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Define Project Management

Project management is such a broad term that it can include a lot of activities. And everyone has a unique perspective or opinion of its meaning. But it’s basically everything related to doing a project. Please comment on the video below.

Define Project Management: The activities and methods used to successfully complete a project or job, usually constrained by time, cost, or scope.

The constraints listed above are the biggies! We all have an idea what the activities are. But often the constraints are not given the priorities they should. Consequently, projects go over their budgets, both from a time and cost perspective. This usually happens when the scope becomes a moving target you can never catch up to. The customer wants more and more, but forgets that it costs more and more, and that it takes time to reach that elusive goal.

Consider these two videos to learn more about project management and the constraints you’ll face:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toohN6bxImU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDyHNz2da8

 

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Define Finish To Start Link

Sometimes you cannot start one task until another is complete. Try to build a bridge without the abutments. You’ll have Galloping Gertie on your hands.

Define Finish to Start Link: A project task link relationship where one task cannot start until the previous task finishes.

Actually, Galloping Gertie was not caused by missing abutments. It was caused by resonating flutter from high winds. Sort of like swinging higher and higher in a playground swing set. Eventually bad things happen.

(see video below)

But abutments is a good example for link relationships, even if it doesn’t apply to Gertie. Sometimes you just have to finish up one thing before you can start another. That’s a “finish to start” task relationship. It turns out there are four type of task relationships.

  1. Finish to Start (FS)
  2. Start to Start (SS)
  3. Finish to Finish (FF)
  4. Start to Finish (SF)

In each of these cases, you’re linking either the finish or start of one task to the finish or start of another. If you think about it, you can imagine crazy cases where each one of these link relationships naturally occurs. Projects have all sorts of relationships you have to model in software so your project works.

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Define Project Portfolio

When you’re starting to think about managing projects as groups, then you might be ready for project portfolios. Of course, you’ll always manage individual projects, but do you also want to manage groups of them?

Define Project Portfolio: A collection of projects managed as a single entity.

For example: in Standard Time® you can view revenue charts for an entire project portfolio. For the sake of this chart, you don’t care how much revenue a single project brings in. You care about an entire collection of projects. How much does the entire collection bring in?

Another example might be finding the effective billing rate for an entire project portfolio. In other words, how much are we making per hour on this entire portfolio of projects? We care about individual projects, of course. But we’re interested in comparing one portfolio against another. Which portfolio has the highest effective billing rate?

Watch the fanciful little video below, and then try this for yourself. It will take some time. You will need multiple projects to be able to call it a portfolio. One project doesn’t make a portfolio. So you’ll need to assign tasks to resources and track some time for multiple projects before you can really start seeing value. This is a high-level management technique.

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Define Resource Allocation

In project management, resources almost always refer to employees.  I.e. human resources. And allocation almost always refers to scheduling tasks they will work on.  Hmmm, is that all there is to it? (watch the video below)

Define Resource Allocation: Using people and objects in projects on a shared or recurring basis.

So no… employees are not the only resources you can allocate to your project. Got a tractor? Using it for landscaping? Then it is a shareable resource that you must schedule use for. In other words, only one landscaper crew can use it at any given time. It can’t be used by two crews at the same time, right? After all, it’s just one tractor. If two crews need tractors at the same time, then you need two tractors.

And no… scheduling tasks is not all there is to allocation. But yes, scheduling shareable resources is often necessary, as described above. Consider a load of manure, used by those landscaping crews above. You’ll have to split that bad-boy load up. You can’t have all the crews fighting for their “fair share” of the poo, can you? So you allocate a percentage to each crew. You guys get a little poo, and you other guys get some too.

That’s resource allocation.

Consider this video for an overview of resource allocation:
http://www.stdtime.com/videos/resourceallocation.htm

Now consider what the snarky little Kat has to say about resource allocation.

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Define Project Resource

When you come in to work and find that you’re assigned to 14 new projects, it’s time for an employee availability chart.

Define Project Resource: a person or shared object committed to a project, such that it cannot be used on another project at the same time.

And… what’s an employee availability chart?

It’s a chart that shows bars for each week, telling how many hours an employee has available to them. On an empty week, you’d see a 40-hour bar. On a booked week, you’d see no bar. Or, on a partially booked week you might see a short bar.

Bars on the employee availability chart are based on project and task assignments. You may be assigned 25% of your daily hours on a certain project, and 75% on another. These would total up to 100% of your daily hours. Or, you might be assigned to certain tasks that fill up your day.

Before assigning resources to projects, it might be good to check their availability; they might be assigned to other projects that you didn’t know about.

To be fair, project resources can be more than just people. They can be equipment that is assigned to a project so that nobody else can use them at the same time. Any shared item or person can be a resource.

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Define Project Milestone

Dreading your next project milestone? It’s a date you hope nobody remembers so it can slip silently into the night. Watch Kat in the video below.

Define Project Milestone: A date marking a significant event in the lifestyle of a project. Standard Time® has billable milestones.

Project milestones mark dates where you evaluate the state of your project. They could be customer related, like a date you can invoice the client for work performed. Or, they could be go/no go events where you evaluate the status of your work and decide if you can move forward to the next phase. Project milestones could trigger staff meetings to bring everyone onto the same page, and make sure everyone is ready to proceed with the project. Is there anything outstanding? Any reason not to begin the next phase? Finally, project milestones can relate to release dates. You have completed a phase of the project and are ready for public delivery and release.

As stated above, ST has project milestones. You can get email notifications for upcoming milestones, and view a short list of them. Project milestones can be used for client invoicing. Just choose the billing type: date range, percentage of project cost, or fixed amount. The actual invoice amount is based on the project milestone settings.

Watch the video and give project milestones a try.

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Define Time Management

What is time management? Easy question and Zach answers it! Your time needs to be managed so you know how much time is spent on each project, how to bill clients, how many hours spent on each task, etc.

Zach is the time tracking and project management geek who answers questions for you. Ask anything about timesheets, time management, or project management. You’ll get an answer.

In this case, time management is watching your project tasks and admin so your project doesn’t bonk. It’s paying attention and keeping your head in the game. It’s making sure your project doesn’t crash.

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What Can Project Portfolios Do For You?

First off, what is a project portfolio? The video below answers this effectively. A project portfolio is just a collection of projects. It’s a “black box” filled with projects that relate to each other some way. You decide how they relate, or why they are bundled. Then you can work on the entire bundle.

The idea is that you can perform certain operations on an entire portfolio of projects rather than the individual projects themselves. Or course you can work with individual projects also. But portfolios give you a “black box” of projects that you can tinker with.

What can you do with portfolios? The video explains, but consider these possibilities.

  1. See resource allocation for an entire portfolio
  2. See revenue for a portfolio
  3. Run reports for a selected portfolio
  4. See historical time for a portfolio

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What is Your Effective Billing Rate?

Do you know how to calculate your effective billing rate? It’s pretty easy. Just divide your revenue by working hours. If you brought in $10,000 and worked worked 80 hours, your effective billing rate is $125.  Nice!

Scroll down for a video.

But if you brought in that same $10,000 but worked 80 hours on the project and 40 hours on secondary stuff, your effective billing rate is only $83. It’s that “secondary stuff” that kills you. We’re talking admin, email, Facebook, Twitter, hanging out, and goofing off. Of course, everyone has to goof off a little. We’re not machines. But still, it’s nice to know what we’re actually bringing in for every scheduled work hour.

The video below talks about finding your effective billing rate for a given time period, or for a certain project. That’s harder to do because you have to collect up all the revenue from time logs for that period, and divide that by scheduled hours. You probably need a good timesheet and project management app to do that.

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Project Mgrs like Task Linking

You can’t put a roof on new construction without a foundation and walls. The same is true with many projects. One task must be done before another. Some tasks are dependent upon the completion of others, and there is no way around it. Those task dependencies are called links. Watch this video below for some ideas.

Project managers like task links because they represent reality, as illustrated above. Sometimes tasks that are linked together like this surprise you because realize your “hot” project simply cannot be completed when you first thought. There are tasks that stretch out into the hazy future because of these dependencies.

That’s when you start thinking… there has got to be a way around this.

But that thought never even occurs to you until you see the linked tasks blowing up your sweet delivery date. Sure, you can add more resources, reduce the scope, accept additional costs, all in an effort to “draw in” the ship date. But the fact is, those task dependencies, and how they stretch our your project schedule are the problem. But at least you now see the issue.