Introduction

If you may be new to project management, or even if you have been a project manager for quite a while, you may be faced with a new project that you actually have no idea how to start it right.  How do I apply my training and experience to this project? 

This can result in false starts, approvals not being achieved or worse, you get the approvals and are quite a way into the work and realise that this was not what we need to be doing.  Back to the drawing board.

How do we train ourselves to get into the mindset of starting a project on the right road?

It’s actually much easier than you think. 

The Problem

What writer’s block is to authors, project block at the start of a project is to Project Managers.  Let’s take the scenario that you are reasonably new to the Project Manager game.  You have completed all of your training, or at least some of it hopefully, you have been given an end goal, a load of warm bodies and a goodly sum of cash. 

Off you go.

Now.

Well, in a minute.

Why is nothing happening?

Let’s have a meeting.

Great.  Meeting underway and you’ve repeated what you’ve been told so the warm bodies now know everything you do.  Off we go.

Still nothing happening.

Oh wait, John’s got an idea.  Fantastic.  Off he starts, sounding out his idea.  Begins enthusiastically but the group buy-in is just not there and he eventually talks himself out in a whimper with nothing gained.

This is not how it’s supposed to be.  Where’s the buzz of lots of people doing lots of stuff that all come together for the great finale?

To give you a bit of a boost so you don’t feel so bad about yourself, you are definitely not alone.   The APM Organisation states that “Project failure often starts at the beginning” in its report APM Common Pitfalls.  The UK Government were so concerned about “Initiation is often the hardest stage for any project” that they launched an exercise with PA Consulting to look into this (Government Initiation Lessons Report).

This is a serious problem so no wonder you want to start your project off right.

The Symptoms

What does the textbook say?

Start writing a Project Brief.  Cool.  First up, define the goals and objectives. Well, I’ve got the goals but what’s the difference between goals and objectives?  Even the project communities confuse themselves on this one.

Many describe goals as being WHAT is to be achieved with the objectives as being HOW and WHEN to achieve the goals. 

How about the objectives being the measurable actions to achieve the goal?

The team cannot decide between them whether these are right to begin with.

So, we’re stalled on the first part of the brief.

The team is becoming disinterested, the timer is already running, and the cash is already being spent.  Nothing to show.

The Resolution

Time to get a fresh take on how we can approach this.  To get over writers’ block, authors seem to agree on the one tip of making writing a regular habit. 

Wordwrake’s advice – number 1 – make writing a habit

Penguin news House’s advice – write about something else to “restart the creative process”.

Squibler’s Advice – embrace freewriting, where you just write without structure, grammar or even staying on a topic.  It gives some prompts to get you started and get the writing juices flowing.  So to speak.

They get into the flow of writing about something else and then the block on their main writing disappears.  To transpose this onto our problem we need to get some training into our brain to spark up getting into the flow of project start up.

You might not be aware of this but practically everything we plan to do can be thought of as a project.

This can range from a cutting the lawn to an all-out build your own house adventure, with a hell of a lot in between.

Why?

A project is typically something or somethings that are done to bring about a desired change. It will have a start (what the current state is) a middle (the actual doing), and an end (the desired change). To get to the desired change we typically plan what it is we need to do, that will take us from where we are now to the desired change.

Back to the lawn cutting – I want to cut the grass because it’s too long / it looks untidy/ someone has told me to do it (usually) because we have someone coming.

OK, so I know the goal – make the lawn look tidy (bit of a Welsh touch in there).

So, what does “tidy” mean?  Grass needs to be evenly cut so it looks like a carpet.  It needs to have sharp edges, and we don’t want any of those cuttings hanging around, getting trodden into our house.  And it needs to be done before whoever it is coming arrives.  Aha, I now have my objectives.  These are simply the more detailed deliverables the project will produce to achieve the overall goal.  I’m only going to do the lawn, not the drive or the borders or whatever, so that’s my scope. (Just keep it really simple.)

So, how to I get to deliver these?

I could pay someone to do it for me, but I’m not sure I’d get away with that.  OK, I need a lawnmower, fuel for it, which could be petrol or a charged battery or just plug it into a working socket that is within reach of the furthest part of my lawn.  Also, I don’t want to cut it in the rain.  And I need to do something with the cuttings. And probably store the lawnmower cleaned.  And a strimmer of some sort to deliver those neat edges.  

All these things we think about are all part of the planning because we hate getting so far only to be thwarted by not having what we need, when we need it and we don’t like to not have thought about these additional things when we start as they only make the job longer once we’ve started.

How about the project of going for some exercise, say a bike ride (just because it happens to be my chosen type of exercise😊)?

What sort of ride will I want, i.e. what do I want to get out of it?  Goal sorted.

Will it be a long ride?  A ride up some hills?  A short punchy one? A recovery one?  Or just a suck-it-and-see ride?  When do I want to do this by?  Objective(s) sorted, even a SMART one (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound).

Well, I need a working bike. One that is suitable for where I want to ride, or I need to choose where to ride that is suitable for my bike.  When can I fit it in?  Will I need to take a drink (probably), will I need to take some sort of food?  What will I need to wear for when I can fit my ride in?  What if I have a problem like a puncture?  Can I mend it? Do I have the stuff I need to mend it? Do I know how to mend it?

There is a mass of other preparations I can and probably should make beforehand such that I can achieve my desired goal from a bike ride, but I don’t want to make this about cycling.

The preparations are all relative to the detail of my desired outcome.  How much we can think about the detail of the desired change will absolutely affect how well we can plan for the change.

Preparing to go on holiday.  Cleaning the car.  Throwing a dinner party.  Going to a dinner party. Buying a new <insert literally anything you want to buy here>. Fixing something that’s broken.  Doing some gardening.  Building a decking.  Having a barbeque.  All of these things are projects and all of us do these or something like these and a whole host more like them.

We do these all the time.  Without realising it, we go through the project start-up process every time we do them.  We don’t necessarily write anything down, unless it involves several items to purchase.  We are well practiced at doing what is necessary as preparation so that we achieve what we want to achieve before we start on the work itself. We’re now in the zone, project start-up training done, flow up and running.

Back to our professional project at hand.  Let’s start with some simple context setting.  Why are we doing this project in the first place and why are we doing it now?  Dig into this with the senior stakeholders and get as much information as you can from them.  Are there any department or company goals the project will benefit.  This will allow you to set the context of the project with some breadth and depth, which will enable those on the project to have the full picture.  This gives you your Background or Context, which you can now easily narrate.

You already have your goals, so next up is to break down each goal into specifics.  Think about what you can do to achieve a measurable target for who (department, team, company, etc) by a certain date.  It could be to migrate our on-premise computers to a cloud service to reduce our IT OPEX by £x by the end of this financial year.

Cool, so now you have your objectives.  You’re on a roll now.  Keep it going.

Where are my boundaries for the desired change?  What is included and what is excluded in getting there?  Scope done ✔️.

Next up is where the planning now starts.  How are you going to achieve those objectives?  There are essentially two parts to this:

Firstly – decide on the approach to take.  The easiest way to do this is to work with your team on the possibilities open to you.  Start at the highest level of how we can get from A to B.  Drill down for each possibility to get some detail behind them.  Doing this usually determines the path of least resistance and helps you decide which possibility to select.  You can and should take this to the senior stakeholders to confirm your choice and also to allow them the opportunity to provide their input.

Secondly – break the end deliverables down into their constituent parts.  Only go one level down at this point and then combine with the selected approach to link these constituent parts together in order.

This will give you a high-level plan of events that you can apply estimates to in order to map your plan to a timetable.

All of a sudden, you realise that you no longer have project block.  You have not only started but have produced some solid project information and have built up some momentum with the team.

Conclusion

When project block happens at the start of a project, don’t panic.  Train your brain to get into the right mode by going over some personal projects that you typically do all the time.

Don’t get hung up on semantics or what others say you must do.  Start with the general basics:

1. Why are we doing this?
2. What are we doing?
3. How can we do it?
4. When can it be done by?

I have other articles that go more in-depth on each of these to progress from this stage, but why not give this a go for your next project, or even check whether you have all of this for your current project?