Transcript International Legal Project Management

International
Legal
Project Management
Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS, Lic. Spec., LL.M.
What is project management?
A project is distinguished from regular work
in that it’s a one-time effort
to change things in some way.
Project management is
everything you need to make a project happen
on time and within budget
to deliver the needed scope and quality.
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The project balance quadrant
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Stakeholders
Stakeholders are the people who feel that the project
might affect them and care about its outcome.
It’s important to identify your stakeholders
so that you can understand their points of view and
predict the pressure they may exert on the project.
Talk to people who will be affected and
actively seek out those who you think will care most.
Understand their concerns and think about how to
involve them in the project.
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Stakeholders (cont.)
The role of the project manager is to make sure that
the different parties’ viewpoints are heard,
and that everyone agrees to respect
the course of action chosen, even if, as individuals,
they would have made a different decision.
Project success depends on the involvement, trust and
contributions of the stakeholders.
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Stakeholders: The project sponsor
The project sponsor is the embodiment of the
project customer, that is, the person for whom the
project is being delivered.
Ultimate decision-making authority resides with the
project sponsor.
The project sponsor must be actively involved and take
the project seriously.
He or she equally needs to be senior enough to have
the authority to make the very big decisions—even
the decision to cancel the project if necessary.
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Stakeholders: The project board
The project board is a small group of people whose
main responsibility is to make the
really big project decisions.
Meet with the project board regularly
to provide progress updates and discuss any key
decisions. The role of the project manager is to
present options and recommend a course of action.
Much of the true value of project management is in
communicating to the stakeholders and project
board, rather than the project team.
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Stakeholders: The project team
Ensuring that you have the right mix of abilities
on the project team is key.
When you’re starting a project with a new team,
sit down, one on one, with each individual.
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Stakeholders: The project team (cont.)
Collaboration requires excellent communication and is
about working together as effectively as possible.
As project manager, you’re responsible both for
leading the team and for fostering an environment
in which the team can collaborate effectively.
Collaboration is about forming relationships.
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Stakeholders: The project team (cont.)
Putting individuals together makes them a group,
but only when they can work together effectively will
they really be a team.
Helping your people to become a team,
rather than remaining a group,
is one of the most important roles
you have as a project manager.
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Project team building
The stages that a group goes through as it becomes a
team are:
 FORMING: Need for a relaxed kick-off meeting.
 STORMING: Differences of opinion (usually on
project planning) come to the fore.
 NORMING: Agreement on standard ways of working
and the ways in which issues and conflicts will be
dealt with. Beware of Groupthink!
 PERFORMING: Reliance on each other for help and
support, healthy ways of dealing with disagreement.
 ADJOURNING: Sense of loss on separation.
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Managing the project team
A project manager has two roles:
manager,
coordinating the efforts on the project,
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leader,
making sure that the project delivers the right results.
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Team management tips
Set up a regular team meeting.
Encourage team members to raise concerns or
ask for help from each other in this forum.
Define an issue reporting and resolution process.
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Remote team management tips
Share lots of contact details.
Pull together a skills matrix.
Create group spaces.
Be respectful of time and routine differences.
Invest in relationship building.
Become a contact hub.
Become a facilitator.
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Hershey and Blanchard
model of behavior
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Communication
The only thing worse than confusion
is when there is absolute clarity
… over different versions of events!
Being able to communicate effectively is a
key skill for any project manager.
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Communication (cont.)
Communication is an area in which it is
particularly important to
understand organisational culture.
Ask the people you’re trying to communicate
with whether your communication is actually
working —don’t just keep doing what you’re
doing, and risk having everything explode at a
later date.
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Forms of communication
Interpersonal
Presentational
Many to many
One- or two-way
Push
Pull
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Content of communication
Whatever the subject, you need to make sure that
you’re clear on three issues:
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Purpose: What are you trying to achieve?
Structure: How are you going to present the
information?
Outcome: What should the people receiving the
communication do once they have it?
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General communication guidelines
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If it’s personal, individual, or sensitive, deal with it
one-to-one.
Separate meetings that have different purposes.
Choose the appropriate form for your purpose.
Presentations are good for informing groups of
people, they aren’t a good format for discussion.
Similarly, turning a team meeting into a series of
one-to-one discussions with individual members isn’t
a productive use of anyone’s time except yours.
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General communication guidelines
(cont.)
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Some methods support different forms of
communication better than others. For instance,
email is a good method for one-to-one and one-tomany communication, but terrible for many-to-many
discussions or conversations.
Electronic communication lends itself to
misunderstandings, particularly when a difference of
opinion occurs.
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General communication guidelines
(cont.)
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Assess people’s expectations of each
communication method. Some people view email as
a high priority, others believe that it’s a low-urgency
form of communication, and that if something’s
important, people will pick up the phone and
actually talk to one another. Don’t try to impose
your preferences on others, but understand theirs so
you can communicate more effectively.
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General communication guidelines
(cont.)
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Have a team discussion about communication to
identify personal preferences.
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Draft a simple communication plan outlining
channels and forms of communication, frequency of
communication and parties involved. The
communication plan should cover everything from
monthly email updates to daily meetings (for the
project team) and fortnightly board meetings (with
the project board).
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Improve the efficiency of email
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Write a good subject line.
Indicate the action needed.
Place a summary at the start of your email.
If you need something done, set a clear deadline.
Use lists and bullet points.
Be specific about responsibilities and make it very
obvious who’s meant to take ownership for a task or
next step.
Keep it short and simple (KISS).
Know when to step outside of email!
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Feedback
Make sure that everyone knows how to
communicate back to you! You need to know about
great ideas, issues popping up on the horizon, and
potential risks and opportunities. Some methods:
feedback sessions during meetings
anonymous “ideas box” (or webpage)
informal meetings and contacts
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The project cycle
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Initiating: General
If Initiating isn’t done right, you often end up in a
situation where the project team members have
very different ideas about the project’s purpose.
Good initiation will also ensure that you
identify all the project stakeholders up-front.
Initiating is also the best chance you’ll get to
define success
and agree on the project’s success criteria.
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The project initiation document
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Draft a document summarising:
the project’s objective (what you’re trying to
achieve)
the key deliverables (how you’re going to achieve
the objective)
the overall rationale for the project (why you’re
undertaking it)
the initial timings (when it will be achieved)
the initial organisation (who is involved)
key assumptions and constraints
success criteria.
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Definition of project objectives
The objectives should be SMAC: specific, measurable,
actionable, and consistent.
The key feature is that at the end of the project, you
should be able to say “yes, we did that” or “no, we
failed.” There should be no gray areas. Throughout
the project, you should be able to track the team’s
progress towards those objectives.
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Initial project timeline
Plan the project timeline, listing major deliverables
against the week or month in which they’ll be
delivered.
Gannt chart example:
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Planning: General
Planning a project is similar to planning
a long-distance drive.
Task-based planning vs deliverable-based planning:
jobs vs products.
The rolling wave approach:
plan the project’s immediate future in detail (tasks),
and plan deliverables that lie further out at a higher
level.
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Planning: a 6-step process
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Break down the project into pieces small enough to
work with.
Identify dependencies.
Estimate how long each piece will take.
Add some contingency.
Consider the risks.
Present the plan in a format that the team, board,
and stakeholders will understand and follow.
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Planning: Step 1
Break the single end-goal of your project
into individual deliverables that are SMAC,
small enough to be both achievable and measurable.
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Planning: Step 2
Identify the dependencies:
which deliverables depend on other deliverables,
forcing a sequential implementation.
resource dependency
or
work that by its nature
demands to be done in sequence.
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Planning: Step 3
Build an initial project schedule.
The person (or subteam) who will actually undertake a
given piece of work should create the estimates,
so that the estimate can be realistic.
Estimates are neither wild guesses nor deadlines.
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Planning: Step 3 (cont.)
How to estimate time?
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Use experience
Break down the deliverables further
Use averaging techniques:
(Most optimistic+least optimistic)÷2
[Most optimistic+(4xmost likely)+least optimistic]÷6
Delphi technique
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Planning: Step 3 (cont.)
Use a rolling wave approach
that gives very rough, broad-based estimates
for any deliverable that’s too far out to estimate
(typically more than eight weeks away), and only
putting the effort in to breaking down in detail,
and estimating properly, the work that’s coming in
the immediate future.
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Planning: Step 4
Add contingency, ie. extra time
that is incorporated in the schedule to cover
unexpected events as well as expected events
that will have an impact on the schedule
(task switching, other work, personal commitments).
Add contingency to risky tasks.
Contingency is another concept that is
often misunderstood by project stakeholders.
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Planning: Step 5
Create a Risk Management Plan:
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Identify potential risks.
Rate them by likelihood and severity.
Choose which risks to plan for.
Make plans for dealing with those risks.
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Planning: Step 5 (cont.)
Rate each risk,
first on the likelihood of its occurrence
(how likely is it to actually happen?)
and then on its severity
(how bad is it, if it does happen?).
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Planning: Step 5 (cont.)
Decide on a response to each risk ahead of time:
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Accept: There is nothing that can be done to reduce
the risk, you can just hope it does not occur.
Avoid: The project plan can be modified so as to
avoid the situation that creates the risk.
Mitigate: What will you do to minimize the impact
should the risk event occur?
Transfer: Pass the impact should the risk event occur
(for example, buy an insurance policy).
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Planning: Step 6
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The total project plan should cover:
deliverables and milestones: the items you’re
actually going to deliver, broken down into logical,
manageable chunks
schedule: timing of the deliverables, based on the
estimates you’ve compiled
assumptions and constraints: the circumstances or
factors you’ve assumed to be true, and that you’ve
identified as limitations.
risk management: anticipated risks and the steps
you will take to mitigate them if they materialise.
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Planning: Step 6 (cont.)
A plan review is a short meeting
(of not more than 30 minutes) in which
you review the project plan
with a specific group of stakeholders,
taking people through the plan at a high level, and
only going into the detail that is relevant to them.
Take advantage of these meetings to clear up any
confusion and deal with misunderstandings.
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Planning: Test question (hint!)
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You find yourself in the midst of a project for which
no planning has been done, but a final deadline
has already been set. What do you do?
Break down the deliverables, gather the estimates,
and decide how much contingency you’d have liked
to have.
Remember the balance quadrant.
Ask for time or other resources.
Take the emotion out of the discussion.
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Executing: The “owner”
Each and every deliverable needs to have an owner.
That individual is personally responsible and
accountable for making it happen.
That individual will either work alone on the
deliverable or will co-ordinate the work of the others
involved, will escalate issues to the project manager
if it looks like things are going off-track, and will
ask for help when it’s needed.
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Executing: The “owner” (cont.)
Assign ownership to the pieces of work that you and
your team will be focusing on for the next 2-3 weeks
(it can be difficult to make good ownership choices
for work to be completed further out than this).
Hold regular short (stand-up) update meetings
with the deliverable owners, making sure that
they walk away from the meeting
knowing their next steps.
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Executing: The RASCI matrix
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The RASCI matrix defines the involvement of
individuals in deliverables and work:
Responsible (owner)
Accountable (project manager)
Supportive (provides help or resources)
Consulted (controls quality)
Informed
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Controlling: Understand, track, adapt
Understand how you are doing:
are deliverables being delivered?
Track your progress: consult the deliverables’ owners.
Adapt to changing circumstances.
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Controlling: Project progress indicators
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Scope delivered:
which deliverables have been completed?
Percentage time that has passed vs time planned:
ahead, on or behind schedule?
Budget used to date,
compared both to the scope delivered and the time
that’s passed.
Quality.
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Controlling: “Issues”
Issues are risks that have come to life;
they are problems that mean you cannot carry on
with the project as planned.
Unidentified or unmitigated risks are handled at the
level of the project manager, the project team or the
project board, in increasing order of severity.
Instead of dealing with the issues individually,
a completely different tack may be needed
to achieve the project itself.
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Controlling: “Issues” (cont.)
Issue lists are used to keep track and
help with assigning ownership of issues.
They also help in building records and experience
for future projects.
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Controlling: verification vs validation
Verification is checking that you have delivered what
you intended.
Validation is checking that whatever you are delivering
is actually going to have the intended value.
Validation can make you change course mid-project,
even if you are delivering everything on time, within
budget, and to the correct scope and quality. An
average project manager cares about making the
project happen; a great project manager cares about
delivering what the customer really needs—not
necessarily the product, but the value underlying it.
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Closing: 4-step process
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Review the project, presenting the product or
process that has been delivered, based on the
success criteria that were agreed in the Initiating
phase and possibly amended in the later phases of
the project.
Agree on exactly what remains to be done before
the project can be officially closed.
Complete the final tasks and deliverables that were
agreed to. Pay attention to detail!
Last, but certainly not least, celebrate the end of the
project!
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Towards future projects
A “lessons learned” session is an opportunity for the
project team to reflect on what went well, what
didn’t, and what could be done differently in future.
Focus on the positives as much as the negatives.
One of the happy side effects of having created all the
project documents, from project plan to issue lists, is
that they make managing multiple or future
projects much easier.
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Credits and notes
This course was prepared for the 2014 Summer School
of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University by Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS,
who drew heavily on the excellent
‘The Principles of Project Management’ by M. Williams and
‘Effective Project Management (7th ed.)’ by R. Wysocki.
Additional material from the TACIS – INOGATE Project 96.07 (www.inogate.org),
in which the lecturer held a key position, served as a case study.
Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS holds Master’s degrees in European Community Law from the
University of Brussels (License spéciale avec Grande Distinction) and in International Law
from the University of Bristol (LL.M.) under academic scholarship from the A. Onassis
Foundation. He has been the head of international legal teams and a key expert in several
major energy-related projects of the European Commission (INOGATE) and has extensive
experience in technical assistance activities and investment support in the Balkans and the
former Eastern bloc regions. He has provided high-level advice to the governments of
Greece, Romania and the Ukraine on matters of energy legislation and foreign investments,
as well as to the EBRD and the EIB on several (mainly energy) projects in Moldova, Georgia,
the Ukraine and the Black Sea. He is the managing partner of a law firm based in Athens,
Greece.
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