It is nothing more than a truism that change is the one constant of the business world these days. So the core skill for any business professional and every manager within an organisation is making change happen effectively. That core skill has a name: project management.
And the result of this is that what it means to be a professional within an organisation is changing, too. Where once your job was to deliver excellent treasury services, now being a corporate treasurer is increasingly about taking on and delivering a series of business projects for which your professional expertise is only one component.
So, what do you need to know about project management?
The first thing is to understand how a typical project life cycle plays out, and this is best illustrated by four stages. Your projects may need a more fine-grained approach, but these four stages illustrate all of the most important features.
While it is misleading to think of these as eight sequential steps that happen one after another, the order of them does capture the essential sequence in which you start to work. Inevitably, there will be a lot of overlap, as each represents a concern that persists for a period of time during your project – some during one stage only, others across several stages.
When defining your project, do so in terms of three critical concepts: your goal, your objectives and your scope. Your goal sets out what you want your project to achieve; your objectives are your criteria for success, in terms of time, cost and quality; and your scope sets out the breadth and the depth of your ambitions for how much you want your project to deliver. With these in place, you can work on the other, more detailed, aspects of your project definition.
Projects represent a significant investment of time, money and commitment. They must therefore also represent a good use of these resources, so the second step is to prepare a business case and expose it to scrutiny and the judgement of those with sufficient authority and a strategic overview to make an informed and wise decision.
Lots of people will have some form of interest in what your project will be doing, how you will be doing it and what it will produce. These are your stakeholders, and unless you engage with them actively and positively, your project will be doomed to fail.
Projects are complex and unfamiliar, so you need a strong plan to help you navigate the uncertainties and feel in control. Your plan needs to incorporate the tasks to be done; sequencing and scheduling these tasks; allocating people, materials and assets to them; budgeting for them; and how you will handle things such as risks, communication and quality control.
Once you have a plan, you need to think about identifying, allocating, coordinating and leading the people who will deliver it. This is the part that takes you from project management to project leadership, for which you need to ensure you balance your attention between people (individually and collectively) and tasks (the plan and communicating it).
You need to prepare for things going wrong with an active process to managing risk. The four steps in risk management are:
During the delivery stage, your primary responsibility is to monitor everything that is happening, comparing it against your plan. Then, as things start to deviate – as they inevitably will – you will need to intervene to bring things back under control. This ‘monitor and control cycle’ is the beating heart of your project during the delivery stage. You also need to continue to manage risks, engage with stakeholders, communicate progress and control requests for change.
Your project will seem to end when you hand over the final deliverable and your client, or the beneficial owner, accepts it as fit for purpose. But, in truth, that is merely the end of the delivery stage. There are a few further things to do, to close your project down in an orderly manner. If you don’t do them, you will end up with one more ‘almost finished’ project that continues to sap your energy – a bit like a dripping tap that never stops. Review your project, clear your admin and celebrate the completion of your project.
Then take a well-earned night off – because if you did well, there will almost certainly be another project waiting for you tomorrow!
To hear more about the four stages and the eight steps of project management, see the two short videos that are available at www.manageagreatproject.co.uk
Dr Mike Clayton is author of How to Manage a Great Project (Pearson, 2014). He has trained thousands of managers and business professionals to lead and deliver projects. Email: mike@mikeclayton.co.uk
