Posts Tagged ‘Planning and control’
Planning and Control
Planning and control are key to the success of any transformation programme, but should be seen as distinctly separate concepts and activities. The preparation of a Programme Plan involves processing large amounts of information and extensive consultation to build the plan.
Programme control provides supporting activities and processes that run throughout the programme to refine and improve delivery, minimise the impact of ambiguity and bring certainty wherever possible.
The Programme Plan should include information on the Project Dossier (timescales, costs, outputs and dependencies), risks and assumptions, a schedule showing the tranches, the transition plan and the monitoring and control activities and performance targets. The Monitoring and Control Strategy will set out the approach for applying the programme’s internal controls based on the Programme Plan.
The projects dossier is a summary description of all the projects and their outputs. The projects together will deliver the required future state as described in the programme’s blueprint.
The projects dossier contain information about existing projects as well as information about the projects that still have to start. So he Projects Dossier also shows work that will be in place at programme start-up.
The projects dossier contains the following information:
- a description of the project, including its outputs (products) and timescales (schedule);
- the contribution it will make to benefit realisation (part of the projects business case);
- risk related information, the acceptable risk threshold as well as the contribution to the overall programme’s risk.
The above information should be part of the project brief of a project when starting up project (Prince2 process). In the ideal situatin, for the programme, the project brief is created by the programme. This makes it more easy to align the projects and to keep track of the outputs and risks.
The projects dossier is a way to try to create structure in the interdependencies between projects and to minimise the numer of interdependencies between the projects by delineate the projects in an efficient way. Because all projects within a dossier may be interlinked, each of the individual project boundaries needs to be carefully thought of.
Delineating the projects can be done in various ways:
- By discipline. Organise the projects about the various disciplines needed to deliver the capability needed for the programme. So there can be an ICT project, a facility management project, a project for personel aspects….etc..
- By location. The approach by discipline can work out very fine if all the work can be done within one location or when culture is not hampering the cooperation. but things change when the programme has to deal with sevarl locations. So that is when you might consider to delineate your project by location. Multi site or multi location projects are more difficult to manage. Projects may be scoped by grouping activities that can be achieved on a single site.
- By outputs. Projects are defined with the focus on the products to be delivered. This is my favourite way for delineating projects.
The projects have to be effective in order to achieve to required outputs. In order to be effective consider the following:
- Divide a big change (projects) in smaller portions (smaller projects).
- Combine work in small packages into one project.
- Consider the skills, knowledge, technology and facilities that are likeliy to be available.
- Maintain the existing team-working arrangements (never change a winning team).
- Multi location projects can be difficult to manage due to communication problems and different cultures.
Critical inputs for the projects dossier are derived from the Blueprint and the delivery.