Project Kick-off Exercise: Prioritize the Vital Signs
by Stacy Goff, PMP ©2000, 2002 ProjectExperts®
Executive Summary: less effective project managers
manage the factors that are easy to measure, rather than those
that are most important to project stakeholders. Then they wonder
why they get suboptimal results. Start the project with agreement
about the relative importance of each of the factors by using this exercise.
Then goal-seek to optimize your performance in the top-priority items,
and use your flexibility
in the lower-priority items to meet stakeholder expectations.
Nine knowledge areas make up the PMBOK® (Project
Management Body of Knowledge) Guide. We use a subset of six
of those knowledge areas as the Vital Signs of project success. They are
represented in the diagram and briefly explained below (note:
in the Guide to the PMBOK, the areas are described as Project
Scope Management, etc., but we've used this process since 1980,
significantly predating the 1987 PMBOK and 1996 PMBOK Guide).
 Scope,
which represents what you'll produce.- Quality, which is often suboptimized when we focus too much
on the easier to measure vital signs.
- Time, and Cost, which when properly used do not constrain
scope, but rather reflect your efficiency in delivering it.
- Risk, which identifies situations that can imperil the project,
offset by responses you identify to prevent, intervene or recover,
to avoid harming the other vital signs (time, cost, quality,
and so on).
- Procurement provides the contract labor, tools, components,
supplies and capital outlay to help with the work.
- Human Resources provides the right people with the right
skills and experience to perform the work as efficiently and
effectively as possible.
- Integration coordinates the development, execution and changes
to the project plan. Note that executing the plan means to carry
it out (not kill it).
- Communication, or as Joan Rivers, the comedian, says "Can
we talk?" Of course, for projects, you'll use many communication
venues; the project plan or status report are just two examples
of these venues.
The six that we prioritize at project startup are Scope, Quality,
Time, Cost, Risk and Human Resources. Getting stakeholder agreement
about the priority of the top three, i.e. which is most important
in this project, which is next most important, and so on, is key
to stakeholder satisfaction.
Three Challenges
1. Differing priorities among stakeholders often results in poor
project performance.
2. Inability to get clear priorities can cause teams to fail to
use flexibility they should use.
3. Post-Project reviews sometimes use different priorities than
those stressed during the project.
For a project to succeed, you must manage all the factors.
But successful project managers use their flexibility in the
lower-priority
vital signs to optimize results in the top-priority ones.
This can be challenging when you try to respond to differing
priorities of different stakeholders.
Given agreement about the absolute priorities, project teams
can use their flexibility, in some cases engaging stakeholders
in their efforts. For example, If Time, Cost and Quality are
the top three rank-ordered vital signs, the team should goal-seek
to success in those areas by establishing flexibility in Scope,
Human Resources, and Risk. Well, maybe not risk, if
your enterprise is Risk-averse.
In this article, we illuminate that point with an exercise we
use in Rapid Initial Planning®, our project start-up consulting
service. We describe the exercise below.
An Exercise
OBJECTIVE: To get agreement about the relative priority of your
project's vital signs, or key factors to manage.
PROCESS: You do the exercise first individually and then compare
results with other stakeholders and your team. Even when you cannot
get your stakeholders to do this exercise at project start-up
you can still get a useful perspective by doing it individually.
Tip: concentrate on the six factors of
Scope, Quality, Time, Cost, Risk and Human Resources.
1. First, working individually, list the six Vital Signs on a
sheet of paper.
2. Rank order the three most
important of those Vital Signs from each of these perspectives:
- Project Team
- Sponsors and Resource Managers
- End Users
3. In larger projects where you have many stakeholders,
or stakeholder representatives, organize them into three groups:
Project Team, Sponsors and Resource Managers, and End Users or
project beneficiaries.
(Note: Resource Managers are those managers one and two levels up from the project
team members, who set priorities and allocate skilled resources appropriately.)
Each group should get consensus about the rank order of the top
three Vital Signs for their respective role.
4. Share your results from Step 2 or 3. Answer these questions:
Q: What, if any, common threads or startlingly different perspectives
do you see?
Q: How might these priorities change after the project is complete?
Why?
Q: How should you reconcile any differences in stakeholder
priorities during the project?
Q: How would you reconcile the changes in priorities after
the project is complete?
5. Work with your stakeholders to get consensus between all
groups about the top 3 Vital Signs. Record the results on a flipchart.
Record 2-3 reasons why your stakeholder group established this
priority sequence. Refer to this list of reasons during the project
for ideas or moral support whenever you need to do a better job
of reconciling differences in priorities.
6. Three or four months into the project (and at regular intervals
thereafter) pull out the original flipchart pages and verify that
you are still targeting the same Vital Signs. Often we fall back
to those factors that are easier to manage, but are not our prefered
results. Redirect the project as needed, or change the priorities
if the project's business case warrants it.
7. At the end of the project, include the priorities and your
performance against them in your project evaluation and Lessons
Learned process.
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