Planning in 3-D

Most of my colleagues  know that I am a  big fan of Clarizen project management software, so much in fact that I offered unabashed praise in a case study-cum-advertorial last year. There are a number of reasons why I love the software – user friendly interface, robust functionality, excellent support & training, etc. – but the Clarizen feature that really won me over is a fundamental paradigm shift in how I approach project planning, especially the creation of team work plans, whether I am using Clarizen or not.

Primarily, this paradigm shift is linked to an alternative usage of “milestones” in project planning. The general definition of milestones, a series of markers placed along a path at mile intervals, is consistent with how milestones are used in Microsoft Project. The milestone  is a no-time marker that the project progress has reached a certain point along the way, much like a driver keeping track of how far down the road he/she has traveled. It has no duration or resources attached, and represents an intangible point in time that has no work dimension in of itself.

Clarizen takes a different approach to using milestones in project plans, even if it diverges from the traditional “marker along the way” definition. A milestone in Clarizen is more like a 3-dimensional building block that contains any number of activities and tasks. When the activities and tasks are complete, the milestone is complete. Thus, complex projects are  made up of multiple milestones that are completed along the way, eventually yielding a finished project.

Semantics you say? I beg to differ for the following reasons:

1. Thinking of milestones as activity blocks to build  (or buckets to fill) is a concrete visualization that helps team members and stakeholders grasp the structure of the project plan.  It is a sort of like a high level WBS for the execution phase that can be expressed literally and visually.
2. Different resource sets can be assigned to different milestones, so everyone can focus on the part of the plan that is most relevant to them, while delays or issues can easily be pinpointed to the appropriate team members.
3. Top down planning, including work hour estimation, is easier, faster and more accurate when there are discrete project chunks to assess instead of looking at the project as a whole.
4. Libraries of common  milestones can be saved and used for new project planning.
5. Milestones can be compared across projects and clients to assess production performance and efficiency. This is particularly helpful in agency environments.

Really, I could go on and on. Any production / development environment handling multiple projects at once could benefit from this 3-D approach to project planning, IMHO.  It is a simple shift that can align estimation, scheduling and reporting regardless of the software being used to manage projects. However, my props go to Clarizen for building it into the fabric of their tool-set.

Home School Project Management 101

Since we are homeschooling our children, I have a fun opportunity to add “basics of project management for elementary aged kids” to their curriculum. We recently did an assignment / activity around organizing a complex shopping trip as a distinct, temporary endeavor with requirements of efficiency and quality.

Our back to school shopping usually overlaps with making sure everyone also has appropriate clothes for the Jewish High Holidays, such as suits, dresses and other dress clothes. Additionally, this year, we were preparing for an October family wedding. With 5 kids to shop for, and some old enough to care about their own style but none old enough to drive, there was a lot to do.

In the midst of the flurry of gathering the requirements – which kids needed what stuff – it occurred to me that I could use a formal plan to manage the chaos of figuring out which kids needed to be taken to which stores, scheduled according to  the sporadic windows of time my wife and I would have available for such activities. 

I gathered the team, my wife and kids, and led them through an “activity definition” exercise that produced an output that we then organized into an actual WBS. This became an input to a series of shopping lists matching kids to stores. We then organized the project milestones by store and matched store by location to parental location and time windows. Parents knew ahead of time which stores to go to on which day of the week, as well as which kids were coming and what exactly needed to be bought for each – information provided by the kids themselves and organized into lists.

Using a WBS framework for helping my children in school has many applications. One child was struggling to get started on an English writing assignment, and I followed a similar process to help him organize a content plan to base his writing from.  It’s really cool to see fundamental methodologies work at the  most elementary levels.