Get Unstuck: Four Must-Ask Project Design Questions to Transform How Your Project Planning

The phone call came from Keith, an Information Technology (IT) manager who had attended my strategy workshops at UCLA Extension’s Technical Management Program. His task force was launching a critical initiative, but their planning had gotten bogged down. After several frustrating meetings with little progress, Keith invited me to facilitate their next one. Here’s what happened.

Tension In The Air

I joined the in-person meeting ten minutes late (stuck in traffic); when I entered the room, a dozen frustrated task force members from several departments were arguing the merits of How to do the project using different software solutions. But it was obvious they had no shared understanding of the big picture behind the project.

The most frequent planning mistake I see is to dive into details about How to execute the project before thoroughly understanding WHY the project is essential. Why before How!

I’ve crafted four must-ask questions to ask while formulating a project strategy. These carefully crafted questions help to ensure your project has its intended impact:

1.???What are we trying to accomplish and why?

2.???How will we measure success?

3.???What other conditions must exist?

4.???How do we get there?

While these questions may be common sense, from my experience, actually asking and answering them is not common practice.

?Then a grumpy-looking executive glared at me and asked, “Okay, you’re the consultant. We’re stuck. What should we do?” I responded by tossing out this first question.

Q1. What Are We Trying to Accomplish and Why?

The executive looked at Keith and his team looked at each other as if to say, “For the money, we are paying this guy, we expected a brilliant answer, not a simple question.”

?But this question shifted the discussion from technical solutions to customer needs, stakeholder expectations, and operational benefits. As their answers tumbled out, I captured them on a whiteboard. It did not take them long to conclude the Goal was to deliver customer value.

While hardly profound, this question is the place to start, whatever your issue. Why the project needs to be done deserves deep attention because those answers drive everything else. Without being clear about the Why and What the project must deliver, it is easy to get lost in the technical jungle of How.

When Keith’s team reached a consensus, I wrote the word OBJECTIVES in capital letters on the whiteboard, and I listed their Objectives in a logical, If-Then hierarchy, with the Goal at the top, Purpose, and Outcomes below, and with vertical arrows connecting them.

Goal: the higher-level, big-picture strategic or program Objective to which the project contributes.

Purpose: the impact or behavior change you anticipate by doing the project; the expected result of producing the Outcomes.

Outcomes: The specific results that the project team must deliver by managing the project activities.

This hierarchy of Objectives establishes a testable strategic hypothesis. Using If-Then language, our project logic is “If Outcomes, then Purpose. If Purpose, then Goal.” There needs to be a clear logical relationship along these.

These Objectives summarize the project strategy and are the heart of a design process called the Logical Framework Approach. The answers are springboards that populate the “LogFrame” matrix, an elegant project plan. (See Systems Thinking for Project Leaders: The Logical Framework Approach for the explanation of the Logical Framework.)

With our project strategy beginning to take shape, I asked the next question.

Q2. How Will We Measure Success?

Their facial expressions suggested I had revealed the magic formula unlocking the universe. Actually, this unlocks the meaning behind each Objective. Finally, a team member spoke up, “Our Goal is to deliver customer value; so, is it not clear what constitutes success?” No. That’s too general and vague. You can’t manage what you can measure. They then began identifying how they would measure the success of each Objective, using performance indicators and numerical targets.

This question seldom gets the attention it deserves. It’s easy to presume the answer must be either obvious or “some other department,” will decide. However, until you define how success is measured, it’s not clear what each Objective really means. I wrote down the heading word MEASURES on the board and added the measures they mentioned next to each Objective. I also added the heading VERIFICATION on the board and listed the data sources and methods to track each Measure.

As we sketched out Success Measures for those Objectives, the atmosphere in the room changed. Progress was now being made, and the worry lines on Keith’s brow softened. When I posed the next question, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a smile breaking out on my glaring/grumpy executive.

Q3.What Other Conditions Must Exist?

In other words, what are the risks, and how can they be handled? They shared concerns such as training, meshing with existing systems, dependencies, related projects, technology issues, resource issues, and other important considerations.

PMI, IPMA, and other project organizations place a great deal of emphasis on early risk identification and require you to have risk mitigation plans so you can identify precursors to risk events. Having the risks identified early using LogFrame is a huge advantage.

Defining Assumptions is the jumping-off point to more extensive risk analysis. I added these Assumptions to our in-progress project design under the heading ASSUMPTIONS. Then I drew lines between the columns and horizontal lines across each level, leaving the bottom row blank. Voilà, a LogFrame is emerging! They were impressed by what they accomplished.

They created a solid project foundation based on their collective experience and common sense in a short amount of time. Now we could finally turn the technical people loose to fight over the nitty-gritty details. That was their job to complete, triggered by the next question.

Q4. How Do We Get There?

Question #1 through Question #3 enable the LogFrame to function as a high-level project design. Adding Question #4 enables it to also function as an implementation planning tool. By visualizing the larger context of Objectives, Measures, and Assumptions, you can now develop action plans with more confidence. Here you may bring in other management tools needed to guide implementation, depending on the type of project and the lifecycle model it follows. Inputs are defined as the tasks and resources needed to produce the Outcomes.

I have seen far too many project teams dive deep into a task and schedule analysis much too soon, or they get sidelined by premature technical arguments. Ensure you get the actionable answers from the fourth question by asking it last in the sequence.

Choose What Works

Your choice of execution methodology depends on the nature of your project, with the degree of uncertainty being a key factor. The Logical Framework structure and trigger questions are a jumping-off point for choosing the right execution planning and tracking tools your project requires, whether you use predictive, adaptive, or hybrid approaches.

These Four Critical Strategic Questions will speed up and smooth out your project planning. Answers to these questions—and secondary questions they will stimulate—will guide you in putting the puzzle pieces together in a structured and logical way. And just as in a crossword puzzle, as you add additional connections, your “project solution” will begin to emerge from your data, analysis, and experience.

For a quick overview of the Logical Framework, go to Systems Thinking for Project Leaders: The Logical Framework Approach. To learn the process, check out my book Strategic Project Management Made Simple.

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Terry Schmidt is the author of?Strategic Project Management Made Simple, which features a simple method to design any project, and the founder of?ManagementPro.com. He helps leaders and teams in technology organizations to sharpen their strategies and turn them into projects that deliver outstanding results.

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