Be wary of cutting corners. You cannot afford to miss critical steps in the process.
The next 5 chapters in the book give you some golden nuggets about working through the 5 process groups. I have had the question posed in this next quote multiple times when considering what’s absolutely necessary for successful project outcomes.
Here is my takeaway #16 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:
16) “Does every project have to run through all 5 (process groups)? What about the really small projects. Surely we can skip a few steps on small projects to save time.”
“Just to be clear, every successfully completed project runs through all 5 process groups. Of course, you complete the process groups a lot faster on a small project.”
Note: This comes from Chapter 2 “PEOPLE + PROCESS = SUCCESS” (pages 31-32)
The book gives a really great example of the printing process when you bring something to your local copy shop. I won’t go through it exactly here. Point is that even small projects go through some form of each of the 5 process groups, even on Agile, Scrum, Adaptive/Hybrid projects. Some principles of project management are just core steps in the process and have been since the Pyramids. Even writing this article took a little bit of initiating, planning, executing, monitoring & controlling, and closing.
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STORY TIME:
In my last article, I mentioned my church service and my printing process to get programs ready for our sacrament service meeting. It has been interesting to me that such a simple project can run into so many problems in execution. Sometimes adding extra hands creates more work. When you are not organized in coordinating between hands you will often get a duplication of work or miss something you thought the other person was doing. Paying attention to the 5 process groups helps get it right.
I treat the work like a new project every week, because of the variability in players, daily life, and elements of the workflow for different reasons from week to week. I factor in the knowns, possible unknowns, and plan for the risk factors. It’s possible for missing information in gathering it, and typos or more egregious copy mistakes and omissions, no white paper on hand (had to use yellow paper once), or other issues in printing. So, in our process of collecting information and printing a final draft, there are safeguards (such as keeping a ream of white paper on hand) to check information and transfer it from hands through formats.
Think of what a publishing company must go through with copy and content editing, exchanges between the author and publisher to make fixes and style choices, especially what it used to do with type setting, printing one proof page, and then going for it in bulk.
And even after all of that, something can easily go wrong, like with my historical fictional book, “Sterling Bridge” there are still things that bother me. I still wonder how the word “living” is missing from a sentence about the living room, because I could have sworn, we caught and fixed that in one of the revisions. That one is acceptable, but choices like what to use for the “disclaimer” are not how I thought we had decided it would be at all, and that is unacceptable. I won’t let the publisher mess that up on my next book.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, everything was “going swimmingly” and then I printed the inside of the bifold for our church program upside down. My computer copy was right, but my mass copier copies were not. Since the copier was causing a streak on the page if I ran it through the automatic feed, I had decided to lay the page on the glass and manually flip it, but I apparently turned it over the long edge instead of the short edge. I didn’t realize the problem until I was 25 out of 50 copies in. I figured it was forgivable, so I let it slide as they say. But it has helped me put in preventative measures, so hopefully I at least won’t make the same mistake twice. Little things add up, especially between multiple hands.
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The danger is to think we naturally know what we are doing and everyone we work with along the way knows intuitively what we and they are doing as well. So, we jump right into the execution part of the project, and we are surprised when others don’t do things the same way in rhythm with whatever we are doing. Then we have to make executive decisions as to what we can live with or not. (Note: Bigger, or more important, executions call for more executive approval, possibly through a change control board, when something goes wrong or maybe even before something goes wrong, just so you know.)
Funny thing is, seems like every project we work on turns out bigger (maybe even better) than we thought it would at the beginning before we had thought it through. We either don’t know what all might be involved in a “simple” project, we don’t remember what it takes for some part of it, or it becomes more grandiose in our quest for excellence because we aren’t paying attention to scope or scope creep. That’s why we need someone to lead out as a project manager who consistently uses some form of each of these steps. Even when working on a solo project you need to not skip process groups to make sure everything is properly done in turn to accomplish best outcomes.
When you initiate, plan, execute, monitor & control, and close the project effectively you prevent most, if not all, of these problems, but imagine how many more problems can crop up if you are not following an orderly process through each of these process groups on even the smallest projects.