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Scaling the size of the project management effort to fit the need 

By Mike Williams, PMP

 

In this first of two articles we look at the challenge of applying an appropriate level of project management to projects of differing sizes.

One of the most common questions I am asked about managing projects is “how much time on a project should be spent on project management?” They are looking for some magic formula – like the rule of 7 – for a team of seven full time equivalent resources you need one full time manager.  I have heard of a wide range of formula being used, often in the range 10% to 20%, but there is no one simple formula for all sizes and types of projects.  

How much time should be spent on planning?  In many organisations the project manager doesn’t think about how much time they should spend on  planning a project; for them the answer is however long it takes to fill out all those project management documents and templates so they can get approval to proceed. 

A common complaint of project managers working in large organisations, particularly those working on relatively smaller projects, is that they spend too much time on the project management documentation and not enough time on getting the project done.  Now I know that some of these project managers just hate producing documentation and they are just having a whinge, however there are a significant number of examples of where the extent of the project management methodology being applied is not appropriate to the size of the project. 

This problem seems to lie in the way most larger organisations put in place their project management methodology.  The approach is typically to define or apply an all encompassing methodology that will handle the largest of projects the organisation ever under takes.  This approach probably stems from why the methodology is being put in place in the first place.  Sooner or later an organisation undertakes a major project which runs in to trouble.  This could have been one of those small projects that just grew in scope, but there is in most large organisations one infamous, large and expensive project that people don’t really want to talk about that hurt the organisation so badly that they decided to get serious about managing projects.  As a result they go for the whole package, the project methodology must cover everything to avoid history repeating itself.   This is then implemented with a governance discipline which can seem to many a little “over-zealous”.

The problem then becomes that too much time and effort is spent on the project management of smaller projects making them less cost effective.  In fact, in speaking to a senior executive of a large organisation recently I was commenting on their extensive project management methodology and asked what they used for smaller projects.  His response was “We don’t do small projects any more they were just too expensive”.

Unless you are able to be selective and only do large projects where you apply the full methodology you are going to need to establish a classification process to projects and determine what to apply to those smaller projects.

In the nextarticle we will look at some of the factors to consider in categorising projects and how to determine what parts of the project methodology to apply to different sized projects.

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