PRINCE2 Best Practice On the horizon
Good project management leaves everyone with a sense of
satisfaction, from the project team members to the wider business
organisation that its success has an impact on. Patrick Mayfield,
chairman of Pearce Mayfield, a Global Knowledge ‘trusted PRINCE2
partner’, has some sound advice on getting the best out of
long-term projects.
Project timeframe targets can have a huge impact on the
engagement of your team members. What we have learned over the
years is that on longer programmes and projects, unless you are in
some sort of management role, then the chances are that you hardly
ever look at project targets more than four to eight weeks ahead –
not six months, 1 year, or more.
This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise when you consider
how most of us plan our personal time, such as holidays. There are
exceptions to the rule, but holiday planning is probably the
longest we target into the future, and on average that is about
three to six months. For most other matters, we might have a
bow-wave of scheduling of four to eight weeks.
In business, we have identified a project planning psychological
time horizon – it’s a horizon that we all have. For project and
programme managers, our time horizons are professionally exercised
and extended somewhat, but we need to appreciate that for most of
our stakeholders this is not the case.
Best practice – and we teach this as part of the PRINCE2
curriculum – gives several reasons why you might want to chunk a
long project plan into smaller stages: controlled breaks against
the tendency of longer projects to spin out of control; opportunity
for a 'heads up' review; and improved two-level detailed planning
over the near future. These are among a few of the conventional
reasons for splitting a project into stages, but as a leader, for
me it is an opportunity to shape a plan that stays in phase with
people's future horizons. A staged plan gives them understandable,
more motivating short-term goals that can build towards longer term
success.
Adapted from Patrick Mayfield’s blog 19 December 2006.