Five Best Practices Every Prime 8 Consultant Uses to Create Predictable Project Results
Organization is the hallmark of every successful project, but it rarely happens organically. Rather, an organized, efficient project is the product of planning, experience, and attention to detail. When these three factors intersect, consultants are in a better position to develop value-adding tools that will build scalable, repeatable success.
The best project managers have many arrows in their quiver to manage clients, collect project details, and keep every project on track. At Prime 8, we’ve spent a great deal of time developing the right tools and documents to streamline our work and set up our project management consultants for success.
In this first blog in our Project Management series, I want to share some of our top tools to initiate a project and start delivering effectively from Day One.
1. Project Charter
In a club or organization, a charter serves as a document that outlines the organization’s purpose and goals. It also serves to enforce compliance of its members by setting forth guidelines and conduct requirements that all members should abide by. This document is unique to every organization, as no two purposes are quite alike.
Our Prime 8 Project Charter serves a similar purpose in the projects we manage. It answers questions like:
What is the purpose of the project?
What should the project solve?
Who are the core team members and what are their roles?
What is the budget for the project?
What is the timeline for the project?
The charter is usually a 1- or 2-pager created at the onset of a project as a part of our standard discovery process to provide a strong foundation for what is to come.
2. Business Requirements Document
Every project comes with unique requirements. Organizing those details on every project is key to predicting project outcomes and success in meeting customer goals.
That’s why our project management consultants leverage a Business Requirements Document so that no detail falls through the cracks. We start every project with Discovery, where one of our first objectives is to understand the business requirements, use cases, and the paths to success.
The consultant documents these findings in a Business Requirements Document. The document serves as a catalog of all the client’s business requirements, and our consultants refer to it often throughout the various stages of the project..
3. Workback Schedule
Planning and tracking progress is a big part of project management. The workback schedule is essentially your detailed plan to accomplish all of the required work within the desired timeframe. It captures the timeline for the project as a whole, the deadlines for the milestones that make up the project, resource assignments and dependencies.
As consultants, keeping our teams focused on the right things and managing client expectations is a core part of daily business so the workback is a central part of our toolkit. There are different strategies to build one, but because our clients generally have a desired delivery date, we start with the end and reverse engineer the project’s schedule. As a first step, we identify the milestones required to complete the project goals and requirements.
The workback schedule also captures tasks and the time needed to complete them, the resources assignments and any task dependencies. Because of this, our project managers collaborate with stakeholders and subject matter experts on the project team to ensure we’re capturing the right tasks and accurate timeframes. Through this collaboration, we build explicit agreements across the project team for the time each person has to complete their work which helps protect the larger project timeline.
As the workback schedule shapes up, it can validate or invalidate a project timeline. If a client hires us for a six month project but the workback schedule plainly illustrates the necessary work won’t fit within that window, we have stakeholder validated timeline data to discuss changes with the client. There may need to be a restructuring of priorities, resources added, or a search for alternative solutions.
4. Action Log
Every project can be broken down into smaller objectives, tasks, and actions. The Action Log is a critical piece of project management documentation because it captures all of the steps taken by a PM and their team to accomplish a task or objective.
The Action Log contains the issue or action that needs to be addressed, a description of the action, and an impact analysis that describes what has happened because of the issue and its overall impact on the project. You’ll also assign ownership to the action to make sure the action is addressed.
This document provides a reference point for the core team when they have weekly meetings to discuss the project status. Team members review the action log to get updated information and gain a better understanding of where the project stands.
5. Project Status Template
Handing over management of a project to an outside consultant, regardless of experience and professionalism, requires a huge amount of trust. That trust is more easily earned when clients receive regular project updates.
At Prime 8, we put a lot of emphasis on our Project Status Template because we believe that regular updates are part of good stakeholder and team communication and trust-building. These updates offer insight into where the project is at any given moment and highlights any risks, dependencies, or issues. In addition, this is a good opportunity to provide a cost breakdown and provide a snapshot of the project’s budget to-date.
Our consultants provide routine project status updates, either on a weekly basis or whatever cadence they agree upon with the client. If the project has start and end dates, the project status updates will show how much of that time has been consumed and illustrate whether the project is on track. We use a color system to show the health of the project — projects that are trending green are on schedule, yellow indicates possible issues with potential mitigation plans, and red indicates more serious issues, such as being behind the timeline or over budget.
Creating Your Project Management Toolkit
Project managers are the feet on the street day to day, running operations from the ground and keeping a watchful eye on progress. The Project Charter, Business Requirements Document, Workback Schedule, and Action Log are key tools our consultants use every day to keep projects on track and create predictably successful outcomes.
