Importance of the Work Definition Phase

Laura Bamberg – Global Sales Administrator

What are the potential pitfalls of a project, especially especially a project where there are numerous tasks? I wonder: even if you have a productive team and a strategic planner for a project manager - if you go back to basics, can you head off these issues at the pass?

In “The Project Life Cycle,” Jonathan Carr wrote about a productive statement of work that leads to an accurate work breakdown structure and how they are critical to a practical, logical budget and schedule. Carr believes that [“one of the primary reasons that projects fail is because they start badly at the work definition stage.”] This is good news, however; if you carefully plan your SOW and WBS your project will run more smoothly.

The SOW and WBS are conceived during the conception of the project, but project managers know  the entire planning phase is just as important regarding the success of the project. These days, project managers may be working with less staff than usual, translating into a greater time pressures. It’s tempting to bypass planning steps, but that will backfire over the life of the project when it’s over budget.  In the latter phases, fixing mistakes is even more costly because the time to have predicted them is long past.

Search on this topic and you will find a lot of posts or articles dedicated to this theme. What does that tell us? It tells us that this is a common mistake; it tells us that avoiding this mistake may take extra time on the front end, but it is obviously time well-spent.

The team needs to fully commit to the project plan as well. This does not mean that they would have handled every decision the way the project manager chooses to; this means that regardless of what they think, they were consulted on the tasks assigned to them (their thoughts and ideas were genuinely heard) and they have a critical level of trust with their project managers, so that they buy into the project even if they don’t fully agree with all aspects of its plan.

Project managers will never be able to receive 100% consensus from their teams. They can, however, receive the necessary commitment if they treat their teams respectfully and do not automatically reject their thoughts and ideas as unnecessary. Even if project managers do not vocalize that sentiment, team members may be able to feel it, and that is a surefire way to derail commitment.

Even the best teams and project managers can’t succeed without the proper software.  In developing our Microsoft Project viewer, we learned that you need to be able to quickly access project information. A powerful, integrated search engine is a must. Customizing your views allows you to avoid wasting time viewing reports with information you don’t need.

Our software is easy to use; otherwise, we would be costing you time, and it's time that you desperately need and cannot get back.

Comments

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Did Mr. Geithner say where this $15 billion would come from?

Sorry to be a buzzkill, Bill, but I am wary of yet one more rescue plan. We've heard this song before - every $100 or $800 or $700 billion the Treasury throws at the credit freeze leads to the same end, a continued freeze. How should this be any different?

I agree small business needs all the help it can get. But I would be more supportive of a plan that would offer small businesses lots of long-term incentives (tax breaks, credits, etc) as opposed to the Treasury trusting that buying securities will accomplish the credit thaw.