Four Phases of a Project - Realization

Yesterday I wrote the first of several posts about the four phases of a project.  The first post was about the first phase of a project and the issues associated with starting a project.  Now we'll look at the concerns and issues associated with the second phase of the project - realization.

At the end of the first phase (about 25% of the time allowed for the project is complete), more than likely your team is behind schedule.  Most of this is due to the fact that a) your company does not motivate and compensate cross functional teams, b) there are no common, collaborative work spaces and technologies and c) it justs takes a while to get any project started. 

Hopefully at this point the team has begun to coalesce and define its own working process, tools and approach and is beginning to pick up some steam.  Everyone begins to realize the amount of work involved in the project and begins to pull together and work as a team, rather than a set of individuals.  Also, it becomes abundantly clear at this point that the team is behind schedule and needs to pick up the pace.  What are the challenges and issues associated with team productivity in this phase?

1.  Communication - if your team hasn't developed a good communication strategy by now, you are toast.  Communication is more than just a periodic meeting - in a fast changing environment initiatives change, roles change, people change.  Your team needs a way to communicate effectively and efficiently.  Regular meetings are important, but detract from productivity.  Email is really more of a one to one communication vehicle.  Why not examine a team blog or wiki to encourage people to effectively communicate?  It's also important to determine who needs to know what.  Not everyone needs to know your lunch plans, but they do need to know if there is a change in direction or if team members will miss their deadlines.

2.  Common work space and tools - if your company doesn't have a good collaborative workspace, then by now you've agreed on which desktop applications to use.  It becomes very important to agree on software applications and templates so the information generated by one team member is comprehensible to another.  Also, determine where you'd like to store and how to retrieve the common information.  This means you need to establish some "meta data" or rules and information about the information you generate and how to retrieve it.  Otherwise your team will spend an inordinate amount of time asking each other where important data is stored and who captured it.

3.  Project management - It's at this point that great project management becomes so critical.  As noted above, it's likely your team is behind schedule at this point and needs to gain some ground against the schedule.  It becomes very important to ensure very quickly that your team has the tools and the focus to succeed.  A good project manager will make all the difference at this point.

At the end of this phase (approximately 50% of the time elapsed), I'd recommend that you refactor the entire project.  By that I mean reassess the scope of the project, the amount of work completed to date, the amount of time left and the velocity and acceleration of the project team.  It will be much easier at this point to carefully consider the requirements and features/tradeoffs or to ask for more resources now than it will be much later in the project.  Unless your team has gained ground significantly, you will be behind schedule at this point, hoping to continue gaining ground to overtake the schedule in the middle of the fourth phase.

One last thing - do everything you can to keep the team focused and "heads down", this is the time when the team should be gaining speed and accelerating to an optimal work efficiency.  Scope issues, conflicting agendas, problem team mates and other distractions need to be eliminated at this point, otherwise the team will never gain the velocity they need.

Next up - the third phase - despair.