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Session 3
- 1. Project Management for SocialImpact Anas Talalqa Sr. PM and Human Rights Advisor Scheduling Project Management for Social Impact
- 2. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 3. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 4. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 5. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 6. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 7. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 8. Project Proposal VsProject Plan Scheduling
- 9. Comprehensive Project Planning •Resources: Money & People • Schedule: How long will this project take? • Stakeholders: Who are the stakeholders? • Risks: What are some of the things that could go wrong? • Learning and Evaluation: M&E Plan. • Procurement: Buying, storing, building, or distributing. • Human resources: Hire, and train. • Planning for planning: Updating plans and revision Scheduling
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- 11. Scheduling Process Steps 1.List Activities 2. Sequence Activities 3. Estimate Resources 4. Estimate Duration 5. Create a Schedule Scheduling
- 12. Scheduling Process Steps ListActivities Scheduling
- 13. Work Breakdown Structure- WBS Scheduling
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- 17. Scheduling Process Steps SequenceActivities Scheduling
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- 19. Scheduling Process Steps EstimateResources Scheduling
- 20. Estimate Resources Weatherconstraints: Will the weather negatively impact this activity? Human resource constraints: Are you able to get people to do this work? Material constraints: Are you able to get materials on time? Scheduling
- 21. Scheduling Process Steps EstimateDuration Scheduling
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- 24. Estimate Duration (Quiz ) Scheduling
- 25. Scheduling Process Steps Createa Schedule Scheduling
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- 27. Monitoring and AdjustingYour Schedule Crashing: Spending extra resources to get work done faster. Fast Tracking: running activities at the same time. Scheduling
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- 30. Project Management for SocialImpact Anas Talalqa Sr. PM and Human Rights Advisor Budgeting Project Management for Social Impact
- 31. ACTIVITY-BASED BUDGETS Activity-based budgetsadvantages: • They provide an opportunity to involve other team members, making sure that cost estimates are accurate. • Because they take the cost of each activity into account, they can be more realistic. Budgeting
- 32. STEP 1: ListingProject Activities Failing to identify these costs ahead of time is one common reason why project go over budget. So, spend plenty of time thinking about the expenses that your project will incur. Your work breakdown structure is a great place to start, but it will probably not include every cost that you will incur. Budgeting
- 33. Step 2: EstimatingActivity Costs Budgeting
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Editor's Notes
- #3 Question: I have already created a project proposal and a project charter. Do I really need to do more planning? Answer: Absolutely. By the time you reach the planning phase, you have probably already done a lot of thinking about the project. Many of the details will already be planned out: the activities will be listed in the work breakdown structure; the deliverables, deadlines, and governance structure all listed in the project charter; and project milestones, measurement plans, and indicators will be listed in the project proposal or M&E plan. But even the most detailed project proposals and project charters are no match for a well-thought-out project plan. Let's compare the documents:
- #10 So, what types of things should you include in your project plan? The answer will depend on the type of project that you are working on. At minimum, your project plan should account for: Resources: How much money will you spend on project activities? How many people will need to work on this project? Will you spend other types of resources? Schedule: How long will this project take? When will you reach major project milestones? Stakeholders: Who are the stakeholders that you will need to communicate with? How often will you communicate with them, and how? Risks: What are some of the things that could go wrong? How will you prepare for these risks? Learning and Evaluation: Hopefully, you have already considered learning and evaluation in your M&E Plan. However, this aspect of project management is so important that it bears repeating. Additionally, depending on the size and complexity of your project, you may want to plan for: Procurement: If your project depends on buying, storing, building, or distributing goods, you will want to spend a lot of time thinking about these logistics. Human resources: Do you need to hire anyone for your project? If so, how will these people be managed? Planning for planning: On a long project, you will want to ensure that you are regularly checking and updating plans. One good way to practice this is to schedule planning revision sessions throughout your project. There is not a single "correct" project plan format. Depending on your project's length, complexity, and focus, your project plan may look very different. The goal is not to create a beautiful, polished document that you are proud to show off; it is to create a useful tool that your team can consult, understand, and revise regularly.
- #11 Imagine a Saturday morning. You have the day off work, it is sunny outside, and you are just waking up. What thoughts cross your mind? Perhaps you think of the day ahead. You need to do some shopping—that will probably take two hours, and your family wants to participate. You are meeting up with an old friend in the afternoon, but you need to decide whether you will meet at your home or at his home. There is about three hours' worth of chores to do in the house, and dinner with your parents in the evening. As you lie in bed, how do you plan your day? What activities will you do first and how long will each activity take? Will there be free time left over? Whether you realize it or not, as you lie in bed on Saturday morning you are scheduling your day. Each of us does this naturally. This means that, whether or not you have experience scheduling a social impact project, you probably already understand the basics of scheduling. The process of scheduling follows the same steps, whether we are planning a Saturday without work, or a two-year-long agricultural development project.
- #12 No matter how large or complex your schedule becomes, following these five steps will always help you construct a schedule. Of course, the larger and more complex your project, the more care you will need to put into each step. In this next section, we will carefully look at each step in the scheduling process.
- #14 So far, we have discussed your product scope—the things things that your project will create or deliver. What about project scope—the work that you promise to do? The tool most commonly used by project managers to define project scope is the work breakdown structure (WBS). A WBS takes all of the work that your team will do throughout the project and breaks it into pieces small enough to be done by a single person. These small pieces of work are called work packages. Work packages are organized into categories and subcategories. A WBS can be shown in a few different formats. Each format, however, shows the same basic information: work packages organized into categories and subcategories. Project: series of activities to achieve objectives within a specific time period and budget Results/Outcomes: desired ends of the project that can be predicted accurately Work Packages : effort required to produce a deliverable within a project (a mini-project) Components Subcomponents : increasingly specific steps necessary to produce your work packages Tasks 1- Gather as many project team members and stakeholders as you can. One person working alone is unlikely to think of all the different types of work that will need to happen. By bringing a diverse group of people together, you are making sure that nothing is forgotten. 2- Brainstorm the big categories of work first, then the subcategories of work. The highest level might be the different services you are creating or the different departments of your team. For example, a project that is both installing solar panels and teaching the community how to use solar panels may divide the work into "Education" and "Installation." Within "Education," there may be subcategories of "Teaching," "Materials," and "Hiring." 3- Get down to the details. Each work package should be small and specific enough that it can be done by a single person. For example, it would be difficult for a single person to manage the task "Increase the use of solar panels in our state." This task is too big and contains too many smaller tasks. Instead, your work package should be specific enough for a single person to complete. A good example would be "Hire teachers who can train residents to use solar panels."
- #15 A graphic WBS is an attractive way to present your project scope. This graphic format is easy to read and excellent for presentations. It can be easily created using sticky notes or made in a digital word processor.
- #16 The indented format is simple to produce in a word processor.
- #17 A WBS can also fit into a table. This is the format that we will use for your assignment. Whichever format you use, the process is the same:
- #19 Most projects will not be as simple as this. Different activities will probably happen at the same time. There may be several workstreams happening side-by-side. We can represent these types of project sequences with a type of diagram called a network diagram This network diagram shows how the school building project might happen. Several workstreams will happen at the same time: while the building is constructed, teachers are hired, and students are recruited. A network diagram is an excellent project management tool for showing the sequence of activities in a complex process.
- #21 Now that you have put your activities into a sequence, you are ready for the second step: estimating the resources that each step will require. If we return to the example of scheduling your Saturday, this was the step when you thought about whether you would need to take the bus to go shopping. Think about resources as anything that you will need to spend on an activity. Hours of work or money are two of the more common types of resources to consider, but you might also want to consider any special equipment that you will need or regulations that you will need to navigate. It can be tempting to skip this step and go straight to the step of estimating duration. However, without understanding what resources you have available, it is impossible to know how long an activity will take. For example, if I know that I can take the bus to the shops, I will be able to do my shopping much faster than if I have to walk. Similarly, three people working together can finish shopping faster than a single person could, so I need to know if my family members are available to help. Besides time, money, regulations, and equipment, here are a few other resource constraints that you may want to consider: Weather constraints: Will the weather negatively impact this activity? Human resource constraints: Are you able to get people to do this work? Material constraints: Are you able to get materials on time?
- #22 Now that we understand the resources that are available to us, we are finally able to estimate how long each activity will take. Estimating activity duration requires some guessing. If you have never done a particular activity before, it can be very difficult to estimate how long it will take. So, if this is a new type of project for your organization, you may have a hard time creating realistic estimates. If you find yourself in this situation, you should gather as much information as you can. Talk to other members of your organization. Have they done this type of activity before? How long did it take? Read reports from similar projects. How long did activities take? Once you have gathered as much information as you can, make your best guess.
- #23 Here is our school building project network diagram with activity durations added in. Study the diagram for a moment. There is a lot of information here. You might notice that some of the workstreams, such as recruiting students, will take a lot less time than other workstreams. In fact, if we add together the total number of days in each workstream, we can see that there is one sequence of activities that will take longer than any other. This sequence of activities is our project's critical path.
- #24 The total length of our critical path is 220 days. This is the minimum amount of time that our project will take. However, if there are any delays to activities on our critical path, the minimum length of our project will increase. Critical Path: The sequence of activities in your schedule that will take the longest time to complete. If any activity in your critical path is delayed, the entire project will be delayed. Identifying the critical path of your project will help you to understand which activities are most likely to cause delays to your project schedule. Once you have identified your critical path, you will know which activities to pay special attention to.
- #25 The slide shows a network diagram for an organization that is creating public health announcements. Which of the following activities are on this project's critical path? Select all that apply. Poll: Check all of the activities on this project's critical path. Hire director Write script Film Rehearse
- #26 Finally, you are ready to create your schedule! There are many possible ways to show schedules. In this tranning, we will be using the most common scheduling tool in the project management field: the Gantt chart.
- #27 A Gantt chart is a way to show activities displayed over a specific period of time. It shows you what has to be done and when. A Gantt chart is particularly useful to show how some tasks must end before others can begin, and also how some tasks must necessarily overlap. Most project managers will create at least two Gantt charts: A summary Gantt chart A detailed Gantt chart Summary Gantt charts, such as the example shown above, show the major workstreams and milestones. They may only go down to the month level, rather than the week or day level. Summary Gantt charts are easy to understand quickly, so they are great tools to share with team members. ( For you as project manager to use on a daily basis ) Detailed Gantt charts, on the other hand, are as detailed as the work breakdown structure. They list all the activities in the WBS and may go down to the day or week level. Detailed Gantt charts are helpful for the project manager to use during implementation.
- #28 MONITORING YOUR SCHEDULE Monitor your schedule the same way you monitor your budget. Check in regularly with the people who are in charge of each activity in your WBS. If delays occur, take a look at the rest of your schedule. Are there any other tasks that are dependent on the late activity? ADJUSTING YOUR SCHEDULE Let's imagine that your project has been running smoothly for six months. All of a sudden, there is a major delay on one of the tasks on your critical path. You know that, if you do not react, your entire project will soon be running behind schedule. What do you do? There has been a major delay to activity B. What should the project manager do? Well, let's remember the three big constraints of project management. We have suffered a setback on one of our constraints: schedule. If we still want to finish on time, we will most likely have to adjust one of our other big constraints: scope or budget. 3 options
- #29 Option 1 is that we spend extra resources to get activities on our critical path done faster. For example, to speed up the completion of a construction activity, we might hire additional construction workers. We call this type of adjustment crashing the schedule.
- #30 Option 2 is that we run some tasks at the same time. This usually adds complexity to a project, so it will probably increase risks and might increase costs. We call this type of adjustment fast-tracking. Option 3 is that we do nothing and simply finish behind schedule. If you have a lot of flexibility with your schedule constraint but very little flexibility with your scope or cost constraints, then this may be the best option. Remember, project management is all about balancing these three constraints. It helps to know which of your constraints are most flexible, and which are most rigid.
- #31 Poll: budgets Managing budgets can be one of the strangest, most difficult parts of a project manager's job, particularly in the social impact sector. One reason? Very often, budgets and finances are managed by someone else. That person—sometimes called a finance manager—might work directly for the donor, or may be in a different department of your own organization. Whatever the arrangement is, it is very likely that you, the project manager, do not have complete control over how the money is spent. Whether or not you have complete control over the budget, it is important that you understand how money will be spent. Remember: cost is one of the three "big constraints" of project management. We spoke last time about the scope, before we spoke about scheduling and now we will speak about budgets Most likely, you will be held accountable if costs are dramatically over budget. And the cost constraint is tightly linked to the scope and time constraints; if there is an issue with either scope or time, you may need to spend more money to compensate. Additionally, your project is most likely spending money that comes from donors. Donors are very interested in seeing that the money which they have provided is spent responsibly. This means that you will be under a lot of pressure to provide clear, well-planned, and frequently updated budgets. Now, we will look briefly at budgets: the types of budgets, how they are created, and how you should use them as project manager
- #32 A budget describes how your organization plans to manage project money. Typically, your donor will impose certain budget requirements. They may require that you use a certain budget format or that you categorize your expenses in a certain way, or that you report on your budget a certain number of times per year. There are a few approaches to budgeting. Today we will take a look at one of these approaches and it’s the most used one If you work for a large organization that has run a similar project several times already, you may be given a budget based on prior project performance. This can be an easy way to generate accurate budgets. For smaller organizations or new projects, however, I recommend taking an activity-based budgeting approach. What does this mean? Well, instead of creating a large, broad budget for your entire project, you list each activity that your project will include. Your work breakdown structure is an excellent place to start listing activities. Then, you estimate the cost of each activity. By adding up the costs of each activity, you create the overall project budget. Activity-based budgets have a few advantages over traditional budgets:
- #33 As with all project management documents, the more detailed and comprehensive your budget, the more likely that your project will unfold smoothly. This means that you should not only include obvious, big expenses like equipment, supplies, and salaries, but also think about the less obvious expenses. For example, consider: Will there be transaction costs? What are the costs of supporting services, such as human resources, communication, and risk management?
- #34 To create an activity-based budget, you need to assign an estimated cost to every activity that you plan on doing. If you have never done some of these activities before, it can be very difficult to calculate realistic cost estimates. In general, however, there are three approaches as you can see on this slide ---------------- In reality, you will be served best by combining these three approaches. Generate realistic top-down estimates, and whenever possible use the bottom-up approach to check your assumptions. Parametric estimates are easy to calculate but will not apply to every expense, so use this approach when it is possible.
- #35 MONITORING YOUR BUDGET If you have created a thorough, thoughtful, activity-based budget, you should have a good idea of what the project's expenses will be. However, your budget is only an estimate of what you will actually spend. As the project progresses, you will gather information about the real costs. A responsible project manager should constantly compare the actual costs of the project to the planned costs. This process is known as monitoring your budget. ADJUSTING YOUR BUDGET Your project has been provided with a set budget. If you did a great job during the project set up phase, this budget may have tolerances (flexibility) built into it. However, when there are significant, unexpected changes to the scope or schedule, this budget may need to be changed. Most organizations will have their own set of internal rules for how budget change requests are handled. You should understand these processes thoroughly before you need to use them. How do you request additional budget? Who do you request it from? Would additional budget come from your organization, or directly from your donor? Do you have the authority to renegotiate budgets with the donor, or should such requests be handled by another team? If you are not sure of the answer to any of these questions, you should consult with your financial manager or director before implementation begins. Regardless of how your organization handles changes to the budget, any new budget information should be documented in your project charter and project plans. Open up these documents and add in any changes that you have made. Make sure that you note when the changes were made and who they were authorized by.