How a Project Manager can predict the future

Project Managers have many responsibilities. Project Managers deliver successful projects by:

  1. helping define the scope
  2. creating a schedule
  3. keeping the project on budget
  4. ensuring the quality meets the expectation
  5. ensuring effective communication and keeping the risk down
  6. working with vendors or products and services

These items can be grouped into integration, scope, time, cost, human resources, quality, risk, communication, and procurement.  But why can’t all projects managers lead any type of project?

Experience.  You want a project manager who’s been there, done that. You want a project manager who has successfully delivered something similar many times before. If you’ve done something many times, you’re aware of:

  • likely problems and obstacles that will arise, and how to mitigate these risks
  • techniques to avoid activities that will waste everyone’s time
  • what decisions are needed early in the project

Effectively, an appropriately-experienced individual can predict the future for your project, and that experience is half of their cost.

Regardless of what project you’re working on, you need to document lessons learned for the next one. This exercise is regularly avoided by project teams, but they are missing the opportunity to capture those brilliant time-saving tidbits for next time.

One of my favorite techniques for predicting the future next time is by documenting the estimated and actual amount of work of things, and saving that for next time. If your project is resolving 50 similar work products (e.g. 50 features, 50 “user stories”, 50 requirements, 50 tickets, 50 bugs, etc.), record the estimated effort and document the actual work (time and/or cost). All sorts of great information comes out of this:

  1. What factor were your total estimates vs actual? (e.g. total estimated effort / actual effort. >1 estimates were high, <1 estimates were low.)
  2. Who’s your star performer?  Who needs some training?
  3. How long will another 50 work products take?  How much will it cost?
  4. What took the most effort, and how can that be avoided next time?

 star25Apply this effectively

  1. Experience allows someone to predict the future if it’s a similar exercise, and that experience is a lot of what you pay for
  2. If you’re managing a project, make your stakeholders’ lives easier by providing quantifiable, irrefutable documentation for next time. This isn’t to be avoided, and this is how you provide excellent service.

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