How do we stay on top of project management? We found out projects that we thought were done, weren’t. Other projects weren’t done profitably. How do we get control of this?
THOUGHTS OF THE DAY: Use project management tools to track your work. Use checks and balances. Hold a weekly project review meeting. Formally hand off every job at the beginning and at the end. Make profitability accountable with teeth.
Staying on top of projects requires communication and accountability
Build a standard job summary form. Include job title, customer name, and contact, who sold it, date received in-house, date due, the amount budgeted, who’s in charge, who else is assigned to work the job, and an overall description. Make a binder for each job. Make the job summary on the cover page.
Build a standard checklist of job stages by going through the last six months of work. Include initial handoff from sales to operations, assigning tasks, progress reviews/phase completions, roll out to the customer, confirm customer satisfaction, invoice, and collect payment.
Match the budget to job stages. If both materials and labor are needed on a job, break out the budget for both categories. As the job unfolds ensure everyone understands how much of the budget is used. How much is still available. Include a reserve for things going wrong and a budget for profit.
Measure progress regularly
It’s hard to keep an eye on how things are going overall when you’re in the trenches dealing with details. Separate project management tasks. Assign responsibility for keeping track of all jobs. Keep a chart up on the wall, where everyone can see it. Show every job in-house, including those yet to start and those waiting for customer approval.
Assign someone, not in operations, to report on quality. Have that person report to the top of the organization. Give authority to gather customer feedback and marshal resources when needed to get things fixed.
Make it clear you don’t want problems glossed over. Encourage open and robust discussion about what works and what doesn’t. Failure is inevitable and OK, so long as people learn from their mistakes and fix the problems.
Manage from start to finish
Assign someone to periodically review all jobs and look for themes — jobs completed on time, jobs that had problems, jobs that were in the budget, and jobs that broke the bank. Search for insights on what work is most and least profitable, which teams are succeeding or struggling.
Include managers and staff in weekly project management meetings. Relay top-line information. Review the scheduling chart.
In short, hold follow-up meetings to get into details. Avoid the temptation to try to resolve everything at once in the main weekly review. Stick to a timetable. Meetings that go over can waste time and disrupt plans.
Use email to gather updates and identify needs. Have a quick daily update meeting with top managers. Ensure problems get addressed before they get out of hand. Fix issues that can blow the schedule, harm quality, or eat into profitability.
Moreover, before starting a job, get sales and operations together to discuss what has been sold. Make sure everyone in operations signs off and takes ownership. Once operations take over, they own the problem. After that, if there are concerns about what was sold, get that out on the table before starting work. Make sales go back to the customer to renegotiate before investing a significant amount of time and effort in the project management.
Best practices save time
Above all, focus everyone on the same set of goals: a job well done, a happy customer, company profitability. Set measurable goals for every job to drive this home.
Measures of a job well done can include how smoothly the job went, how many things had to be re-done, how close to schedule each phase was. Moreover, customer happiness can be rated through a follow-up phone call to the customer: how well did the job meet the customer’s expectations, was it received on time? Likewise, involve finance in profitability questions: was the job within budget, how legitimate were excess charges, did the customer accept and pay for up-charges?
Use a 4-point scale to rate each question. Anything less than a 3 should be closely examined for learning opportunities.
Meanwhile, make it clear that top scores matter by including them as part of the review process and bonus calculations. Avoid debate and finger-pointing by assigning ownership: sales, operations, or finance. Consequently, consider an overall bonus for everyone when things go right all around.
