Project Management

Cooking up a good project

Whilst in a Project Management training session recently, my instructor shared a tidbit that I thought was brilliant.  It summed up in two minutes for me what I’d spent hours trying to make management and stakeholders understand.  That is the importance of the Project Start Up and Initiation Phase. Specifically, the production of appropriate supporting documentation.  What was this magic bullet?

“…a well run project is like a good stir fry”

Whilst I am no Jamie Oliver, I can put together a half decent stir fry and I must admit its been a while since I’d had any culinary fatalities.  However, this one had me scratching my head a little.  He then went on to explain that a large proportion of making a good stir fry is the preparation of ingredients. Chopping all the vegetables and meats, preparing the sauces, selecting herbs etc all MUST happen before any ingredients go near the wok.  Because once that wok is on and up to temperature, you have only a very short amount of time and your attention must be 100% on that wok otherwise things are going to get burnt.  There’s no more time for preparation once the heat is on.

Similarly, if you haven’t established your key stakeholders, determined your project approach, worked out what your customers quality expectations are, established scope, established things like Issue logs, Quality logs, Risk logs (as appropriate)or even established what the business benefits are going to be, then once the project starts and the heat is on, you are going to get burnt. Back in 2004, the Standish Group surveyed greater than 10,000 technology projects and found that:

• 29% were completed on time and on Budget
• 18% were canceled before completion
• 53% of projects over ran original estimates

It would be a little naive to suggest that this is because that no one plans anything properly, but in my experience I have worked on projects where this kind of level of preparation was frowned upon and the catch cry was “get it done, and don’t bother me with the paper work”…lets just say that at the end of many of these projects where that was the case, the wok came away with some interesting scorch marks.

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