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Imagine the following all too common scenario. A company must execute a strategically important project, such as the development and introduction of a new product. A deadline has been established, and a cross-functional team has been assigned. The project is similar to projects that have been performed in the past, and the deadline seems to allow enough time to get it done. The project stakeholders believe that the scope, objectives, and constraints are clear, although they have not been documented. Each team member thinks they know what is expected of them based on the functional area they represent. For all these reasons, no formal project planning or control processes seem necessary.

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With all the buzz and confusion surrounding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, it is no wonder that companies are scrambling to find resources that will insure their compliance with SOX. Congress created the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 "to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws, and for other purposes." This Act addresses eleven separate titles such as Title III-Corporate Responsibility and Title IV-Enhanced Financial Disclosure and also outlines white-collar crime penalties as well as CEO and CFO accountability and responsibility.

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When most people refer to M&A work, they think about structuring, funding, and closing a deal. The real battle for “value” lies within the associated integration project. It is incredibly difficult to take two or more business units with different business cultures, processes, and reporting structures, and merge them into a single harmonious, productive entity. It is even more challenging to accomplish the feat quickly and efficiently. Faster integration means earlier productivity and an acceleration of financial results. What if you could apply a proven, powerful approach to merger integration to ensure realization of integration benefits and accelerate results?

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As Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, predicted almost twenty years ago, projects pervade every aspect of business today, and the ability to execute projects successfully can be an unparalleled source of competitive advantage. Companies serve customers and generate revenue by performing processes that produce products and services. The dominant companies in any industry fine-tune their processes to deliver high quality with speed and low cost, and they use sophisticated management systems to plan and control their operations.

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Does the act of assigning a group of people to work together on a project automatically create a real project team? Of course not – no more than the act of dressing a group of kids in red shirts and shorts and calling them the “Tornadoes” will create a real soccer team. So how do you know a real team when you see one?

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Setting out on a mountain climb without careful planning would certainly be foolish and dangerous. Selecting a route, determining what equipment and supplies to take, and assigning specific responsibilities to team members are some of the decisions that must be made to ensure a successful, safe, and enjoyable climb. When it comes to projects, people give lip service to planning, but many don’t want to take the time and exert the effort to develop a plan.

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What a nightmare it would be for a team of mountain climbers to get halfway to the top of a mountain only to discover that (a) they are climbing the wrong mountain, or (b) the mountain is growing taller as fast as they are climbing it. Amazingly, this is the nightmare that many project teams experience in real life!

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What self-respecting mountain climber would consider a climb successful if they only got two-thirds of the way to the summit? Yet in performing projects, people tend to be all too willing to accept and, in fact, often aim for only partial success. Three dimensions of performance are applied to measuring the performance of any project: Time (duration or completion date), Cost, and Quality of the deliverables produced.

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When your organization has gained some experience and enjoyed success using The Project Success Method, you will recognize the value of developing a project management system. A project management system is an integrated set of organizational and technological elements that supports the effective application of project management on your projects. The system is not specific to a single project, but is a permanent infrastructure that is intended for use on a continuing stream of projects.

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One of the difficulties of managing projects that involve several (perhaps many) organizations is that the group has no pre-established procedures for handling actions that cross organizational boundaries. Such actions often include: Technical decisions (e.g., specification or design changes), Managerial decisions (e.g., schedule changes), Administrative processes (e.g., issuing payments for work), and Project activities that involve more than one organization (e.g., approvals or inspections, placing purchase orders).
If such inter-organizational actions are not anticipated and procedures put in place to guide their performance, confusion and miscommunication will result, which will lead to unnecessary delays, wasted resources, and potentially even conflict among the organizations.

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The importance of tracking actual costs and resource usage in projects depends upon the project situation. For some projects, tracking actuals is unnecessary or is not worth the effort required. In other cases, however, tracking actual costs and resource usage is an essential aspect of the project control function. In such cases, a system must be put into place to support the tracking process, and the collection/recording of the potentially voluminous quantity of data requires strong organizational discipline. Why then is tracking actual costs and resource usage on a project ever worth the effort required to accomplish it?

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This white paper is from the upcoming book by Dennis Young and Tom Clark The 20 Laws of Project Success. Law #9 - "I don’t know what effect this will have on our completion date”.
Statement of Law - Project schedules should be network-based, and the critical path must always be known.

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One of the most crucial decisions in the life of a project is the selection of the project manager or team leader. The right project manager boosts the confidence of the team and vastly increases the probability of project success. A common error is to select an individual who has superior technical expertise but seriously lacks managerial skill and leadership ability.

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If your company is a leader in its industry, you are committed to continuous improvement in all aspects of your operations. An effective way to improve through experience in managing projects is to conduct post-project management process audits. These team-based reviews concentrate on the planning and control processes used in managing the project - not on technical aspects of the project work.

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In the context of project management, a resource is any entity that contributes to the accomplishment of project activities. Most project resources perform work and include such entities as personnel, equipment and contractors. However, the concept of a resource (and the techniques of resource management presented in this paper) can also be applied to entities that do not perform work, but which must be available in order for work to be performed.

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As with all complex human endeavors, projects almost never go exactly as planned. So a project control process is required to detect deviations from the plan, solve problems, and update the plan. Without a proactive control process, the project will get so far off the track that the plan will lose its credibility. Once your project plan (especially the schedule) becomes nothing more than a wall decoration in the project manager’s office, you have lost the ability to manage the project. Project control is largely a matter of discipline. It involves a cyclical process that must not end until the project is completed.

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