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Continuing on the theme of Project Management Tools, we are taking a tour of my personal project management toolbox. I open the toolbox and I see one of my favorite and most used tools, the Scope Axe.

Most projects run into trouble at some point, and as the project continues, the options for the Project Manager are progressively reduced. As discussed earlier, most problems stem from unanticipated tasks or complexity. The initial reaction is to add budget and resources to handle this, but the wise project manager will get out his scope axe.

I believe that it is by now generally accepted wisdom that smaller projects have a greater chance of success than larger ones. This is based on many painful experiences, and also based on the numbers. The number of communications links between N project staffers is N factorial. As N gets bigger, N factorial goes out of sight. And although everyone on a project doesn’t talk to everyone else, (it only seems that way), the “communications links” effect quickly produces the situation familiar to managers of large projects – that adding resources actually reduces overall progress.

So, what is a PM to do? Get out the Scope Axe. Use project creep to have the hard discussions with your users and your sponsors, and chop off some scope. You don’t have to amputate it completely, just restructure the phases to push the particular scope area to a later time.

You may encounter significant barriers in having this discussion. Most user groups feel under served and under appreciated, and see an IT project as an opportunity to get as much as they can, because their opportunity might not come around again. This mindset is less prevalent than it used to be, probably because now in many organizations business management is spending their own money on IT projects. The other barrier is the “whole baby” effect – just like Solomon, you will hear arguments that you can’t cut the “baby” in half and still have a valuable, or even functioning system.

If you have worked hard on project benefits (as I ranted about in prior entries), you have the tools and ammo to have a discussion with your stake holders on what is really valuable to them. Then you can apply the Axe, and reduce the current project scope, and increase your chance of success.

Hopefully, you have already used another useful tool, the “Phase Measuring Cups”, to scope the phases of the project into digestible pieces. We will talk about the Measuring Cups next time.

Larry Cone