Creating a Project Plan (part 3 of 3)

It’s important to have the right team for your project. Without the right team, no matter how good a plan you have, the work will not get done.

If you’ve followed parts 1 & 2, you’ve seen that we covered the importance of a project plan, dividing up the tasks and estimating time. In this post, we ‘re going to talk about People and Costs, or what is sometimes known as resource management.

People

If you haven’t identified key sources yet, then one of the nice things about building out the task list is that you can see what types of people, perhaps even, which people you need to complete tasks, milestones and ultimately the project. In reality, you probably already had a good idea, but this helps solidify that idea.

To help select the right people, consider the following;

• What skills are required?
• How many people with each type of skill do you need?
• Which people have these skills?
• Can you afford them?
• Are they available?
• Do they have the right attitude?

That last one; Do they have the right attitude, is a bit hard to pin down and as such, it’s often forgotten. But, if you have the choice, you need to select people that want to be on the project, or more importantly you don’t want the people that don’t want to be a part of the project. Is there a trade-off between highly skilled engineers that don’t want to be a part of the project vs lower skilled, but highly enthused engineers that do want to be a part of the project?

Yes, but, invariably, your project is more likely to succeed with the lower skilled, yet highly enthused member of the team than the better skilled but uninterested team member!

Costs

Project Managers need to worry about how much money they need to complete the project. We look for 2 types of costs; Variable Costs and Fixed Costs.

Variable Costs are the things that change depending on what or how much of something you are building, these are things that you are buying specifically for the project. The number of people you need and for how long, the materials, the new hardware or software, these are all variables.

Fixed Costs are the costs that you have to pay irrespective of how much you use. An example here might be things like software pricing, at least in a perpetual licensing model anyway, for example, the cost of X software if $Y and it may be a 1 time cost, or an annual recurring fee, but the cost is fixed. If you use the product for 3 months, the price is still the same as if you used it for 12 months. I realise this doesn’t hold up in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that we’re pretty much all shifting too, but there are still many products out there that are sold under one-time licensing.

Budget

The budget for your project is the sum of all the costs. Many internal projects will not allocate the cost of staff time, the labour is considered a normal cost of business unless you need to hire specialists or contractors to increase your team in order to meet the required work output to complete the project.

Most costs are known, if you’re at this stage of a Project Plan then there must have been some kind of Business Case which should have detailed costs in order to prove that the project was viable. Those early costs may have been estimated or based on previous projects (for example, a new server bought 6 months ago is a good indicator of what a current server price would be, assuming a similar spec). Where a cost is unknown, we need to go back to making assumptions and as with any time that you make an assumption, you need to document the assumption and the reason for the assumption so that you can explain or correct the assumption at a later date.

Assumptions and Risk

Unfortunately, the more assumptions you need to make, the more Risk there is in your project, and as discussed in previous posts, these need to be documented in your Risk Register along with any Mitigations and Contingencies.

Can you do it, Should you do it? Finally we come back round to one of the fundamental questions of Project Management ‘Can you do it, Should you do it?’

Can you do it; If the project plan shows that you need 40 people and it will cost $600k, yet you only have 10 people available and a maximum budget of $100k, then the answer is No!

Should you do it; If the project is going to cost you $600k, take 18 months of development and the end deliverable is going to save you $10k per year in manufacturing costs, it’s going to take a long time to see a Return on Investment (ROI) before this project was worth the cost, in this case, I would say the answer is No!