Submitting a project for funding approval can be stressful. Will management give thumbs up or down? Doing your homework and providing critical information is the key to getting your projects approved. Here are the questions to answer to increase your chances of project approval.

How will you meet financial targets? Many organizations have financial thresholds that a project must meet to obtain funding. Others don’t. In either case, understand your sponsor’s financial expectations for the project. Include an explanation of how you will meet financial targets in your high-level project plan.

What skills do you need? As projects represent unique endeavors, you might need to train staff members or hire contractors for your project. Do your homework to identify the availability of internal staff members. Also, determine the lead times you’ll need if you plan to hire skilled contractors. If possible, check with others who have run similar projects. Identify the cost of hiring top-notch contractors. If those costs are high, using internal staff members (even if they would take longer) might be preferable for your organization.

How does your project support your organization’s strategy? Often, projects are specifically designed to support strategy. In other cases, projects indirectly support strategy. For instance, one project might make other strategic projects easier to deliver. Management might not recognize these subtle links to strategy. In your project plan, spell out how your project helps implement your organization’s strategy.

How will you measure progress? It’s important to identify how you will track progress on your project. Also, how you will ensure project outcomes deliver business value. Many sponsors are wary of spending money on projects without a solid promise of receiving business value in return. You can reassure your sponsor and management by explaining how you will assess progress and business value during the project.

How will you transition to new tools and processes? Projects create business change. Create an overview of how you will train and transition project stakeholders to new ways of working. This is important, because new tools and processes can be intimidating. Your overview helps management understand how your approach to gaining acceptance of your project’s business changes.

Do you have any tips for helping obtain project approval? If so, share it with us in the comments section.

For more about obtaining approval for a project to proceed, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

A critical factor for using agile methods successfully is the mindset of the sponsor. With the wrong attitude about how agile works, you might as well forget about using an agile approach. A sponsor who is ready for agile must:

• Support a “learning organization.”  Learning organizations spend some time on activities that don’t directly create business outcomes. That time is used to develop capabilities within the organization that produce better outcomes in the future. This learning organization philosophy is pivotal for agile. The agile approach is itself a learning philosophy. With agile, you learn, adjust what you produce, and reprioritize features based on the knowledge you’ve gained. You learn about the product as it’s built.

Sponsors must embrace a learning mindset to support agile initiatives. In many instances, agile teams don’t do well at the start, because agile is so different from traditional project methodologies. A supportive sponsor will give teams the time and opportunity on a couple of agile projects to get into the agile flow. 

• Be open to new metrics. Sponsors with traditional PM leanings depend on Gantt chart schedules, pre-determined risk management plans, and specific milestones to measure progress. They might struggle with agile, because Gantt chart representations and fixed milestones aren’t very relevant to agile projects. Features are produced in a sequence that can change with each sprint. Agile uses measurement techniques like burndown charts and traditional budget management to provide schedule and cost status. Embedded testing and feature validation addresses the need to reduce risk. So, agile is a managed methodology — but it requires a sponsor who is open to different ways to assess progress.
• Focus on what’s needed, not how to achieve it. Agile is not the ideal approach when you have a fixed set of requirements and details for how the solution will be constructed. In an agile project, you define an objective, and then explore ways to achieve it. It’s typical for direction and approach to change along the way. Sponsors who are uncomfortable with the speculative and explorative nature of agile will struggle with its methods.
• Be willing to dedicate resources. Agile teams need to make decisions quickly and flexibly to be…well…agile! To do that, knowledgeable senior staff members need to be dedicated to agile teams. Sponsors need to assign the proper team members to agile projects and take other business activities off their plates. If junior staff members lead agile projects, teams might jump to inappropriate conclusions. This can create rework and reduce the team’s velocity. 

If you have experience with agile Projects, share your tips about sponsors in the comments section!

For more about agile approaches, check out Doug Rose’s Agile Foundations course.

Coming Up

My updated Project Management Foundations course is live! This version includes info about PMBOK7, clarifications to confusing items from past versions, a few corrections, more templates, and a new look.

An Exception Plan is a pre-agreed fallback approach to implement if a project gets into trouble. It’s more than a mitigation plan to address a single risk. An exception plan supplies an alternative project plan to recover from unacceptable conditions, such as exceeding the accepted tolerances for schedule delays or budget overruns. 

First, let’s look at the different definitions for Exception Plan. In PRINCE2, an exception plan is applied when a phase will exceed its cost or schedule commitment. Other methodologies use exception plans (or exception documentation) to show when overall project constraints are at risk. 

The exception plan in this article focuses on increasing the efficiency of responding to a troubled project. The plan includes course correction actions that have been pre-approved by management. In other words, an alternative plan to recover the project is ready to go. That means you can immediately implement the exception plan when project parameters are going to be exceeded. This pre-agreed exception plan saves time and money.

Here are some tips for when an exception plan might make sense and what the plan might propose:

Alternative project options are workable. Exception plans are useful only when you have flexibility in scope, schedule, or budget. Exception plans often propose cuts to scope or changes to the original approved timeline. For example, the plan could cut non-essential deliverables to bring an over-budget project back in line. In this case, management must be comfortable with and approve these changes ahead of time.

Alternate risks are acceptable. An exception plan walks a fine line between delivering value and adding risk. For instance, you might reduce quality management tasks to save time and money. This choice is practical if enough quality management activities remain after the task reduction. Even then, cutting quality management adds risk, which must be acceptable to stakeholders. For another example, the plan could propose decreasing organizational change management activities. Once again, the increased risk of implementation issues needs to be acceptable to management and project stakeholders.

Exception plans for agile projects are different. Issues with agile show up as delivery shortfalls, such as committed features that are late — or not delivered at all. Exception planning for agile projects usually focuses on engaging more experienced people to help get things back on track. Completing features in the backlog increases the business value of the project. However, management needs to be OK with the cost of these additional skilled resources.

The plan increases project management support. A project that is outside acceptable parameters presents project management challenges. Often, a project suffers due to a lack of technical or in-depth project management skills. The exception plan needs to address that shortage. However, an exception plan that increases the burden on the PM isn’t helpful. In other words, adding more management control deliverables without adding staff to create them makes things worse, not better. So, exception plans also need to include increased project management support. Management must commit to providing the additional project management resources as well as other changes from the exception plan. 

Do you have questions or suggestions about how to use an exception plan with a project? If so, join the conversation in the comments section.

For more about project planning, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming up:

October 2022 will be a busy month. My updated Project Management Foundations course is due to go live. And you can see me in several LinkedIn Office Hours live broadcasts.

October 12, 2022  11AM MT- Project Baselines: Basics and Best Practices

Once management approves a project, the project manager baselines the project. What is a baseline? What do you capture in a baseline? What happens when you create a baseline in Project? What are best practices for making baselines more helpful to managing projects effectively?

In this interactive Office Hours presentation, Bonnie Biafore and Ira Brown will share best practices at all stages of baselining.

Link to event   https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6978438578267664385/

 

Oct 17, 2022  11AM MT- Leading with Curiosity 

Questions and answers are inputs into any system or project, and they drive the output — whether the system is making dinner or launching a new product. The more diverse the inputs, the more innovative the output! Asking the right questions from the outset is crucial to setting up a system or project for success and achieving the best outcomes. To turbocharge results, you need to go beyond the usual questions like “What is the goal for the endeavor?” and “What is the best strategy for achieving that goal?” You and your team need to be curious and creative throughout the endeavor. In this Office Hours session, Natalie Nixon and Bonnie Biafore will explore what it means for a cognitively and experientially diverse team to be curious and creative and what you, as a leader can do to support that effort.

https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6979155332908400640/

 

Oct 27, 2022- Sometimes, the hardest part of innovation isn’t coming up with the great idea. It’s implementing it. Across the organization.

 

If you are trying to lead your organization in thinking (or doing) differently, you need to balance inspiration and operations. In this engaging and interactive conversation, LinkedIn Instructors Bonnie Biafore (Project Management Foundations) and Robbie Kellman Baxter (Become an Entrepreneur Inside a Company) will share best practices in scaling your great idea throughout your organization.

 

https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6978746469797244928/

It might seem like a hopeless situation when business value doesn’t meet expectations. Here are a few things to look at for potential opportunities for improvement.

Revisit your estimates. Compare the estimates used to justify the project to the business results. Opportunities may arise from this, including:

• Business activities included in project justification aren’t being executed. Investigate whether you can launch these activities to generate business value.
• Assumptions might have been inaccurate. You might achieve business benefit improvements by bringing those assumptions to fruition. For example, the project assumed internal resources would run a new system, but expensive contractors were assigned instead. Switching to internal resources could generate a positive return for the business.
• Estimates might have been inaccurate. Understanding those inaccuracies can help create better estimates in the future. 

Cut underperforming elements. For example, in a building, you can convert extra ground floor conference rooms to leased retail space. You can apply this concept to IT as well. Consider cutting IT components that aren’t generating benefits. 

Re-examine your deliverables and training. Evaluate whether people are using your project deliverables as intended. If they aren’t, they might not have received adequate training. Find the root cause for the disconnect between intent and actual usage. Update and deliver new training to improve results. In addition, redesigning deliverables might help improve outcomes.

Trim maintenance or licensing expenses. Most project deliverables have ongoing operational costs, such as maintenance, software, other product licensing, and help support. Look for opportunities to trim the costs of these services. Although this cost cutting might reduce the efficiency and quality of your deliverables, changes that result in benefits that exceed costs is worthwhile. 

Look for secondary benefits. Business cases don’t address secondary benefits because they are hard to estimate. However, now that deliverables are in place, you can get measurement data. For example, a product might not sell as much as expected. Yet, discussing that product with customers might generate sales of other products. Also, project outcomes could free up employee time. That time might provide the opportunity to pursue other beneficial projects.

While it’s never good when a benefits shortfall occurs, don’t give up! These are a few of the possibilities you can explore to end your benefits shortfall.

What other actions might you take to bring business value back on track? Share with us in the comments section.

Coming Up:

September 15th Office Hours with Chris Croft, Doug Rose, and Bonnie Biafore

Project managers experienced a 70% change in the top 10 skills in the industry since 2015. Few teams can function without a project manager in seat to help them adapt to the whirlwind changes of the past few years. Join us to learn the top trending project management skills today and tactical tips to ensure you have the skillset for what’s next.

I’m almost done updating Project Management Foundations. In a few months, you can look for the updated edition, which includes some info on PMBoK7 and other changes.