Introduction:
The project schedule is a timetable that shows the start and end date of all project outputs and which project team members and other resources are responsible for delivery. It guides the project team as they deliver the project showing planned effort and interdependencies. This contributes greatly to project success by many attributes including progress tracking and visibility to the governance board and stakeholders, but importantly it flags resources requirements for when they’re needed.
Problem:
A tertiary education provider’s payroll upgrade to a cloud-based solution project had derailed due to high project team turnover, lack of clarity of the project’s deliverables and status, and team confusion on their tasks. The Governance Board lacked confidence in the reliability of the Project Schedule and hence project status. Furthermore, the relationship with the solution vendor had waned somewhat due to unclear expectations for delivery responsibilities between the parties. There was no clear direction for project delivery activities and outputs, and a critical path had not been identified.
To add to the difficulties, the Project Management Office (PMO) had resource capacity challenges and was unable to provide support to uplift the schedule to ensure adherence to standards and reporting obligations. The PMO engaged myP3 to assist with scheduling expertise.
Objective:
myP3 was engaged to conduct a Project Schedule health-check to obtain clarity of the project structure and status, and then establish a forward path with the objective that the project delivery team, the Project Board, and business stakeholders had confidence in their delivery plan.
Overview:
myP3 conducted the health check and quickly identified that the Project Schedule was not fit-for-purpose. It did not articulate the project’s current scope of delivery and a series of tasks in the schedule were incorrectly identified as complete.
In response to the health check findings, the client tasked myP3 with an entire replan of the project and then create a new Schedule that all stakeholders could support.
Our first replanning step was to ascertain prior deliverable status to understand the commenced, in progress and complete tasks and outputs by each work stream. myP3 conducted workshops to gain input from the entire team to ensure accurate status accounting. This required the project team to provide candid and blame-free input, with estimates to complete activities re-evaluated, and all internal and external dependencies noted.
myP3 then employed product-based planning as our preferred approach to capture scope and all product delivery outputs comprehensively with the outputs being a Product Breakdown Structure and Product Flow Diagram. These were workshopped with the project team to confirm the full delivery requirements and to inform a re-baseline. Therefore, these artefacts included all project outputs (complete and incomplete), as well as all identified external projects that have a ‘give or get’ product dependency relationship to this project.
With already completed products now tagged appropriately, myP3 could prepare an accurate picture of the tasks and products remaining in a revised Schedule, with their relationships and sequencing matched to the agreed Product Flow Diagram.
The final step in Schedule development was to appropriately resource the scheduled tasks which amounted to adjustments in planned timing and durations based on previously workshopped task effort estimates.
The fully replanned Schedule was socialised with the project team, vendor and business stakeholders for feedback and minor revisions. Once agreed, the final version was presented to, and approved by, the Project Board and the Schedule was re-baselined.
The project recommenced with renewed enthusiasm and commitment across the team whose members each had clear understanding of their responsibilities and outputs. Business stakeholders and the Governance Board were also able to realise a defined path to delivery.
myP3’s Scheduling Service continued to provide ongoing schedule maintenance support and attended weekly meetings with project team leads to update schedule task status. On-going Schedule Reports improvements were also developed to meet Project and Governance needs. An example was the tagging of key tasks within reporting periods so that the delivery teams had clarity of what they needed to achieve, by when and priorities.
The project team successfully continued delivery in accordance with the defined Schedule through to solution transition and go-live, and with the support of the Governance Board and business stakeholders.
Outcome:
Confidence in delivery and accuracy of progress reporting was exponentially improved across the Project Board, project team and stakeholders.
The Project Team morale uplifted with each member seeing progress and accomplishment, that led to adherence to scheduled tasks with the knowledge that these were well planned and appropriately resourced.
A commendation by the CIO and senior management team was made to the project for its ability to recover and achieve the delivery targets.