Using the Project Vital Signs to Prioritize Expectations

Executive Summary: less effective Project Managers manage the factors that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important to project stakeholders. Then they wonder why they get suboptimal results. Start the project with agreement about the results by using this exercise. Then goal-seek to optimize your performance in the top-priority items, and use your flexibility in the lower-priority items to meet stakeholder expectations.

Nine factors make up the PMBOK^® Guide's knowledge areas (PMBOK: Project Management Body of Knowledge). We have used a subset of those areas for over 30 years as the Vital Signs of project success. They are represented in the diagram and briefly explained below (note: in the PMBOK Guide, the knowledge areas are described as Project Scope Management, etc).

• Scope, which is what you'll produce (tip: don't try to solve world hunger).
• Quality, which should be constant, but is often sub-optimized when we focus too much on the easier to measure vital signs.
• Time, and Cost, which when properly used do not constrain scope, but reflect your efficiency in delivering it.
• Risk, which identifies situations that can imperil the project, offset by responses you identify to prevent, intervene or recover, to avoid harming the other vital signs (time, cost, quality, and so on).
• Procurement provides the contract labor, tools, components, supplies and capital outlay to help with the work.
• Human Resources provides the right people with the right skills and experience to perform the work as efficiently and effectively as possible.
• Integration coordinates the development, execution and changes to the project plan. Note that executing the plan means to carry it out (not kill it).
• Communication, or as Joan Rivers, the comedian, says "Can we talk?" Of course, for projects, you'll use many communication venues; the project plan or status report are just two examples of these venues.

Three Challenges

1. Differing priorities among stakeholders can result in poor project performance.
2. Inability to get clear priorities can cause teams to fail to use flexibility they should use.
3. Post-Project reviews sometimes use different priorities than those stressed during the project.

For any project to be successful, you must manage all nine areas. This can be challenging when you try to respond to differing priorities of different stakeholders.

Given agreement about the absolute priorities, project teams can use their flexibility, in some cases engaging stakeholders in their efforts. For example, If Time, Cost and Quality are the top three rank-ordered vital signs, the team should goal-seek to success in those areas by establishing flexibility in Scope, Human Resources, Procurement and Risk. Well, maybe not risk, if your enterprise is Risk-averse.

In this article, we illuminate that point with an exercise we use in Rapid Initial Planning, our project start-up consulting service. We describe the exercise below.

An Exercise
OBJECTIVE: To get agreement about the relative priority of your project's vital signs, or knowledge areas.

PROCESS: You do the exercise first individually and then compare results with other stakeholders and your team. Even when you cannot get your stakeholders to do this exercise at project start-up you can still get a useful perspective by doing it individually.

Tip: to reduce prioritizing complexity to those that are measureable outcomes, rather than key parts of the process, consider dropping Procurement, Integration and Communication from the Vital Signs list.

1. First, working individually, list the six measurable Vital Signs on a sheet of paper.

2. Rank order the three most important of those Vital Signs from each of these perspectives:

• Project Team
• Sponsors and Resource Managers
• End Users

3. Organize your stakeholders into three groups: Project Team, Sponsors & Resource Managers, and End Users. Each group should get consensus about the rank order of the top three Vital Signs for their respective role. If time permits, each group should also agree on the rank order as perceived by the other groups. (Note: Resource Managers are those managers one and two levels up from the project team who set priorities and allocate skilled resources appropriately.)

4. Share your results from Step 3. Answer these questions:

Q: What, if any, common threads or startlingly different perspectives do you see?

Q: How might these priorities change after the project is complete? Why?

Q: How should you reconcile any differences in stakeholder priorities during the project?

Q: How would you reconcile the changes in priorities after the project is complete?

5. Work with your stakeholders to get consensus about the top 3 Vital Signs. Record the results on a flipchart. Record 2-3 reasons why your stakeholder group established this priority sequence. Refer to this list of reasons for ideas whenever you need to do a better job of reconciling differences in priorities.

6. Three or four months into the project (and at regular intervals thereafter) pull out the original flipchart pages and verify that you are still targeting the same Vital Signs. Often we fall back to those factors that are easier to manage, but are not our prefered results. Redirect the project as needed, or change the priorities if the project's business case warrants it.

7. At the end of the project, include the priorities and your performance against them in your project evaluation and Lessons Learned process.