Management Toolkit

Break your mega-projects into manageable chunks

Tom Mochal Tech Republic

Published: 22 Feb 2006 13:00 GMT

In the past, it was not uncommon to have projects that spanned years. However, for the most part, the days of the mega-project are over. Very large projects are simply too difficult to execute successfully and present a number of problems, including:

The work is less clear as you get further out. This makes it very difficult to plan successfully.

Since the future work is less clear, it's harder to make accurate estimates for effort, duration, and cost.

Business and technical conditions change over time, making planning assumptions very uncertain. The business and technical certainties of today can change dramatically over time.

You risk losing organisational support if there's a long timeframe before delivering tangible results. It's very difficult to maintain organisational enthusiasm and support over long periods of time.

Large projects have more people and this increases the likelihood of communication problems, misunderstandings, team turnover, and morale problems.

Very large efforts are much too difficult and complex to manage as a single project. It's better to break the work down into more manageable chunks of work, each of which is managed as its own project, with its own project definition and workplan.

For instance, a long IT development effort can be broken into separate projects. One project could be set up for the analysis work. Toward the end of that project, you could establish three more projects to design and build portions of the solution. A project might be structured to create the infrastructure needed for the solution. Two more projects could be set up for consolidated testing and final deployment respectively.

If you break a large effort into a number of inter-related projects, there's still a need to maintain overall management and coordination. This is the purpose of setting up a programme. A programme is the umbrella structure established to manage a series of related projects and is led by a programme manager. The programme does not produce any project deliverables. The programme manager's purpose is to:

Provide overall direction, guidance, and leadership for the projects.
Make sure the related projects are communicating effectively.
Provide a central point of contact and focus for the client and the project teams.
Determine how individual projects should be defined to ensure all the work gets completed successfully.

If you are assigned a very large project, look for ways to break it up into smaller pieces (with or without the programme umbrella). Breaking it up into multiple smaller projects doesn't mean you have more work — it is the same work. However, breaking it up will allow you to manage the work more effectively and ultimately give you a better chance of success.