From the course: Project Management Simplified

Introduction to the 12-step process

From the course: Project Management Simplified

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Introduction to the 12-step process

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- Every project is different, but the great thing is that there's a simple 12-step process that you can use that will work on any project. If you just follow my 12 steps, you'll be fine. Let's look briefly at the 12 steps, and then during the course, we will look at each one in more detail. The first step is to define clearly what your project is. Unclear definition is a very common reason for project failure. So it's vital to agree exactly what the customer is going to get in terms of quality, cost and time scale. Once you've done that, you could start with the planning of your project. And steps two to eight are all about having an accurate plan. You could see that project management is mostly about planning. So step two is to list all the tasks. These tasks form the raw material for the rest of the planning process. Then, step three is to get the tasks into the right order using post-it notes to make what are officially called critical path diagrams. These allow us to not only plan the running order of our tasks but also to put the times on each post-it, how long will that task take to do, so that we can then add up how long the whole project will take. Of course, it can be tricky to estimate the duration of things that might vary, so we will be looking at how to do that. Step four is to add a safety margin to the plan so that we can be 90% sure that we're not going to let our customer down. There's a science to working out how much contingency to add on and we will cover that. Then, step five is about what you can do if the total time comes out as being too long to be acceptable, which is known as crashing your project plan. Once you've got an acceptable length of project plan, you can then make it into a Gantt chart which is step six. I'm a big enthusiast for Gantt charts, and in step six, I'm hoping to convince you to love Gantt charts almost as much as I do. Once you've got your Gantt chart, you can then use it for step seven, which is to look at resources. You can work out whether you've got enough people to do the project the way you want to do it. You can also add up multiple projects to make sure that you got enough resources to do all of the projects that you want to do. And we're also going to be looking at that in step seven. The last bit of planning, step eight, is to think about what might go wrong, what are the risks, how likely are they, and how serious would they be if they happened, and what can be done to reduce them. Steps two to eight were all about planning, and now we start doing the project. Step nine is to monitor the progress during your project, making sure that you're still on plan to finish on time. Step 10 is monitoring the cost and making sure that you're staying within budget during the project. This can be tricky because if you're running late it can look like an underspend when really you just haven't done the work yet. So we'll need to look at how you work out where the underspends and overspends are real. Then there's step 11, which is where often the pain happens because this is where you readjust your plan if necessary. This is where you have to admit to either your boss or your customer that you need either more time or more money or quite possibly both. We will look at how to make this pain less likely to happen. And then finally, we reach step 12, which is the project review. Often, people miss step 12, because they don't have time or they don't want to review it because some parts of it didn't go very well. But the only way an organization learns is through reviews and you must do a review. So the last part of this course is on how to carry out a good project review. That's the 12-step process, so let's get started on learning how to do each step.

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