What is critical to Project success?

and my heart bled to see half completed buildings of the campus ruining from a construction project that was terminated prematurely several years ago within an institution that churns out world class civil and construction engineers perennially.
The same goes for Tokwe Mukosi Dam in Masvingo and the controversial Matabeleland Zambezi Water project.
The list of equally challenged examples of macro-projects may go on, as well as other micro projects hidden in corporate organisations.
It is evident to any layman that some project factors did not blend well in the above examples leading to premature termination.
These observations have motivated me to share with you this week the critical success factors required to successfully navigate any project.
Dozens of literature has been published globally about causes of project failure but the following top five seem to emerge as the popular Critical Success Factors to any project.
l Project Planning
l Stakeholder Buy-in
l Executive Support
l Formal Standards
l Controlled Scope, Cost and Time
“Without a plan, everything is a deviation . . . ,” says English business strategist Thomas Blackburn.
While planning is a primary function of management that involves deciding in advance the future course of action, project planning sharply differs from other types of planning.
Project planning will involve identifying and documenting scope, tasks, schedule, risks, quality and staffing needs. During the planning process the sequence and the logical inter-relationships between the various activities may be established.
The project plan represents the basic tool for successfully executing a project. It forms the basis for all management efforts associated with the project.
The project manager (and his team) is responsible for bringing out the project plan, which should be accurate and complete as far as possible without being several volumes in length.
It is a document that allows the project manager to manage the details, and not be managed by the details. The common error is that most project sponsors impose a project plan on a project manager who was not involved in the planning process and demand results from the document.
Project stakeholders are people who are outside the project manager’s scope of control and have a direct or indirect interest in the project. These people are critical in achieving project success.
If a project manager cannot gain effective buy-in and support from these people, then activities such as defining scope and objectives, identifying and managing risk, benefits analysis and realisation, quality requirements definition and change control are effectively compromised.
Without consensus among stakeholders as to the scope, objectives and quality requirements of the project, the project manager cannot effectively manage the project. At best, the project manager may be able to deliver a product that does not meet the needs of the majority of his or her stakeholders and does not add value.
At worst, the project will simply remain in an “out of control” state with constant changes in scope and objectives until it is terminated or the team leaves in frustration.
In every one of the 20 major failed projects, lack of effective project planning and stakeholder buy-in was common.
Surveys by Deloittes and Touche (1995) on the high failure rate of business process re-engineering projects report that lack of senior management commitment as a major factor in the failures.
The contemporary role of project sponsors and steering committee members goes far beyond the traditional passive roles of project approval and review.
It is critical that senior business executives who have sponsored a project must be actively involved.
one project manager recently put it “to manage a project without an effective executive sponsor is to visit hell on earth”.
A formal project management process is crucial to the success of any project.
This means that projects cannot run on trial and error.
Project Managers must be trained and oriented to the formal project management methodologies, standards, tools and techniques that the sponsor wants them to apply to a particular project.
The objective of a formal project management process is to provide a detailed plan and set of deliverables that can be easily tracked, controlled and measured and reported on to assure the proposed solution is delivered on time and within budget while meeting the strictest quality standards.
The Project Management Institute’s ‘Project Management Body of Knowledge’ (PMBOK) is probably the world’s most popular methodology applied by most Project Managers as a formal tool for managing projects.
The PMBOK methodology is outlined in PMI’s generic 216 page handbook titled, “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge 4th Edition, which segments the Project Management responsibilities into nine knowledge areas.
The PMBOK methodology is considered to be a simple process for managing projects which is also used by PMI ® as a benchmark for testing the competency of project managers for their certification such as the project management professional qualifications (PMP)
Future articles of this editorial series will be dedicated to scrutinising in detail each of the PMBOK nine knowledge areas and what they mean to project managers.
Besides the PMBOK methodology, the second most popular technique for managing projects is PRINCE2 of the UK origin.
PRINCE2 is a widely recognised de facto standard used mostly by UK government departments. PRINCE (Projects in a controlled environment) is described as a structured method for effective project management for all types of projects, although the influence of the IT industry is very clear in the methodology.
Other future articles will be dedicated to elaborating the application of the PRINCE2 methodology.
However, knowledge of formal project management standards is not just for project managers.
Team members need to know how to carry out their parts of the project and business executives need to understand how to support project management efforts in the organisation.
As a project manager how do you rate yourself or your project against these lessons?
What went wrong at NUST?
Next week we will separately examine the fifth of the five critical success factors, i.e. control of the project scope, cost and time known as the triple constraints of project management.
l Peter Banda is the Secretary General & Chief Executive of PMIZ.
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