• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Ensuring the Project is a Manageable Size

Question 4: Is your project a manageable size?

Good Practice: A large project should be cut up into more manageable sub-projects, which only depend on completed sub-projects. The project planning methodology provides an excellent tool to subdivide major projects into more manageable sub-projects with short-term deliverables.

Each project plan should be subdivided into several key milestones. This approach helps to provide continuous delivery and makes sure progress is measured regularly. For example, a recent large project involved two separate project plans for different stages of the project, development and implementation. Each plan consisted of around 300+ individual tasks and approximately 30 key milestones.

In his article 7 Steps to Project Success, Peter Draper suggests it is necessary to break up projects into smaller, independent sub-projects that are more easily manageable. These sub-projects must be:

• Small, that is, less than $1m.
• Fast, that is, takes less than 6 months.
• Compact, that is, fewer than 6 people on the team.
• Focused on key benefits and not just deliverables.

Common Mistakes

• Going for a big bang implementation.
• Not being prepared to take the extra cost of splitting the project into separate stages.
• Underestimating the overall complexity and the interactions between all the different components.