Establish the Triple Constraint when the Project Charter is Approved
At the end of the Definition and Planning process you should have an agreement with your sponsor on the work that will be completed and the cost (time) and duration that are needed to complete the work. These three items form a concept called the “triple constraint”. The key aspect of the triple constraint is that if one of the three items change, at least one, if not both, of the other items need to change as well. (The triple constraint is actually written a couple similar ways. The cost item can also be referred to as effort, which makes more sense if the labor costs are all internal and if there are no non-labor costs. Sometimes, the scope item is referred to as quality, which then focuses on delivering a certain quality level for a certain cost and duration. This is a more narrow aspect of the triple constraint, but the general concepts still hold true.)
Try to Understand Your Client’s Expressed Needs and Their Real Needs
The Project Charter describes the project at a high level. The Project Charter specifically describes the needs of the client, as well as the project team’s estimate of the effort, duration and cost to fulfill those needs. The details of the client’s need are then defined in more detail through the gathering of business requirements.
It is important for the project manager and project team to understand that the true needs of the client may or may not be the same as the needs that are expressed to you and that are the foundation of the Project Charter and the business requirements. In many cases, the client does not understand his true needs when the project starts. The true needs can sometimes evolve over the course of the project. Likewise, the client may have a clear vision of his needs, but he may have a hard time expressing the needs to the project team. To a certain extent, this is the purpose of scope change management – to allow the client to change the requirements of the project while it is in-progress.
The project team can document the expressed needs of the client and use the expressed needs as the basis for the approval of the Project Charter and the Business Requirements. However, the project team should do as good a job as possible uncovering the true needs of the client. This involves techniques such as asking good questions, asking targeted follow-up questions, gathering input from all key stakeholders, asking more questions when requirements don’t seem to make sense, etc. Obviously, the project team should do whatever it can to try to uncover the true needs of the client. The closer the true needs of the client are to his expressed needs, the closer you will be to getting the project right the first time.
Use a Separate “Discovery Project” to Define the Work for a Large Project
For very large projects, there is a tendency for the project definition work to become very lengthy and unfocused. Defining the work for very large projects may take enough time that it should be structured as a project itself. This is the purpose of defining a separate Discovery Project.
This should make sense. For example, if the project is ultimately going to take 50,000 effort hours, it may take a number of months to get the project defined and approved. In these cases, a distinct first project is established to define the second larger project itself. The final deliverable for a Discovery Project is a completed Project Charter, Project Management Plan and project schedule for the subsequent large project. All the other project deliverables will be produced as a part of the next follow-up project.
Discovery Projects, like all projects, come in all sizes. You should estimate the effort and duration required for the Discovery Project. Based on the effort required for the Discovery Project, you can categorize the Discovery Project itself as small / medium / large using the same project criteria described earlier. Remember that this is the relative size of the Discovery Project, not the final project. Depending on the size of the Discovery Project, you again have three options on how to define the work.
For a small Discovery Project, a service request can be created, but it is not required. For this size of effort, just continue to do the definition work, as defined in the 1.1.2 Define the Work / Medium project. It is assumed that if you are defining a Discovery Project the final project will be large enough to require a full Project Charter.
For a medium-sized Discovery Project, follow the TenStep Project Management Process for a medium project. The Discovery Project should have an Abbreviated Project Charter and project schedule, and be managed just like any other medium-size project, including managing issues, scope, risk, etc. (A Project Management Plan document does not need to be created for the Discovery Project itself.) When the Discovery Project is complete, the Project Charter, Project Management Plan and project schedule for the subsequent project should be created. The approval process for these documents should be a part of the Discovery Project. Assuming that the Project Charter has been approved, the subsequent large project can start at any time. However, steps 1.0 Define the Work and 2.0 Build the Schedule and Budget will already be completed (these were the purpose of the Discovery Project). The project management process for this subsequent project can begin in Step 3.0 Manage the Schedule and Budget.
If the size of your Discovery Project is, in fact, a large project itself, you should follow the steps required for defining large projects. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you are trying to define a very large project – perhaps even a program (a set of related projects managed as a whole). Let’s further assume the Discovery Project itself takes 5,000 hours. If the Discovery Project is a large project, the subsequent project actually being defined would have to be very, very large. The Discovery Project would then be managed as a large project. When the Discovery Project is completed, the larger project can start, since the Discovery Project deliverables include the Project Charter, schedule and Project Management Plan. |
