Manager and Development Teams can be contentious, and the resulting transparency issues create a negative focus that actually serves to slow progress rather than increase the velocity and throughput of the teams. Rather than focusing on the successful outcome and responsibilities assignment, the attention quickly shifts to ownership issues, and territorial conflicts on what the development team will own, the job of the SCRUM Master, and the responsibilities of everyone involved in the effort. Its an easy conflict to avoid. Development groups, and especially development managers, are generally overwhelmed by the volume of tasks on a project. Adopting the additional role of Project Manager confuses the picture even further by removing the transparency from the equation; where Agile might have been successful, and the Project Manager an advocate to manage all of the moving parts of the project, the confusion around the role suddenly serves to slow progress and bog down the development teams in minutiae. The role of the Project Manager in an Agile context is so often misunderstood that even so-called Agile experts question whether its needed. The simple truth is that managing only the development tracks of an Agile effort leaves a lot of work unaddressed, most of those responsibilities being outside of the SCRUM Masters and development managers remit or knowledge. This is where the experienced project manager can provide better focus to a large, multi-iteration development effort by removing the external noise and prioritizing the work of the individual project teams. Its work that would otherwise detract from the development efforts, and subsequently reduces the throughput of business requirements definition, quality assurance, and release management. Before the Agile team begins the project, they need to establish a few entry criteria:

Communications Plan define the interaction between the team members and create the most efficient flow possible to address both the customer requirements, minimize rework, and build a qualitative environment.

Responsibilities Matrix (RACI Chart, RAM Matrix) define the roles and duties of each member of the team, as well as the appropriate approval and escalation paths during the project. Change Management every initiative undergoes some form of change, although a lack of control and priority will derail the success of any effort. Iterative methodologies such as Agile provide a mechanism to incorporate changes at various stages of a project, or defer them until their inclusion at a later stage. This is where the experience project manager can negotiate the expectations and help diminish the tension between business customer and development teams. Collaboration Agile, by its very nature, requires a collaborative environment to be successful. Its the foundation for Agile to achieve its goals.

In short, the turf-war between development and project objectives creates extraneous noise that is counter-productive since the development manager already has a full plate and could use the support of the properly equipped and engaged project manager. But thats only half the story. The project manager needs to think beyond the project lines, and consider the more strategic view of the product throughout its life-cycle. The complaint of many development managers is the lack of strategic understanding of the product, the development cycle, and the ability to provide the right level of expertise and support in the Agile cycle. Asking the question of whether or not the project management role is needed is shortsighted. Clearly, it is. Rather, it exposes the problem to a new level of scrutiny, and it elevates the project management role into a much broader perspective: that of Product Manager. From our perspective, there is too much value in strong project and product management to an Agile team to even suggest that an approach removing the role is a viable option. Despite the assertion that many Agile teams are self-managed, the broader adoption of a more mature Agile lifecycle demands stronger skills, greater bandwidth, and a more strategic view of the entire product lifecycle. The project alone is much larger than the development cycle, and self-management cannot apply to external forces such as stakeholders, sponsors, and other external forces outside of development control. Strategic decisions are likely to affect the long-term direction of an organisation. 2. Strategic decisions are normally about trying to achieve some advantage for the organisation. 3. Strategic decisions are likely to be concerned with the scope of an organisations activities: Does (and should) the organisation concentrate on one area of activity, or does it have many? The issue of scope of activity is fundamental to strategic decisions because it concerns the way in which those responsible for managing the organisation conceive its boundaries. It is to do with what they want the organisation to be like and to be about.

4. Strategy is to do with the matching of the activities of an organisation to the environment in which it operates. 5. Strategy can also be seen as 'stretching' an organisation's resources and competences to create opportunities or capitalise on them. It is not just about countering environmental threats and taking advantage of environmental opportunities; it is also about matching organisational resources to these threats and opportunities. There would be little point in trying to take advantage of some new opportunity if the resources needed were not available or could not be made available, or if the strategy was rooted in an inadequate resource-base. 6. Strategic decisions therefore often have major resource implications for an organisation. In the 1980s a number of UK retail firms had attempted to develop overseas with little success and one of the major reasons was that they had underestimated the extent to which their resource commitments would rise and how the need to control them would take on quite different proportions. Strategies, then, need to be considered not only in terms of the extent to which the existing resource-base of the organisation is suited to the environmental opportunities but also in terms of the extent to which resources can be obtained and controlled to develop a strategy for the future. 7. Strategic decisions are therefore likely to affect operational decisions, to set off waves of lesser decisions. 8. The strategy of an organisation will be affected not only by environmental forces and resource availability, but also by the values and expectations of those who have power in and around the organisation. In some respects, strategy can be thought of as a reflection of the attitudes and beliefs of those who have the most influence on the organisation. Whether a company is expansionist or more concerned with consolidation, and where the boundaries are drawn for a companys activities, may say much about the values and attitudes of those who influence strategy -- the stakeholders of the organisation. The beliefs and values of these stakeholders will have a more or less direct influence on the organisation. Overall, if a definition of strategy is required, these characteristics can provide a basis for one. Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term, which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a changing environment, to meet the needs of markets and fulfil stakeholder expectations. Strategic decisions are, then, often complex in nature: it can be argued that what distinguishes strategic management from other aspects of management in an organisation is just this complexity. The complexity arises for at least three reasons. First, strategic decisions usually involve a high degree of uncertainty: they may involve taking decisions on the basis of views about the future which it is impossible for managers to be sure

about. Second, strategic decisions are likely to demand an integrated approach to managing the organisation. Unlike functional problems, there is no one area of expertise, or one perspective that can define or resolve the problems. Managers, therefore, have to cross functional and operational boundaries to deal with strategic problems and come to agreements with other managers who, inevitably, have different interests and perhaps different priorities. This problem of integration exists in all management tasks but is particularly problematic for strategic decisions. Third, as has been noted above, strategic decisions are likely to involve major change in organisations. Not only is it problematic to decide upon and plan those changes, it is even more problematic actually to implement them. Strategic management is therefore distinguished by a higher order of complexity than operational tasks.

Articles

Strategic Decisions
By: Larry Goldberg, Managing Partner, Knowledge Partners International Monday January 14, 2008

In these pages over the last year we have focused on the business value of separating Business Rules from Business Process, and using Business Decisions as both organizing principal for those Business Rules, and as a means of managing the rules. The value of the Business Decision Management (BDM) approach is multifold, as the Business Decision is the natural means of connecting Business Rules to Business Process in a BPM environment. This creates both an agile business and technology environment, where Business Rules and Business Process can be governed by different stakeholders (if necessary), managed separately, and implemented on different technologies. The approach provides a natural environment for an SOA approach, where Business Decisions that are strategic to the business, or that contain rules that are changed frequently, or that are reused by multiple processes, can be implemented as Business Decision Services. For the most part, we think of BDM as the management of operational Business Decisions i.e. Decisions that are made within conventional operational business processes. I often quote from the excellent book by James Taylor and Neil Raden, Smart Enough Systems (Prentice Hall, 2007) where the authors categorize Business Decisions between low volume, high value decisions (strategic), medium volume and medium value decisions, and high volume low value decisions (operational). Figure 1 illustrates this categorization.