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Scaling the size of the project management effort to fit the need (part 2) 

By Mike Williams, PMP

In this second of two articles we look at some of the factors to consider in categorising projects and how to determine what parts of the project methodology to apply to different sized projects.

In the previous article we looked at the challenge of applying an appropriate level of project management to projects of differing sizes. In fact we saw that in some organisations this had been put in the ‘too hard” basket.  The reason being if you missed something this could cause the project to fail. 

Many of the larger organisations end up with a comprehensive project management methodology and then say for smaller projects you still need all of this, but just less detail. Some organisations manage to make some of the documentation optional for smaller projects.

The problem stems from a fear of leaving something out.  For example in PRINCE2, they talk about “tailoring” and state that “if the practitioner omits an element, project management for the project is weakened”. In other words you still need to do it all, but to a lesser extent.

Let us first look at how to classify projects.  The common classification is small medium and large, but what does this refer to?  Is it based on the cost, the duration, business impact, complexity or some combination?  A project may have a high cost, but the execution of the project may be very short and straight forward, it’s just that the materials being used are expensive.  Similarly a project may be low cost and duration but very complex, with a large number of external dependencies.   For example, I have seen a few computer relocation projects that have been relatively low cost and timeframe, but the risk to the business in terms of potential disruption of business services were higher than many of their more expensive projects.

I saw one organisation develop a very complex classification process using all the factors you could possibly think of and more. Project managers had to complete an extensive survey in order to classify their projects into small, medium or large.  The funny thing was, whether the project was medium or large meant that just one of the many documents was optional rather than required!   If you are going to implement a time consuming project classification process it needs to provide value in determining the right extent of project management activities to fit the project.

 Essentially the key common factor is risk.  High risk projects need more project management, low risk projects can get by with less.  So, some level of risk assessment is needed.  One approach is to conduct a risk appraisal of the proposed project and obtain a risk score.  Questions asked would focus on the various contributing factors such as anticipated project budget, timeframe, business impact, safety, complexity etc.  These factors may need to be adjusted by weightings to reflect the relative importance of each of these factors to the organisation.

Gollowing on from this appraisal process there needs to be sets of project management activities according to the classification.  For example the low risk projects may not need to produce all the project management documentation required of the higher risk projects.  Also, there may be a set of “light” templates for documents on smaller projects and simpler procedures and reporting requirements.

Finally, one aspect to also consider is the different level of governance required.   High risk projects will need more governance.  Let’s not put our smaller projects through the same level of governance as the larger ones.  For example, we could have fewer governance gates in the project’s lifecycle for the smaller projects. Project management is hard enough, let’s not make it even harder by burdening our project managers with unnecessary processes and documentation requirements.

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