7 Habits of Highly Effective Microsoft Project Users - Think Win-Win

Think Win-Win

  

While the project schedule is an important tool for many project managers, it is often misunderstood (or not understood at all) by project team members.  When building the Work Breakdown Structure for the project, you will get a much more accurate definition of scope by involving the team and letting them own the decomposition of the deliverables.  

It is also important to stress to the team what benefits they get from having the scope fully defined and contributing to the on-going updates to the project schedule.  For organizations who have adopted the proactive scheduling approach, these are some of the common benefits to team members:

Reduced over-allocation

• When schedules have complete dependency networks and incomplete work is rescheduled each week, the typical “pile-up” of work is avoided.
• With resource manager commitments to allocations (see above), there are typically fewer conflicts across projects also.

Visibility into planned work and priorities

• Whether in Project Professional on the desktop or in Project Web App, project team members can get a complete list of project tasks with dates and priorities.

Accurate forecasting of project time availability

• Organizations that choose to capture all time quickly identify how much work is spent on projects vs. on-going support or Business As Usual activities.

Push prioritization decisions back on management

• Frequent interruptions by senior executives with ‘urgent’ requests for support can be better managed when team members are able to show a list of scheduled work and priorities.
• Stephen Covey’s famous dialogue with a team member: “I’m happy to help with your request, Stephen. Which of these existing project tasks would you like me to postpone?  Would you like me to notify the project manager or will you do that?”

Managers can now see how hard team members actually work

• If resources work 60+ hours each week to get all the work done, there’s usually a long-term impact and potentially high employee turnover.

The above will help answer the “What’s in it for me?” question and should get you more participation from team members when updating the status of the project schedule.  It’s a Win-Win if project managers get the input they need from the team to build the best possible schedule and team members get a more structured working environment with visibility and reduced over-allocation.

  

Another Win-Win is between project managers and the project sponsor and key stakeholders.  All too often, we neglect to ask what the success criteria are for the project and whether Time, Quality or Cost is more important.  Managing the triple constraints and reporting against Key Performance Indicators will enable senior management to make better decisions and provide guidance for corrective action.  This, in turns, gets the project manager buy-in on the project schedule and commitment to a formal project management approach.