Geekly Articles each Day
📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

Express Course "Project Planning"

Does project planning apply everywhere


Any activity of the company or individual can be divided into two states:

  1. I am doing (will do) something now;
  2. I will do this in the future.

The first state is very popular in trade and procurement activities:


You are a dozen tasks that need to be done right now . As a rule, these are tasks for “five minutes”, although sometimes the preparation for the execution of the task itself may take more than a couple of hours. If this happens, then the entire flow of tasks that need to be done “right now” stops until the short task is completed. However, in some mythical way, all such tasks are “resolved” by the end of the week.

Activities in which there are tasks appearing “right now” and which need to be done “right now” or “today” cannot be planned, it depends solely on external factors of influence and is of a short-term nature. The only thing that is applicable with this approach is the registration of the task and its results so that it can be reassigned or the story can be raised when controversial issues arise or the performer’s performance is assessed.
')
Another condition relates to the planning of its activities or the activities of a team, a company. If, when a task arrives, you postpone it with the phrase “I will do it in the future,” then the question immediately arises: In the “future,” is when?

If your task queue is empty, then the “future” for the implementation of a new job may come right now, but what will happen if the queue already has ten tasks postponed for the future?

Will it be added to the tail of the queue? And if her priority is between the fifth and sixth tasks? Well, if no one asks you: “when will you do my task?”, Then you can just put her turn and continue to do the current work.

If your task queue is kept within a dozen, then you can be congratulated, the speed of the arrival of new work and the speed of its implementation are approximately the same for you, and you do not need to change anything in this system and plan.

Take a different situation, the task is brought to you, and the director conveys her interest in "When will you do it?". then two questions appear at once:

  1. How much time do I need to spend on the task?
  2. When can you start the task?

on the answers to which the answer to the most important question "When will you do it?"
As soon as you begin to try to answer such questions, then you can be congratulated, you have come to the need to plan your activities.

How does planning begin?


The simplest plan is a task list:


Today you are doing the first task, moving the list up, doing the second and also the third. To the question “when will you do my task” that you put at the end of the list, you can show the list and say, “When I finish all these, then I can do your task as well.”

The approach is good, you can say to everyone “I plan my activities!”, But will the task director be satisfied with this answer?

I think that in the absence of other options he will have to be content with this. But, in fact, he wants to hear an approximate date when his task will be completed.

This approach is often used by people who care only about what they are doing only now, according to the concept of "live for today, there is no need to bury your head with any managerial blizzard." And as a result, the task director, promising someone any timelines, simply calls the numbers from the ceiling and crosses his fingers hoping for a chance.

If the task director is more meticulous, then he will be able to force you to say some number of time estimates, which of course you will take "from the ceiling" based on your experience in solving similar problems.

And of course, miss about two, three times. And when the director comes to you with the words “Well, how is it, Vasily, you promised and did not have time. You set me up. ”You will feel guilty, although both you and the one who came are both aware that the numbers were taken from the ceiling.

Nobody likes to feel guilty; you can be manipulated with guilt. And when you want the next time this does not happen again, there are two options:

  1. When a deadline is requested, hide behind the wording “I don't know,” “after those on the list,” or
  2. To think about how to improve the quality of the assessment of the complexity of what was not yet done.

If you choose the second path, then congratulations, you have a need for planning your activities.

We make a plan, we estimate terms


There is a need for planning activities, but how to implement it? Making a plan!
The plan is recorded our assumptions as to:


Why precisely "supposedly" ? Because, in the meantime, as you write down in the task what you need to do and who will do it, a thousand different events can occur that affect your plan and the intended performer.

For example: he may suddenly get sick, a bus may cross him (see bus factor), the customer suddenly decided to refuse this job, the government issued a law requiring licensing of your activity, another company released a product that simplifies your work, you have been allocated additional resources. Each of these small moments can both increase the time of work and reduce its volume.

In the most optimistic scenario, we can assume that these events will not occur. And then we can build a plan:


Our expectations will be 9 people / days for 3 people, and the entire plan can be completed in 4 days.

When the team starts to do the work together, it turns out that:


As a result, the implementation of the plan instead of the expected 9 people / days took 12 days (5 + 3 + 4), that is, we missed with an estimate of 3 days, and in fact the amount of work increased by 30% from the planned. However, according to the calendar, it took 5 calendar days, which means that the next job will not start before Monday of the next week, which leads to an increase in terms of 75% (7 days instead of 4).

If, on the basis of your plan, you have promised some deadlines for the task director, then a situation will arise again when you will be blamed, "You promised, and you did not fulfill it."

And here again there are two ways:


If you choose the second path, then congratulations, you have a need for a risk assessment.

We improve the plan


In the previous section, the planned volume and terms increased due to two factors:


It is common for a person to always give optimistic estimates of time, especially when the task designer expects to hear less time. Or, when assessing the amount of work, only personal experience of performing a similar task is taken into account and the experience of the actual performer is not taken into account.

With a rapid assessment of the volume of work in most cases, the risks are not considered at all. The risks are different, there are those that require a little more time to eliminate, and there are those that can bury your project.

The implementation of the project is mainly affected by a relatively small set of risks that occur regularly, but are constantly forgotten to be taken into account.

I will cite a few of them that each encounters:


All these risks can be reduced to one thing: Risk of accuracy of planning estimates. Accounting for this risk can be expressed in the form of a “planning accuracy ratio” . If we take into account that:

  1. Principles for estimating work volumes rarely change,
  2. the team performing the project rarely changes and
  3. the nature of the work does not change

So, the obtained calculations of the coefficient for the previous stage of work or the previous project can be taken into account when calculating the plan of a new project or stage of work.

The scheduling accuracy ratio is calculated based on the history of the work performed, as the ratio of the planned time to the actual time spent.

  planned_volume 
 coefficient of accuracy = --------------------
                   actual costs

here:
planned_volume - workload in man-days
actual costs are the cost in man-days.

Accounting for the scheduling accuracy factor for estimating the planned scope of work allows for a more accurate completion date.
However, if you just perform the calculation taking into account the planning accuracy ratio, this will also be an optimistic forecast estimate, it does not take into account the occurrence of the most important risk: an increase in the amount of work due to incomplete task elaboration.
In order to calculate it, it is necessary to estimate how much the initial scope of work has increased in relation to the actually completed one:
  actual_volume
 coefficient of increase of volume = --------------------
                             initial volume


here:
actual_volume is the volume of work at the end of a project or stage of work in planned man-days.
initial_volume - the amount of work at the beginning of the project or stage of work in the planned man-days.

By itself, the increase in the volume of work is a static value, but if we take into account that the tendency to increase in volume will continue in the future, then it must be taken into account as an influencing factor.

Thus, the most likely time for completion of the work should take into account: the initial volume, the planning accuracy factor and the increase in work volume. Such a term is called "pessimistic . "

The formula is:
  initial volume 
 calendar_time = ----------------------------- x coefficient of increase_volume x week
                       accuracy ratio x command

Where:
initial_volume - the initial amount of work in man / days
accuracy factor - scheduling accuracy ratio
coefficient of increase of volume - the rate of increase in the volume of work
week - the ratio of calendar days to working week, is 7/5
team - the number of performers

Thus, our example from the previous section will have the following layout:



If we go back and make a prediction of the completion date, we get:
  9
 calendar_time = --------- x 1.33 x 1.4 = 6.2 calendar days
                     0.9 x 3

Thus, our forecast showed that the work will take a week.

If the project has no history of completed work, then when forecasting a negative scenario, it makes sense to take 50% of the volume as risks to increase the volume, that is, the coefficient will be equal to 1.5.

Thus, when forecasting the project completion dates, taking into account the main risks, the forecast can be optimistic , without taking into account the increase in workload and pessimistic , taking into account the upward trend in the volume of planned work.

Resources are the same, projects are increasing


So, you have already learned how to estimate the most likely date for completion of the milestone. But the number of projects begins to increase and competition between projects begins for the same artist.

It becomes necessary to put projects in a queue and shift the date of commencement of work until the necessary employee is released. For example, there is a web-studio, and everything rests on one cool designer, a client comes to us and we are ready to approve the contract, but the question arises, “What time is it to promise the client?”

In our case, the designer is a limitation of the entire system.

In order to answer the question about the availability of the designer, it is necessary to calculate an optimistic and pessimistic forecast for him - as well as it is done for the work phase, but taking into account the individual task plan, which includes the tasks of all the projects carried out.

What to read on the topic


Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/243503/

More articles:


All Articles