The plan that you use must be:
- clear and specific in its content
- easily understood by all who use or see it
- capable of accepting changes at both a detailed and broad level, and
- capable of being used to monitor what’s actually happening.
The simplest forms of the project plan that will do this for you are:
The Gantt chart, and The Critical Path network.
To do that you’ll need to branch out into more specialized texts. But we can take a look, albeit briefly, at their pros and cons.
Gantt charts
The Gantt chart was developed by an American engineer called Henry Gantt. It is based on the use of a horizontal line for each activity on a time-based chart with the length of the line representing the time taken to complete that activity.
The Gantt chart can use a time-scale based on minutes, hours, days or even weeks, depending upon the time-scale of your project, and provides you with a picture of your project. It is a picture that can be easily understood, that shows the relationships of the various activities, and can be used to monitor progress by the filling in of activity lines:
The Gantt chart is probably the most popular of the project planning methods. It is easily understood and can be presented in a variety of physical forms ranging from a proprietary wall chart using adhesive strips, through the hard copy output of modern computer software, to a hand-drawn chart. The ease and speed with which it can be updated is high, particularly with the wall chart or computer-produced charts. Another of its major advantages lies in the ease with which it can be generated — often needing very limited prior training. However, Gantt charts cannot deal easily with complex projects or with projects which contain high levels of uncertainty about durations or completion times. These, as you’ll now see, are best dealt with by the other major type of project planning tool.
Critical Path networks
There are various types of Critical Path network, the best known using acronyms such as PERT (Programme Evaluation and Review Technique), CPM (Critical Path Method), CPS (Critical Path Scheduling) and CPA (Critical Path Analysis). All of these use networks to display both the order of and connections between the activities of the project. The most easily understood of these is the Activity on Arrow network — a network in which an activity is represented by an arrow.
The nodes or circles at the start and finish of each activity are, in a completed network, used to record further information and the arrows can also be used to indicate whether the activities are interdependent or whether they are part of the sequence of activities that defines the overall project duration — called the project ‘critical path‘.
While network-based planning tools are more complex in both their construction and operation than the Gantt chart, they do enable you to quickly examine the implications of changes that occur. This means that you can make decisions about changes based on a good understanding of their implications and examine the trade-offs between cost, time and money. However, the network plan has less visual impact than the Gantt chart and requires considerable training and experience for it to be used efficiently. For these reasons it is used, often in its computer- driven form, on large and complex projects. But, whether you choose a Critical Path network or Gantt chart, the plan you create is really just the beginning of the implementation project. To implement that plan what you need is a team.
Teams
The word ‘team‘ is a very common one. We have teams on our sports fields — as in football, soccer, rugby, baseball and basketball teams — and teams in our workplaces — as in`Finishing shop team‘ or ‘Telephone sales team‘. When we look it up in the dictionary, we find the word ‘team‘ is defined byphrases like ‘a number of people’ and verbs such as`collaborating’ and ‘working together’. Teams generally have members with defined functional roles, such as ‘goalkeeper’, `pitcher’ or ‘team leader’, and what goes on inside them is often seen to be co-operative and constructive — as in ‘team spirit’ or `team work’. In all sorts of situations — at work, at play, and in the home — the team has a proven track-record of creativity and achievement. Most of us have experienced, at some point in our lives, that extra ’something’ that a good team can create. A team that works well can, sometimes literally, ‘move mountains’.
The team that you use to implement your negotiated agreement should be no less an animal and in order to reach this peak of performance it should be made up of people:
- from both sides of the negotiation
- who have:
— higher than average functional skills
— sensitivity to the ‘politics’ of the project — strong problem-solving skills.
The team leader or project manager is an important role in this team — often making the difference between success and failure — and ‘partnership’ is a key word in the way the team operates. The conflict of the negotiation is over; now it is time to make sure that the agreement is implemented — successfully. Teams that do this well have members who act together in ways that are co-operative and aimed at generating outcomes that are desired by the whole team, rather than any one individual. These teams are task focused. Their leadership is less formal, even to the point of being shared, with the leader role moving around the team as the availability of individuals or the phase of task in hand changes. Their meetings are usually open-ended, untidy debates aimed at solving problems. All of this provides you — and the other side — with a way to tap into and harness the efforts, skills, abilities and creativity of all who are involved. The team has a considerable potential to contribute to the success of your implementation project. But even the best of teams needs a framework on which to focus its efforts and this is where we find your project’s monitoring, control andinformation system.
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