Jim Reynolds sat at his spartan desk. A solid grey number he picked up himself from a local thrift store. His shoulders hunched and his head bent over a blank piece of paper. Pen in hand. A wood file cabinet stained dark stood next to him like a roman centurion guard. A faded map of the world was on the wall behind him.
There was a gleaming trophy and a picture of Jim with his softball team smiling for the camera. Jim had been 100 pounds heavier in that picture. Over the past few years, he had started exercising and eating right. Today, his shoulders were broad. His head was full of grey hair framing a face of someone 10 years younger.
I walked in and sat in my project manager’s only guest chair and asked, “Good morning, Jim, what are you working on?” I glanced over at the trophy and at the old Jim.
Preparing for the Project Network Building Session
He said as he looked up, “I’m working out what I need to do to prepare for my next project network building session. I’ve noticed that we all have a different way of leading these meetings and I wanted to find the least effective dose.”
The least effective dose is medical slang. To get the greatest possible effect, the doctor injects the patient with the least effective dose of medication. Many times the medication can be poisonous, but up to a point, the poison can be tolerated by the body and kills off the virus being treated.
I said, “Good idea, this has been on my to-do list for a while, too. Do you mind sharing what you come up with?”
Jim said, “Of course, I should have something to you this afternoon. The only other thing I need to do this morning is look over my portfolio dashboard and see who needs help. As you know most projects are moving along so well it shouldn’t take me too long.”
The project network building sessions are where two project management worlds collide. Ours and the customers. The potential polite, but never the less, explosive situations between our two companies are things we want to avoid. So, we want to be very careful to plan how we get agreement on the problems which face both of our organizations before doing anything else. It may be a strange way to start a meeting, but it’s vital we build trust before continuing on to the more contentious ways we are working these days.
The Pre-meeting and Meeting Details
As I left his office, I saw Jim start to write. I know Jim needs to put pen to paper to get his thoughts straight. His handwriting is atrocious, but as long as he can read his scribbles, that’s not my problem.
Meanwhile, Jim read over the details he had about the meeting so far:
The starting point is scheduling the project network building session. DONE. He had sent out the invite to the customer’s project manager and to his team the first thing this morning.
Since this project was with a new customer, a pre-meeting was planned with their project manager. We’ll go over the agenda and make them aware of the few, key differences in our CCPM approach. Review our poor history of project performance and the significant consequences of poor performance first.
Before this first customer meeting, add my own introduction, agenda and objectives. The same content will be used to kick-off the network building session itself.
Any mis-understandings or concerns need to be cleared up ahead of time. But, the most important reasons for the customer pre-meeting was to create a sense of confidence. Trust. Not in my abilities to lead our project, but to instill some confidence in them, too. CCPM flies in the face of some commonly held beliefs about how project are planned and executed. And, it doesn’t do anyone any good if their project manager looks ignorant about them in front of their own people.
Unique CCPM Items
The few, unique CCPM items to cover in the initial customer meeting are:
-
- How task durations are established.
- The focus on scheduling the known work. Not scheduling the “what if’s”, unsubstantiated predictions or items with a low probability of happening.
- The focus on finishing the project on time, not focusing on finishing each task on time.
- The project buffer and the “insurance model” as an example for dealing with uncertainty throughout the life of the project.
- The level of task details and the ability to added as much detail as desired with the task description notes, custom or activities fields.
- The definition of a task––A task of a project is defined as a group of activities whose completion enables ANOTHER resource to start doing their work.
- The process of building the network from the objective back, from right to left, to the beginning of the project.
- Defining the one objective and expected benefits the project is intended to deliver.
Stakeholder Elements
Next, I’ll request and review the few elements we need before any project planning session (the stakeholder analysis elements). These elements items are the:
-
- Scope, goal(s), and key milestones
- Internal and external customers
- Tangible deliverables
- Major items needed as inputs
- Technical, schedule and budget risks
Software Set-up Elements
The project management software also needs a few pieces of data before the network building session. I’ll plan on getting these things during the initial customer meeting. They are:
-
- The customer’s holiday schedule
- Project naming conventions
- The project manager and their email address
- Who their task managers are and their email addresses
- Who their resource managers are and their email addresses
- The days of the week they work and which day their work week starts
- Request an initial list of resource types (skills) needed and quantity of each available for the project.
- Request an initial list of users who only need access to view the project’s performance indicators.
Then, I’ll set up the software with the above data before the network building session.
Meeting Room Set-up
Arrive ahead of the network building session and make sure:
-
- The room is set-up
- The large video screens work
- I can connect my PC to the screens
- To dial in to the conference call, call a colleague and check the volume
- There is enough work space for the expected project team members
Kick-off Meeting Agenda
Start the kick-off the network building session with the following:
-
- Welcome and introductions
- Inventing the future speech
- Combination of skills and knowledge which will get us there
- The project performance issues we encountered in the past, the significant ramifications of poor project performance, and the things we have done to avoid them in the future
After that, review the four phases of network building, e.g., build network, add all task success criteria, add resource type and durations, and optimize.
-
- Network building / Naming Projects (what is a project)
- Select the Project Manager––A Project Manager has the responsibility for all aspects of the planning, scheduling and execution phases.
- Schedule the known, leave the unknown to the buffer.
Planning “What must be finished immediately before this task (on the right) can start?” - Dependencies must be true dependencies, using the word “MUST”, i.e., this task must finish before starting the next one.
- Repeat until you have reached a task that could be started today.
- Add success or exit criteria to each task.
Add resource type(s), resource quantities, and estimated task durations. Use these guidelines: - Assign a resource type responsible for completing the task. Resource types assigned to a task are doing the majority of the work.
- To increase the speed of the task, determine the most number of this resource type that could be assigned to perform tasks.
- If a resource type will cause a delay in the task’s execution, but the skill is not critical, list them in the task notes section (not as a resource type).
- For the task duration estimate, ask “How long would this task take without interruption and if no unusual problems occurred?”
- Optimizing project network for total duration, risk, and on-going improvement opportunities.
Examples of CCPM Schedules
Show an example of a CCPM project. Review what the schedule will look like. Explain the critical chain tasks, project and feeding buffers. Review the project dashboard, what updates are required, and what reports are available.
Finally, we’ll determine the official start date of the project and how the project status will be communicated.
Above all, the only other thing Jim jotted down for the network building session was a small, sugar free snack from the grocery store. A small, peace offering can’t hurt. He’ll pick that up the day before the meeting.
Jim’s Email
Sure enough, Jim’s email––How to Prepare for a Project Network Building Session––landed in my inbox at 1:35pm the same day. I read it over and decided it was good enough. Good enough may seem like faint praise, but good enough is a different way of describing the least effective dose for planning projects. You see, the amount of uncertainty every project encounters during its life dwarfs any detailed predictions made during the planning process.
In the end, the beauty of CCPM is that is expects the uncertainty. A CCPM schedule has buffers in the right place to watch exactly how much uncertainty the project is experiencing. And, the performance indicators provide enough time to react to most, if not all, deviations. So, good enough is indeed good enough. The point is not to plan a project to death, but to get the project finished on-time and reap the benefits of the work done.