A Case Study of Project Management for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses – Day 1 (Project Managers, Objectives and Stakeholders)

Over the next week or so, this blog will be dedicated to creating a useful toolkit of Project Management concepts that can be used in a small business setting and for entrepreneurs.  I’m going to throw my pride under the bus here and turn an experience from my own professional background into a case study since it was unfortunately rife with Project Management no-no’s making it a great, albeit embarrassing, example for most of the concepts we’ll discuss.  At the end of the day, it was a tremendous learning experience and hey, if you learn something that allows you to avoid even ONE of my mistakes, it’ll be worth it!

So, let’s set the scene.  We’re a new business and our product is an online education product.  We are PSYCHED.  We have a great idea, early focus groups love the concepts, we’ve got national presenters lining up to be a part of this.  This product is NEEDED.  This product will SAVE TIME.  This product will REVOLUTIONIZE the way education is obtained in this particular field.  We’re gonna be rich!  Our entire product, essentially our website and the videos contained within it, will be outsourced to a 3rd party vendor.  So let’s call this our case study project:  Build New-Fangled Online Education Website.

So, out of the box we do something right.  We assign someone (that would be me) to manage the project.  This is a seemingly obvious but often overlooked step.  Having one central point of contact is critical on a project.  If you’re a one-person shop, ignore this tip, since you do everything all by yourself anyway.  But literally, if there are 2 or more of you, designate one person to take the lead.  This person needs to be able to organize just about everything.  From people to schedules, correspondence to contracts.  If you don’t have someone in house who can fit this description, seriously consider hiring an outside Project Manager to step in and organize it for you.

Next, we need to determine how the project fits into our overall company objectives.  In the case of our New-Fangled Online Education Website, it pretty much WAS our company objective, since without it we wouldn’t have a product.  Case closed on this one for our case study.  However, there truly are times that someone comes up with an idea.  It’s a cool idea.  Everyone likes it.  It’s hip, competitors are doing the same thing.  Of course it makes sense.  But does it?  Anytime you plan to spend money or resources, really take a step back to make sure the project you’re about to undertake supports your overall company objectives.  How will this project, in particular, forward your mission as a company and help you meet your stated objectives?  If you can’t answer this question, don’t do the project, as unpopular as that may be.  Small business resources are limited enough without diverting precious assets away from your primary goals.  This, of course, assumes you have company objectives.  If not, we’ve got some serious work to do!

So back to our case study.  So far, we’ve done 2 things right – yippee!

Moving on to the next key point…here’s a step we skipped over that, in hindsight, may have helped us get a bit more clarity in dealing with our vendor:  document the project’s objectives.  At the end of the day, what are you trying to accomplish?  Write it down.  Write it down.  Write it down.  These objectives are going to dictate what and how you manage all aspects of this project.  Without this initial document, it’s virtually impossible to get everyone on the same page and clarify what it is you hope to achieve.  This document is a preliminary, high level view of the project.  Had we written a Project Objective, it would’ve looked something like this, “By September 1, 2008 design and build a state-of-the-art, fully-functional, online website where professionals can earn professional continuing education credits through watching online videos presented by industry experts and participating in online self-examinations.  The website will be designed and built with a budget of $20,000.”  Just to reiterate, this project objectives document is a high level view of what you’re trying to achieve.  It’s meant to be a starting document upon which other, more detailed documents will be crafted.

The final item we’ll discuss today deals with stakeholders.  This is another step that we mostly whizzed right by in our hurry to get to work on our New-Fangled Website.  Who are our stakeholders?  So what’s a stakeholder?  Basically anyone who will be impacted by the project.    Depending on your business structure, it may just be your team and your customers.  Or perhaps it includes investors, community groups, etc.  An critical step is to figure out who all of these individuals are so you can get to the heart of the matter:  what are their expectations of your project?  Why is this so crucial when you’re starting out on a project?  Because if you fail to identify your stakeholders at the beginning of a project and figure out what their expectations are, your project could be seriously delayed with both unexpected changes and unexpected costs.

For the purposes of our case study, we realized that the primary stakeholders were ourselves, the project team and our customers.  But we didn’t document any of our own expectations and “must’s”.  Had we done this, we would’ve realized that the President of our company expected that only the best in video technology would be used and, in fact, that he had a vendor in mind that he wanted to be sure we used. Instead, we spent countless hours researching video delivery systems and servers before we were given the directive to use this company that the President had had in mind all along.  We may have also realized how critical it was for us to have a content management system that enabled us to change individual pages on our own website.  Instead, that “change” to our requirements cost us at least a month in delivery of the website and thousands of dollars in additional vendor time.

We did, however, do one thing right in terms of stakeholders and that was to hold focus groups with our target market.  This is simple and inexpensive to do and can help you immeasurably.  We asked a group of our target customers if we could bring lunch to them one day and get their feedback on our concept.  We documented everything they said and a lot of their feedback ultimately impacted the design of our product.    It is much, much, much less expensive to incorporate customer comments into the project plan than it is to make a change once the project is underway.  The power in this concept is getting everything out there on the table, so all the requirements and expectations are in plain sight at the beginning of the project.  While you may not be able to meet everyone’s expectations, at a minimum the stage is set for open and honest communication about the project.  Compiling all stakeholder expectations and requirements is a great lead-in to our project “bible”, the scope statement, which we’ll discuss tomorrow.  Be prepared to learn a LOT from my mistakes on this one!

Think about a project you’re currently involved with or that you plan to start.  How can you apply at least one of the concepts above to make your project flow more smoothly?