5 Questions All Project Managers Must Ask of The Stakeholders and Themselves

There are five immutable principles of project management that must be addressed by project leaders and teams in order to succeed. In this new series, we begin with an overview of these principles before exploring in detail how you can put them to work in a variety of business and technical domains.

Project managers are tasked with a wide variety of duties; many are vague, some are difficult, but none are really rewarding in the absence of some chance of project success.?This is the first in a series of articles?that describes?the 5?Immutable Principles of Successful Projects. These principles are the basis for increasing?your probability of project success. The five principles, presented as questions, are:

1. What Does Done Look Like? What are the Measures of Effectiveness (MOE), Measures of Performance (MOP), Technical Performance Measures (TPM), and Key Performance Parameters (KPP) of Done?
2. How Do We Get There? What is the Plan and Schedule for reaching Done?
3. Do We Have Enough Time, Resources, and Money to reach Done at the needed time for the needed cost, with the needed Capabilities?
4. What Impediments Will We Encounter Along The Way? What are reducible (epistemic) uncertainties and irreducible (aleatory) uncertainties, creating risks resulting in implements to reach done as needed?
5. How Do We Know We Are Making Progress? What are the processes and procedures to measuring the Physical Percent Complete of the deliverable produced by the project? What is the confidence this progress to plan can be maintained and be assessed in the Estimate to Complete and Estimate at Completion for time, cost, and technical performance.

The answers to these questions will be explored in subsequent articles, each guided by the underlying framework of a project, program, and portfolio management system. This management system can be almost any system that meets the need of the project. It needs to be a system that connects projects and their deliverables, with the programs that collect projects into beneficial outcomes, and the portfolio of programs and their business beneficial outcomes connected to strategy, mission, and vision.

When we speak about projects, there are attributes we need to establish before looking for the answers to our five questions.

• The Situation – projects are risky, by their very nature. Handling or retiring risk is a core success factor.
• The Problem – project management makes use of processes to create measurement data. This data must identify tangible outcomes, and their measures of performance, in units meaningful to the decision-makers.
• The Need – project management is about avoiding surprises. Measures of physical percent complete are used to forecast future performance.
• The Context – organizations execute projects. Adapting the project management processes to the organization's culture to the risk tolerance of the project’s environment is a critical success factor.
• The Solution – defining the tangible deliverables as measures of increasing maturity increases the probability of success.

As well as the 5 Immutable Principles, the project manager must provide accurate and credible information to the decision-makers:

• How much is this project going to cost when we are done?
• When will we be done?
• Do we have some notion of the business value produced by the project, and how the project is going to meet the goals of the business by delivering this value?
• What activities will be performed in what order to produce this business value?

Here's a Mind Map to guide the conversation

To begin,?let’s look at top-level descriptions of the 5 Immutable Principles.

1. WHAT DOES?DONE?LOOK LIKE IN UNITS OF MEASURE MEANINGFUL TO THE DECISION MAKERS – STARTING WITH EFFECTIVENESS AND PERFORMANCE?

Done should be described through a set of capabilities?possessed by the project owner. These capabilities describe the operational behavior of the system in terms of “operational concepts”:?what does the system do to achieve beneficial outcomes for the owners?

Capability planning means “planning under uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable for the wide range of needs for the business, while working within an economic framework that requires choices be made.”

By identifying capabilities, the technical and operational requirements can be traced from the Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) to each deliverable. Capabilities state “why” we want this system.

2. HOW ARE WE GOING TO GET TO?DONE AT THE NEEDED TIME, FOR THE NEEDED COST, WITH THE NEEDED CAPABILITIES?

Starting with each desired capability, a set of technical and operational requirements must be built. Each requirement must be testable and traceable to the desired capability.?Requirements are?elicited?through a fact-finding and classification process. The evaluation and rationalization of the requirements answers the question “Why do I need this?” in terms of operation benefits.

With these requirements, we need to determine what the?plan?is for arriving at?done? The?plan?is the?strategy?for the successful completion of the project. The plan describes the "path" to the end. The Plan describes what "done" looks like. Not only at the end, but along the way to "done." The Plan describes the increasing maturity of the deliverables of the project. The units of measure for the maturity and when a specific value for this unit of measure should be present. This means the plan has a sequence of increasing maturity.

The Plan is NOT a Schedule, which is time-based. The Plan is sequence-based, relationship-based, and maturity based for the deliverable. The Schedule tells us "when" this maturity should appear.

3. DO WE HAVE ENOUGH RESOURCES, TIME, AND MONEY TO GET TO?DONE, WITH THE NEEDED CAPABILITIES, FOR THE NEEDED BUDGET, ON THE NEEDED DAY?

Once we know what done looks like in units of measure meaningful to the decision makers and our Plan and Schedule to reach?done?in the planned time, with the planned budget we must determine if we have enough of everything we needed to reach?done.

4. WHAT IMPEDIMENTS WILL WE ENCOUNTER ALONG THE WAY, ND WHAT ARE THE HANDLED STRATEGIES FOR REMOVING THEM OR MANAGING IN THEIR PRESENCE?

Risk management continually assesses what can go wrong in the project, determines which of these risks are most important, and implements strategies to handle these risks. Risk Management is not Issue Management. Risks are things that?may?happen in the future with some probability of occurrence. Risks when they do happen with have some undesirable impact on the project. This impact has a range of possibilities as well.

5. HOW CAN WE TELL WE ARE MAKING PROGRESS TO PLAN IN UNITS OF PHYSICAL PERCENT COMPLETE?

With our plan, schedule, resources, and a clear and concise description of?done, how can we tell if we’re making progress toward?done? Do we know how much progress we?should?make at some point in the future? What are the units of measure for this progress?

The passage of time and consumption of money are NOT measures of progress to plan

Only compliance to the Technical Performance Measures at the planned time are measures of progress to plan