On the other hand, getting your project audited when you know you are in control is somewhat satisfying, if not highly rewarding. Let’s see here how we can achieve good marks in every project audits:

Project audits are used to answer two questions:

• Is the project delivering the expected result at this point in time? Evaluation of the project’s health (cost, time, scope, risks) and must be performed often, minimally at every milestone occurrences. A good project manager must always be knowledgeable about the state of his project.
• Are we satisfied that everything is done to mitigate risks on future project expectations? Risks are part of a project. There may be risk associated with any expected results. Do we have a strategy to mitigate them? You need to be able to answer this question.

Project risk management is a vast topic. Many strategies and techniques exist to make sure you identify, measure and mitigate project risks. But what about project process risks?  A best practice is a technique believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome when applied to a particular condition or circumstance. The Project Management Institute (PMI) proposes to use “best practices” as a mean to correct any deficiencies to reduce cost of quality and an increase in sponsor and customer acceptance of the project’s product.

Are project management best practices being followed to mitigate risks? We can surmise that a project manager who uses best practices should have a higher degree of success than someone who doesn’t.

But, how often should we audit project for its best practice adherence? Best practices are implemented in an organization to reduce process induced risks. Best practice audit should then occur as often as possible. A good project manager should audit his practices to ensure the process will impact positively on project results.

A Project Management Office’s responsibilities are to ensure project managers know and follow organizational best practices. It’s easy to write a bunch of guidelines on a piece of paper. But how do you get the project managers to use them so they feel it is improving their chance of success?

Let me know what you think. My views on this in a later post.

 But project management is not about gathering data. Project management is about making day-to-day decisions and avoid problems. PM decisions are centered around three constraints: 

1. Budget
2. Time
3. Features (or project objectives)

Now, the big question : IS YOUR PROJECT DATA RELIABLE ? Can you make the right decision at the right time ? I say yes if your data collection and reporting respect acknowleged project best practices. If your project plan is sound, project control will be based on correct assumptions. You cannot wait for an end of project audit to tell you your plan was not following best practices. You need to know right away to remove project process risk from the equation.

A PM identifies all risks related to these three constraints and makes decision accordingly. A good PM doesn’t sit in front of a computer all day. A good PM emails and calls and has face-to-face contact with project resources and stakeholders. A PM makes decisions with data that must be reliable. I would compare it to Command and Control in the military (…Command and control functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission… – Wikipedia). These are analogies I can use since I spent more than ten years in the Army.

In the Army, good intelligence is the key to winning wars. In project management, sound project data is the key to project success.

Smartbox Software is proud to announce that Project Scheduling Smart Assistant 1.6 is now ready to download. PSSA now supports project assignment best practice. New practices will be added soon to help you improve and optimize your project plans.

PSSA is now faster and its set up process more streamlined. The process of deploying the software and loading it into Microsoft Project is now more robust.

Download it now.

Please continue to let us know how we can keep improving through the Customer Feedback Forum, and thank you to everyone who participated in today’s update.

If you have already downloaded an earlier version of PSSA, you need to uninstall the old version.

Project managers have made use of specialized business applications too, most notably Microsoft Project and Basecamp. Think of the time and effort you’d have to invest to draw and label timelines by hand. Thanks to the specialized software, we can create them right on the computer, organize them, store them, call up the information in an instant and share the files with others.

But as valuable as these tools are for project management, they are only about collecting, saving and reporting data. Management is not about gathering data, it’s about making decisions. Specifically, it’s about juggling three constraints: the available budget, the available time and the project’s features (or objectives).

Real project management software would help you evaluate a plan and recommend improvements. It would help you audit your plan so you could spot potential problems and make corrections in advance.

That’s what Smartbox has created.

Our Project Scheduling Smart Assistant makes an objective evaluation of your project plan’s strengths, then recommends improvements based on the best practices we’ve gathered from of other project managers. It reacts to changes in a project schedule and notifies you of any nonconformity.

You still make the decisions, so you are still in control.

With the Smart Assistant, you become more efficient, which lets you get out from behind your computer and stay in contact with your project’s resources and stakeholders.

Project’s schedule audit is a free online tool that assists project managers improving and optimizing their project plans. It provides some basic advice on how the project’s schedule can be improved from a scheduling best practice perspective. A well thought project schedule, built on generally accepted practices and standards, will reflect more precisely the project manager’s plan.

Simply upload your Microsoft Project files and within seconds, you will get a full report of items that are not consistent with good practices. You can also get the report via email. Currently, you can audit your schedules built with Microsoft Project 2003, 2007 and 2010.

Unlike Project Scheduling Smart Assistant, our complete solution of project schedule auditing, the online version does not offer advice to correct the problems identified and thus comply with good project scheduling practices. If you want complete advices, we invite you to try out PSSA, our solution that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Project and allows interaction with the schedule.

To try this exciting new tool, simply go to http://projectscheduleaudit.smartbox-software.com/.

PSSA is now faster and its set up process more streamlined. With the latest version, we’ve eliminated the need to have administration privileges at installation.

Note: If you have a 64-bit operating system or the 64-bit version of Microsoft Project 2010, PSSA 1.5 will be compatible.

Download it now.

Please continue to let us know how we can keep improving through the Customer Feedback Forum, and thank you to everyone who participated in today’s update.

If you have already downloaded an earlier version of PSSA, you need to uninstall the old version.

Thanks for using Project Scheduling Smart Assistant !

I like to compare a project manager to a junior officer in the army. In order to make good decisions, both need to have an accurate picture of the current situation, the goal they want to achieve, and the roadblocks they will or might encounter. In other words, good intelligence is crucial.

And to obtain good intelligence, a project manager needs a command and control center to gather or analyze your information. Microsoft Project can be said to be a command and control center for project managers. It allows you to plan your project and to monitor what is going on in it.

You should not delude yourself into thinking that using Microsoft Project is all there is to project management. You must get the data you need – delays, unexpected difficulties, time gained and time lost – from those actually doing the project and you must show that you are in control by identifying and acting on the data.

But how do you make the best decisions? In that last blog, I used the term “project audits” to answer that question, which befuddled some readers. I admit the word I chose was not the best, so let me explain further what I meant. I use the term audit in its larger sense: an accurate assessment of a situation. These assessments must be based on experience and the timely application of best practices.

A final word of advice: always keep in mind that if those who work on the project do not trust you as a project manager, you will fail. And a large part of this trust is based on your history as a decision maker.

Hypothesis: PSSA can transform virtually anyone into a competent project manager, regardless of how much skills they possess in the field of project management.

To test our theory, we found the perfect guinea pig: our new intern, Alexander. Alexander had never touched Microsoft Project 2007 before and was totally new to project management. So we gave him the task to plan a simple project in any domain he knew very well with Microsoft Project 2007, first alone and then using PSSA. We asked him to be able to answer two questions at the end of the experiment:

• If the project started tomorrow, when would it end?
• How much would the project cost, in total.

Alexander successfully completed the experiment yesterday. His comments were:

“When I first opened Microsoft Project, I was overwhelmed. I could not see how this Excel look-alike would help me plan a project. I began to play with it and slowly began to understand what I had to do. After about an hour, I knew how to create a task, link tasks, create resources and make the project looks like a coherent whole. After a total of 2 hours and a half, I had a complete project planned. 

Then came the next step; I installed Project Scheduling Smart Assistant (PSSA) and ran it. First thing first, I’ve rarely seen such a simple-yet-efficient user interface. You have one big button called analyze, you click on it, and voila, the software tells you what you must, should, or may do.

Among the practices it suggested were the creation of milestones, which I would not have thought of by myself, the necessity of linking task to others and the avoidance of tasks with free slack time greater than 50% of the time you need to complete the task. For those of you who do not know what free slack time is, and I did not know myself before PSSA told me, it is the time between the end of a task and the beginning of another linked task. My project plan had two tasks with an excessively long slack time, but thanks to PSSA, I was able to correct the mistake quickly. But one must keep in mind that PSSA does not tell you what to do, it warns you about possible problems your project may have, but not all of its warning must necessarily be heeded.

After half an hour, I was totally finished and, thanks again to PSSA, I knew when my project would end and how much it would cost, as requested. As a whole, the experiment took three hours. However, if I had had PSSA from the very beginning, I’m sure it would have taken less time, because I would have learned Microsoft Project much faster with PSSA’s help.”

I like to compare this situation to my years spent in the army where the achievement of a junior officer was related to his leadership and decision making skills. Although a project manager’s authority is given through the project charter, he will not succeed with formal authority alone. Expert authority or the respect achieved through decision making abilities is paramount to a project manager success.

How do you achieve a good level of expert authority?

By making better decisions of course!! A good officer (oops, I meant project manager) elaborates a sound plan based on recognized project management best practices knowing the project plan itself will need to be adapted as soon as the real action starts. Why? You will say risks of course. Yes, your project plan must take into account risks and bravo if you have a contingency plan for every perceived risk. I say this is not enough: a good project manager must be able to recognize a situation (planned, foreseen or totally out of nowhere) and react accordingly to achieve a successful outcome. If he can do so repeatedly, he will then achieve expert authority.

Project process, best practices and audits

The army has best practices that date a few thousand years (Sun Tzu anyone?) which are still applied today when planning. The first thing you learn during officer basic training is the process of planning while audits are ingrained in the authoritative hierarchy of the army. Although project management is a younger field, individual experts and organizations alike have worked hard to propose processes, best practices and audit mechanisms. The goal here is to ensure they are being used by junior project managers:

• To plan better and reduce the risks associated with a faulty plan.
• To recognize a potentially difficult situation and react accordingly.

The sheer number of data and information can be staggering in some projects. Short on having a mentor sitting close by, how do you make the project audit process enhance your project manager’s skills right away, not at the end of the project?

Here is a non exhaustive list of SIMPLE scheduling practices that will ensure a good head start to produce high quality project plans:

• 1. Activity code / WBS: In order to structure your activities, you should use a numerical or alphanumerical value to categorize them.
• 2. Milestones: A milestone is an event in time to indicate an important decision or the completion of a key project phase. It should be monitored all the time. It goes without saying that the project start and finish dates are important events.
• 3. Relationships: All activities and milestones, except the project start and finish milestones, must have relationships with other tasks/milestones.
• 4. Constraints: Use scheduling constraints sparingly as they reduce scheduling options and optimization opportunities.
• 5. Project scheduling vs activity scheduling: If you schedule the project from its start date, make sure activities are set to start as soon as possible and vice-versa.

When you have successfully mastered these best practices, you can introduce others in your routine.

Would you propose other simple starting scheduling best practices?