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Prioritizing
Projects often need more money, time, or resources to deliver everything wanted by the organization, users, or suppliers, even if delivery of everything has business justification.
In project management, prioritizing is a crucial step. It involves deciding what aspects of the project, such as scope, acceptance criteria, and quality specifications, should be focused on. This decision is based on what can be delivered with the available resources and what has a business justification.
Numerous practical ways exist to facilitate agreements on priorities over requirements, empowering you to make informed decisions.
For example:
- Categorizing criteria as must-have, should-have, could-have, or won’t have
- A product backlog approach that explains the sequence in which features will be made available to users (or in which criteria will be met)
- pairwise comparison to understand preferences between criteria
- The Kano model describes features as delighters, performance features, and essentials for gauging customer satisfaction.
- Eisenhower matrices assess criteria in two contrasting dimensions (for example, importance versus urgency or value versus ease of implementation).
- Prioritization techniques help define scope tolerances, supporting the management by exception principle.
PRINCE2 Scheduling
Scheduling is a key aspect of project management. It involves creating a timeline for the project, including the sequencing, dependencies, durations of activities, and milestones. Various scheduling and presentation techniques can be used to manage this aspect of the project effectively.
Gantt chart: a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the progression of time. Gantt charts are useful for projects with numerous activities and milestones and are compatible with many scheduling tools.
Spreadsheet: for simple projects, work packages and tasks can be listed with their
corresponding timelines. This presentation can be challenging to maintain for large projects or projects with frequent schedule changes.
Product checklist: This is a list of the plan’s major products and the key delivery dates. When the planned and actual delivery dates are displayed, this presentation summarises delivery performance over the project lifecycle.
Activity flow board: this technique shows how each product or product component progresses through development or delivery. It is used in Kanban boards as well as other tools that are often used in iterative-incremental projects.
The schedule should identify the amount of time that an activity can be delayed without affecting the completion time of the plan. This is known as float or slack. A schedule with zero float across all activities represents a high risk of delay and exception to the time tolerance.
A critical path diagram illustrates the activities from the start to the end of the project with the least total float. Any delay beyond the planned float between any two activities on the critical path means the project will stay within its schedule.
A weakness in the critical path diagram is that it needs to address resource limitations. Therefore, it may be helpful to identify the critical chain as well. The critical chain is the sequence of tasks that, given available resources, prevents a project from being completed in a shorter time.
In the example of the house project, the critical chain might reflect that local regulations prohibit outside construction work on weekends.
By identifying schedule constraints, the project manager can focus on changes in the schedule of activities, critical path, or critical chain as potential exceptions. Moreover, the project manager can avoid exceptions by adjusting the timing of activities with the available float or resource flexibilities.
PRINCE2 Estimating
A variety of reliable estimating techniques are available to project managers, providing you with the confidence to make accurate predictions. These include the following:
- Top-down: A top-down technique assumes that the costs, duration, and level of effort of the significant products and work packages can be estimated with a high level of confidence.
These are then allocated to subordinate elements of the product and work breakdown structures.
This technique could be used for an iterative-incremental project in which delivery is structured into stages and sprints with fixed timeframes and resources.
- Bottom-up: a bottom-up technique develops estimates for individual products, components, activities, or tasks at their lowest level of definition. The lower-level estimates are then aggregated to obtain overall estimates. This technique is useful when the lower-level elements are well-understood but will be combined in a manner unique to the project or new to the organization.
- Comparative: when the materials, products, or delivery work are well-understood and based on standard practices, estimates can be developed based on similar projects or openly available market information.
- Parametric: when measured or when empirical data on materials, effort, and duration is available and supported by estimating models (such as in the construction industry), estimates can be developed using values from the project, such as the number, units, or size of a structure.
- Data analytics: descriptive analytics (understanding the characteristics of a task) and predictive analytics (understanding a task’s predisposition to particular outcomes) can help improve estimates.
This will require access to data generated by the project, held by the business layer, or sourced from a data trust.
- Subject matter expertise: consensus-based techniques, such as Delphi and planning poker, can be used to develop a consensus on estimates with the participation of subject matter experts.
Several estimating techniques are often used in large and complex projects. If specialists in cost estimation are available, the project manager may seek their support.
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