Re-Planning

There will of course inevitably be variance from the original plan and it is the role of the project manager to decide how best to progress the project in the light of the realities of the current situation. As stressed above, this is where ingenuity and creativity is required. Don't ever get so attached to 'your' plan that you aren't open to better or more effective ways of doing things.

Example 1

A major system implementation in a university encountered problems with data migration. The institution had developed sophisticated automated data transfer mechanisms and was proud of its technical capabilities. It became a point of honour for the technical staff to solve the remaining problems but this was costing time and money.

The Project Manager had to take a step back and break the problems into two categories:

• It was worth finding a technical solution to some of the issues because they would recur with much larger data sets later in the project.

• Some of the most complex problems however occurred with quite small data sets. It was more effective to manually input the data.

Reducing the scope of the technical problem allowed the developers to solve the real issues much more quickly but this could only happen once the team looked at alternatives to the original plan.

Example 2

A student record system project was planned along the lines of a phased implementation (a fairly standard and generally assumed to be low risk approach) with student admissions functionality going live a year before the remainder of the system.

During the course of the project the team became increasingly uneasy about this approach as it was evident that the system needed end-to-end testing before they could be fully confident about any aspect of the system going live. After a rethink of the plan it was decided to adopt a 'big bang' approach whereby admissions data was migrated during the year and the whole system went live for the following academic year. This approach met the original objective of having the whole system live for a particular academic year but actually reduced risk by allowing more time for testing and user training.

Going back to the composition of the project team. The right mix of people will help encourage the sort of creativity needed in a project. As a project manager it is worth trying out some lateral thinking exercises and brainstorming as two techniques for encouraging creative thinking when you meet problems and there are no obvious solutions.

The MindTools website gives resources that can be used for creative thinking.

Brainstorming.co.uk provides creative thinking exercises.

Dspace.dial.pipex.com provides puzzles.