The core team -Project Management Foundations

Project Management Foundations - The Core Team

July 8, 2011 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management for Beginners

Project Management Foundations - The Core Team
By Steve Hart
At the heart of most successful projects you will find an effective core team that is fully responsible for the day-to-day leadership of the project. This is not to be confused with the strategic level guidance that represents the key function of the project steering committee. The project manager is responsible for ensuring that the core team is effectively selected, on-boarded, and fully engaged throughout the project life cycle.

What Is the Purpose of the Core Team?

The practical answer is that the core team is responsible for monitoring the progress of each of the key deliverables and making decisions about course corrections should the project begin tracking behind schedule, over budget or if major scope changes occur.

What Are the Important Elements of a Good Core Team?

A good core team is comprised of the key stakeholders who are empowered to represent a segment of the overall project domain (the segment is generally defined based upon an organization or competency/function they represent). Representing this segment means that the core team member is responsible for providing knowledge from their area of expertise, and making/influencing decisions that impact this area of expertise. Several key factors influence the process of identifying the core team:

• Diversity: Diversity is a key element of the core team, because it is critical that different perspectives about the project and the project deliverables are fairly represented on the core project leadership team. These perspectives should be represented from day one of the core team — many project managers are tempted to exclude groups from the core team until they are needed to perform specific project activities.
• Inclusiveness vs. effectiveness: The core team is not the entire project team working on different project activities. Sizing the core team appropriately is critical to the successful management of the project. As the project manager you need to strike a balance between including the right people in the day-to-day management of the project, and creating a team that is too big to effectively make decisions. Based upon my experience the appropriate core team size is somewhere between 6-10 people.
  
• Assessing the Organization: The type of organization you are working in significantly influences the manner in which the core team is formed (depicted in the chart below). In a functional organizational, it is generally the functional leads that represent their area/department on the core team. In a matrix and project organization, the core team is generally formed based upon the role of the people assigned to the project. The type of organization also impacts the project manager’s role and authority on the project (from limited in a functional organization, to full control in a project organization).

Project leadership in different organization types

Procuring the Core Team Members

The factors described above represent key considerations when performing the following steps to select the core team:

• Determine which roles should be included on the core team. I find the most effective method is to look for the roles on the RACI chart with the most significant R’s (Responsible).
• Decide what project team members can fulfill these roles, If the team has not been formed, the question becomes what people in the organization can fulfill these roles.
• Determine if the composition of the core team needs to be adjusted based upon disconnects between the roles on the core team and the names assigned to the team.

The following chart provides an example of assembling a core team, based upon ownership of the key project deliverables. Ownership does not necessarily represent the person that will complete or manage the deliverable, but rather the person that will be responsible for the deliverable. Responsible means that this is the role that will ensure that the quality, scope, timing and cost of the deliverable are satisfied based upon the expectations established in the baseline project plan. Key deliverables which do not have an explicit owner established on the core team generally represents a RED flag (project risk), because the project manager will likely be required to manage these deliverables outside of the project leadership team as a “one off” process.

Core team example
You will find that multiple people may be required to fulfill specific roles, if one person cannot adequately represent the full scope of the deliverable on the core team. In addition, specific roles may be filled by consultants or third party partners.
Getting stakeholders, functional managers and other resource managers to agree to loan you the right resources for your core team can be a challenge. Having a solid project management plan with high level milestones and roles/responsibilities, Project Sponsor support for the initiative, and clear definition of the deliverables (in the form of a WBS) to reference during the discussion with the resource managers makes this process much easier. When assembling the core team it is important to interact with the potential core team members to understand how well they understand the project – and how they feel about the business case (benefits, scope, target dates). It is a bonus to obtain resources that are passionate about some aspect of the initiative (benefits to their organization, learning opportunities for them, team dynamics).

On-boarding the Core Team

Prior to the overall project kick-off, the core team is assembled for a planning meeting (or series of planning meetings, depending on the complexity of the project). The planning meeting helps level set the core team on project planning efforts that have been completed to date (prior to them joining the team), and launching the efforts to complete the remaining planning activities/deliverables. The Project Manager facilitates the discussion on project planning deliverables completed to-date (project charter, milestones/target dates, scope statement, RACI, and the Project Management Plan). Making sure everyone is clear about what their role on the project is one of the essential topics at this point in forming the core team.
The Core Team planning meeting is best structured in the following manner:

• Goals and objectives
  • Communicate information about the project using project artifacts created to-date
  • Establish a common understanding of roles and responsibilities
  • Begin the process of completing the remaining planning deliverables
• Activities / Discussion Topics
  
  • Icebreakers and introductions (particularly important for new projects, with a diverse cross-functional team)
  • Review of project deliverables (best to provide access to these deliverables in advance of the meeting, so this time is spent productively covering questions and open issues)
  • Establish core team priorities and begin working on the remaining planning deliverables

Core Team Best Practices

The following summarizes the best practices associated with selecting, procuring, and on-boarding your core project team:

• Purposefully select the core team
  • The team’s diversity in terms of backgrounds, perspectives and talents significantly improves project outcomes.
  • Right-size the team to accomplish the task at hand – manage the day-to-day project operations. Make sure the team can adequately “own” the project deliverables, but is not too large to effectively manage team dynamics.
  • The core team should be formed in a manner that is consistent with the organization that is driving the project.
• Work with the right people to procure the right team members
  
  • Clearly communicate with resource managers (about the project and resource needs).
  • Use the project sponsor appropriately to gain support of the initiative.
  • Obtain buy-in of the potential core team members (to understand their commitment to the initiative, and comfort with their role).
• Make the effort to adequately on-board and ramp-up the core team
  
  • Spend time “forming” the team.
  • Clearly communicate the plans completed to-date. You want the core team to “own” the plans, even if they were not involved in making all of the decisions or creating all of the planning deliverables.
  • Focus on getting immediate traction on the work ahead. Quickly align the core team with the project priorities, and ownership of next steps.  

The Project Design Master Class -PMP

Overview

Much as you to design the software system, you must design the project: from accurately calculating the planned duration and cost, to devising several good execution options, scheduling resources, and even validating your plan, to ensure it is sensible and feasible. This requires understanding the inner dependencies between services and activities, the critical path of integration, the staff distribution and the risks involved. All of these challenges stem from your system design and addressing them properly is a hard core engineering task – designing the project. This design task requires both the project manager and the architect to work closely together to determine the best overall plan.

The Project Design Master Class will take you to a new level as project managers and architects. The class shares IDesign's original battle proven techniques and methodologies that so far have only been the privilege of IDesign's direct customers. You will master the core body of knowledge and skills required of modern software project design. IDesign will mentor you how to gain credibility and perfect communication with top management by providing real life, repeatable and workable options for the project - solutions that balance cost, schedule and risk. Practicing our techniques feels as if "the blinders are off", enabling you to mechanize most aspects of project design while relaying on the IDesign Method and making the most of other tools.

Assuming no prior knowledge, the class covers the essentials of the critical path method, a technique admirably suited for complex software systems and arguably, the only one that works. By modeling the project as a network you eliminate the bias and objectively calculate schedule and cost. You will understand the typical behavior of a project, how it is affected by limiting resource and schedule, and what recurring techniques and approaches to leverage as you cope with constraints.

With these basics in place, you will proceed to see the IDesign Method approach for project design, which enables you to determine the best overall plan across architecture, schedule, cost and risk. The IDesign Method for project design converges on the best and even optimal solution for the project while eliminating gambling, death marches, wishful thinking, and expensive trial and errors. Next the class discussed some advanced project design techniques such as the project time-cost curve, schedule acceleration with network compression and crashing, and IDesign's original risk quantifying techniques. Since there are several design solutions for every project, some more aggressive than others, you must objectively measure the risk of each option and evaluate the project design solutions in light of risk as well as cost and duration.

But no project plan survives unscathed the first day of execution – priorities, resources, deadlines, estimations and features will change, and you must constantly adapt the plan for the new reality. The class will show you IDesign's techniques for closing the loop by tracking both progress and effort across developers and services and containing the impact of changes, allowing you to constantly stay on schedule and on budget.

The class ends with a comprehensive case study and walks through its various permutations in determining the best plan that will keep the project on time all the time at the best risk and cost available. Moreover, the case study not only demonstrates end-to-end flow of project design across iterations, but it also demonstrates the thought process and rationale behind the decisions, our practical approach for using tools, how to integrate and compensate for their shortcomings and utilizing the IDesign templates.

While most training classes merely stack modules, focusing on a single topic at a time, the Project Design Master Class uses a spiral, and each iteration gains more insight across multiple topics, providing the motivation and objectives for next iteration, thus mimicking the natural learning process. Each such iteration incorporates hands-on labs to cement the concepts and practice the techniques. In the class you will also receive the IDesign's original tools, metrics, thumb rules, project design templates, and reference projects.

Don’t miss on this unique opportunity to learn and improve your project design skills with IDesign, and share our passion for excellence and project engineering, gain from our extensive experience of numerous projects design and profound insight on architecture, the process and its application.

While the class will open new horizons for you about project design and the possibilities, we recognize you often need to educate others even on the basics. You may find our project design call for action instrumental in getting support for transforming your environment.

Target Audience

Any project manager, architect, development manager or even aspiring senior developer wanting to grow their skill set would benefit greatly from the class. The class's specific objective is to train the project manager and the architect of the same solution to work together synergistically, so it is particularity suited for such a pair to attend together.

Duration

5 very challenging days.

Outline

Project Design Method Overview

• The core team
• Development plan
• Product life cycle
• Service life cycle
• Estimations techniques
• Services integration plan
• Staffing distribution
• Scheduling activities
• Viability and risk
• Figuring cost
• Tracking progress and effort
• Roles and responsibilities

Essential Concepts

• Project as a network diagram
• Node vs. arrow diagrams
• Critical path pre-requisites
• Identifying critical path
• Calculating floats
• Floats and scheduling
• Proactive risk management

Project Compression

• Time-Cost curve
• Points on Time-Cost curve
• Solutions and feasibility
• Cost elements
• Staffing and cost
• Critical path compression
• Activity crashing
• Project crashing

Quantifying Risk

• Risk curve
• Risk and floats
• Modeling risk
• Criticality risk index
• Activity Risk index
• Exponential risk behavior
• Risk decompression
• Tracking risk

Project Design in Action

• Architecture and dependencies
• Complexity reduction
• Adding activities
• Fuzzy front end
• Tools and network diagram
• Working with/around MS-Project
• Abstracting network diagram
• Staffing requirements
• Planning assumptions
• Network and resources
• Staffing distribution
• Floats analysis
• Infrastructure and dependencies
• Design with limited resources
• Design with sub-critical resources
• Milestones identification
• Project compression and crashing
• Accelerating schedule
• Team throughput analysis
• Building and modeling Time Cost curve
• Quantifying Risk
• Risk decompression
• Planning and risk

Project Design Mini-Clinic

• Project walkthrough
• Planning assumptions
• Normal solution
• SDP presentations and review