Making a Party out of Project Management: Chapter 5 - The Plan for the Team

               At this point, Abby had a lot of important information figured out. She could clearly see what would need to happen to get the work done, and what it would take to get there. Abby decided the best next thing to do next was to review and add to her human resource management plan, to finish planning how to best manage her team. She had already involved her friends in some of the planning, like the brainstorming sessions, and she documented the processes that she had used so far as part of the plan. Her human resources management plan would become especially helpful once the work began, though. By planning ahead for how to best manage her team to get the work done, Abby could come up with ideas for how to train everyone and how to review their work and provide the right feedback. How would she address something needing to be done better? It generally works best to think about things like this ahead of time, to come up with feedback that helps a team member do work of acceptable quality without making them feel bad for needing some help getting there.

Training additions to the human resource management plan, along with the org chart and RACI matrix.

               Abby had already written about who she had available to help, what work each person would do (their roles on the project), and now she added what training to provide for those roles her friends would perform. She also wrote down how she would coach and help anyone who needed pointers on how to do their work better. It was important to Abby to lead by example wherever she could, so she would demonstrate how to do something when needed. There were a few jobs that she wouldn’t be able to do that for, though. Her dad knew more about grilling meat than she did, and she didn’t feel comfortable doing that job because of how hot the grill would get. This is an example of a project manager having to trust a subject matter expert (SME for short) to perform their specialized work and report the results [18]. In this case, Abby ensured her dad had a meat thermometer to confirm everything was cooked to the right temperature. Project managers must trust SMEs to come through for them on almost any real-world project, although the project manager should review work data and metrics (like the meat temperature as measured by the thermometer) to ensure that the work is being done to an acceptable level of quality as required to make the project succeed.

[18] Abby’s dad being a SME here has nothing to do with his role as a project sponsor. Sponsors typically don’t also play a SME role on the same project, but it’s not necessarily prohibited. The same applies regarding Abby’s mom making the birthday cake, which is not part of her role as project sponsor. Projects typically only have one sponsor; the existence of two sponsors in the story is due to both parents helping with the party.

Abby’s requirements traceability matrix again, now with training comments added.

               Now that Abby felt like she had drafted a good plan for managing her team, she reviewed how she was managing the outside help for the project. The local party shop was providing the bouncy castle and the city park department was renting out the pavilion, including the grill and eight large picnic tables. Thinking ahead about how to further manage and interact with vendors for the project, she looked through her procurement management plan again. In this plan, Abby wrote about how she planned to work with the vendors just before and during the party, what information was important to document or verify at a given time, and how to account for procurement expenditures and performance after the party was done [19].

[19] In most companies, a list of accepted or preferred vendors is kept, and often, vendors have to go through a process of interviewing with a company before even being considered for hire. Similar to this process, Abby had earlier researched three different party shops in the area, selecting the one with the best price, and that had recently done a good job at some other parties in the neighborhood. If they did a good job at Nathan’s party, Abby would be likely to consider them first for helping to throw other parties in the future – they would become a preferred vendor.

               With plans for how to manage both her project team and outside vendors who would contribute special deliverables to the project, Abby compared these plans to her quality management plan started earlier, thinking through how she would help team members work to the right level of quality as they set up the party. You would think this simply meant she needed to ensure everyone’s work met some kind of minimum standard, but interestingly, it would be possible for people to work with quality that was too good as well. The problem with improving quality too much is that after a certain point, doing a better job on something doesn’t really make it a better product. Working on something beyond when it’s good enough for the needs of the project often leads to wasted time and sometimes wasted material resources and money; working on a deliverable to make it nicer than it needs to be to meet project requirements is called gold plating. Abby’s friends who decorate the tables could use a ruler to ensure that precisely equal amounts of tablecloth hang over each side of the table, but this level of exactness would clearly be unnecessary when they can just eyeball it and still make the table look nice. So, Abby wanted to think through how her team would do a good job without spending all day trying to make each deliverable perfect.

Remember that with quality, it’s not about producing a perfect product, but about producing a product that meets a project’s requirements, both on paper and in how well the final product functions. To make sure this would happen for everything in scope for the party, Abby would need to know what things to inspect, how to inspect them and what inspection measurements would indicate that each scope item was done “well enough”. The quality management plan would be Abby’s plan for determining exactly what work to inspect, how to inspect that work and fix any issues, and why that work item needed inspection. As an example:

-        Inspect the temperature of meat on the grill to ensure it’s fully cooked before serving

-        Inspect by inserting the food thermometer into each piece of meat to take a reading

-        Keep cooking the meat if it’s not yet cooked to a safe temperature and re-check it soon

-        This work item needs to be inspected to ensure the safety of the food the party guests will eat

Next, Abby thought some more about the involvement of people who would attend the party. Not just Nathan and his friends, but relatives who would be there. Some of them would just show up at the right time and place, have a great time and then go home at the end of the party. A few of these people, however, would have an interest in how the party was coming together, and how it would go, and they would ask about the party before it took place. They might even want to try to influence the party preparations or become directly involved. How would Abby assess these people and make sure they stayed happy but didn’t interfere with her project? This is where Abby would need to update her stakeholder management plan, to identify the interest level of people coming to the party and their level of influence over the project. Plotting people on a stakeholder power/interest grid like the one below gave Abby a convenient way to remind herself of the influence each stakeholder had. While Abby was primarily focused on making sure Nathan really enjoyed his party, she wanted to make sure everyone else who was invited would have a great time, too.

Power/interest grid including various stakeholders or stakeholder groups.

               The possibility of an overly concerned relative trying to steer the party too much for Abby got her thinking, “This may or may not happen. I really can’t say yet, but I want to give it some thought and be ready with a good response in case it does.” She then thought a step further, “There are a lot of different things that could influence the party one way or another, not just the people around it. There isn’t a guarantee, but things could happen.”

               Abby revisited her risk management plan established earlier – the possibility of someone trying to get too involved with the party was a risk identified from analyzing her stakeholders. She recalled that different domains of project management are interrelated and a fact or change in one domain often requires updates of plans or information in other domains. A realization in stakeholder management required Abby to make an update to her risk management documentation.

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               Once finished with her updates, Abby piled all these plans that she had finally completed into a big stack. A tremendous amount of work had been put into developing these, but she was finally ready to start putting together this big party for Nathan. All these individual, topic-focused plans combined to give Abby all the information she would need to navigate any situation that could unfold while getting the party ready, and they gave Abby a big picture view of what putting on the party would look like. Putting all these specific plans together as one big plan, Abby had finally finished producing the project management plan that she had started earlier on in the project!

As things would change, Abby would keep making both major and minor updates to her plans as needed. She found that for each change, she would have to review her plans for a minute to see how the change would affect each part of the project, and how each plan instructed her and her team to respond. The process of assessing these change impacts across different parts of the project more fully describes project integration management, which is an iterative process that is always happening until the project is complete. To keep her from being constantly distracted with all these updates, Abby set aside an hour each morning to review the changes and progress made the day before and to ensure that her project documentation was updated accordingly, and that she hadn’t forgotten to take any actions per the directions of her project plans.

Before starting the work of setting up the party with her friends, Abby held a planning gate review with her sponsors. She wanted Mom and Dad to see all that she was planning to do, and to ensure they agreed that Abby and her friends were ready to start carrying out those plans. Things Abby reviewed with her parents included the scope of what she and her friends would provide for the party, the planned timing of the work, and a final review of how much it was expected to cost. Along with that, Abby reviewed specific quality metrics that would be measured and how she planned to address the main risks to the party’s success. After all of this was discussed, Abby’s parents were confident that Abby and her friends were well prepared to throw a great party for Nathan. They approved the project to continue forward into the next phase!

Next post in the series: Making a Party out of Project Management: Chapter 6 - Getting the Party Items Ready