Category Archives: Project Planning

Project Planning for Creative People

September 18, 2014Creativity, Project Planning, Uncategorizedadmin

Project planning for creative people needs to be completely different to traditional planning.
Most existing project management and planning tools have been created by technical minds driven by logical, structured though processes and where numbers and results are the keys to success. When the same approach is applied to the creative world full of colours, images and ideas there is an immediate clash of orthodoxies.
The creative mind tends to work in alternative ways, often non-linear, and although the desired outcome is essentially the same, project management in the creative arena needs to adapt to accommodate the needs of the creative user.

Blog image 1 — Visual project plans work well for creative people – this plan was created with The MAPP online planning tool

There is often a natural conflict between those that run agencies and those that work in the studio, with the former focused on delivering profit and the latter on delivering design excellence – often at whatever the cost.
So in order to deliver successful project outcomes in these creative environments some changes to traditional project planning techniques are needed. It will usually require more conversation, potentially a template plan that is clear from the outset and keeps everyone on track, but most importantly a project management system that doesn’t look like it’s going to launch the next Space Shuttle. Using an easy project management tool that is a visual pleasure to use will go a long way to consistent engagement.
Some things remain the same such as defining the goals, business and creative, of the project at the outset. Using a proven template can then help to keep the scope within a manageable area of flexibility, while still allowing for some risk-managed deviation from the central plan.
Some things will be different however, especially in the world of collaboration which is an accepted, even required norm for most creative projects so the approach can never appear to be too ‘top-down’ or imposed. Even though a template may form the basis of the project there must be room for opinion, emotion and deviation.
The project manager themselves may have to take on an extended role, ensuring that the team of varying talents and skills can work together to the focused goal without forcing the creative soul to spend hours filling in forms or developing budget numbers.
In all cases empathy will be essential for project planning with a range of characters across an agency. It also requires less rigidity than you’d see in the logical world. With these organic solutions, it’s very hard to predict the problems that will come up.
Ultimately, project planning for creative people demands the existence of a few key elements: a simple template system, an open attitude and an empathetic focus on the goal. With these in hand, they will stand the project manager in good stead and minimise the chances of project failure.

A project planning tool for creative people

You don’t need a sophisticated tool to get started with planning with a group of creative people. A large whiteboard, some sticky notes, are a perfectly good starting point.
However, as the size of a team grows, or you have people working together from different locations, it can be helpful to have an online, collaborative planning tool. That way you can easily save your work, share it with colleagues, and add to your plan over time as your plans evolve, without creating a huge mess of sticky notes each time.
We’ve created a tool to do just that. It’s called TheMAPP and it’s designed to make planning simple, fast and effective. It doesn’t assume any background knowledge in project management so you (or Sue from marketing) can create your first project plan in minutes. Sign up for a free trial here and tell me what you think:
Create an online plan for creative people

The 10 Greatest Project Plans The World Has Ever Seen – Number 8

September 18, 2014Project Planning, Uncategorizedadmin

This post is part of our series on the greatest project plans the world has ever seen and was originally posted on 13 August 2013.

The idea behind this series of blog posts is to review some of the greatest human achievements and how they were made real by people who took project plans really seriously and had a true “getting things done” attitude. The rankings are the results of a small survey and of course I would love to hear your views and suggestions for candidates that I have missed or discounted. So let’s continue with Number 8…

The number 8 slot is occupied by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland.

Start

The LHC had a difficult birth as although plans for a large proton collider at CERN had been discussed since 1977, the approval of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in the United States in 1987 put the whole project into doubt. The SSC was almost three times more powerful than what was originally planned at CERN but the resilience and conviction of one man, Carlo Rubbia the Director-General of CERN, who kept the project alive.
In December 1993, a plan was presented to the CERN Council to build the machine over a ten-year period by reducing almost to zero CERN’s other experimental programmes. The plan was well received but the two largest contributors, Germany and the United Kingdom, were unhappy with the increased funding needed and as a result gained more control over the project. In June 1994, a second proposal was made and although 17 member states voted to approve the project again was blocked by Germany and the UK, who demanded that the host states France and Switzerland contributed more which they eventually did. The project was approved for two-stage construction, to be reviewed in 1997 by which time India, Russia, Canada and the US had joined in and in 1998, four years after its start-up, the first test string of the LHC came to the end of its operation.

Goal

The goal for the project was grand to say the least. Although the stated objectives were to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories and unsolved questions of particle physics and high-energy physics, the gold at the end of the rainbow was the potential to prove or discount the existence of the theorised Higgs boson particle – often referred to as the ‘God’ particle. The existence of the Higgs boson could potentially plug a gap in the “standard model” of particle physics that is a system that attempts to describe the forces, components, and reactions of the basic particles that make up matter. The only particle predicted by the model which had not been experimentally verified was the Higgs boson so the goal, while huge, was pretty clear.
Challenges

As a £2.6bn engineering project, the LHC was immense. Nominally called the world’s largest machine, it has a circumference of 27km, lies in a tunnel up to 175 metres deep and contains a total of 9300 magnets inside. Clearly the world’s largest particle accelerator it is also effectively the world’s largest fridge as all the magnets must be pre cooled to -193.2°C (80 K) using 10 080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tonnes of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K).
As a collaborative project the LHC broke new ground involving over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The computing challenges were also new – almost 100,000 computers working together to manage data volumes that reached over 3 petabytes per year.

Keys to Success

Setting a clear and romantic vision for the project was seen to be one of the keys to the success of the LHC – answering questions that had been asked by physicists for generations created a sense of awe and excitement around the goal, allowing many who would have normally been in conflict to work together and put aside their differences. Collaboration on a massive scale on a simple plan was part of this, not just scientists but politicians and business leaders coming together for a common purpose.
Persistence was critical to the process as so many of the elements of the project plan had never been attempted before and were prone to failure. A small piece of baguette dropped by a passing bird was identified as being responsible for the overheating of the supercooled magnets in 2009. Even when the LHC went live in September 2008, only 9 days later an electrical fault led to damage to 50 magnets and the team then spent by 14 months putting them right before resuming experiments.

Footnote

Although all the media coverage focused on the Higgs boson story, by August 2013, the LHC had discovered several previously unobserved particles including the bottomonium state, the e Bottom xi and the Lambda baryons as well as ultimately a new fundamental particle – a massive 125 GeV boson which subsequent results confirmed to be the long-sought Higgs boson. And just for a bit of fun there’s a CERN video rap which explains it all!

Top 10 List

Number 10 – The Channel Tunnel

Number 9 – First Transcontinental Railroad across the USA

The 10 Greatest Project Plans The World Has Ever Seen – Number 9

September 18, 2014Project Planning, Uncategorizedadmin

This post is part of our series on the greatest project plans the world has ever seen.

The number 9 slot is occupied by the First Transcontinental Railroad across the USA

Start
The development of a complete trans-American railroad was the result of a long-term movement that started in 1832 when Dr. Hartwell Carver, an American doctor and businessman, published an article in the New York Courier & Enquirer advocating the “Building of a transcontinental railroad from Lake Michigan to Oregon”. In 1847 he went to the US Congress to ask for a charter to build it and although initially rejected, in 1856 the Select Committee on the Pacific Railroad and Telegraph of the US House of Representatives recommended its adoption primarily in order to maintain control over its position in the Pacific and to avoid the need to use seaborne routes through waters controlled by other nations.

Goal
The ultimate goal of the project was to complete a 1,907 mile (3,069 km) contiguous railway that connected the Pacific coast at San Francisco Bay with the then-existing Eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa on the Missouri River. The line was opened on May 10, 1869, with the driving in of what was called the “Last Spike” with a silver hammer at Promontory Summit in Box Elder County, Utah which itself was at an elevation of 4,902 feet (1,494 m) above sea level. The route ultimately revolutionised the settlement and economy of Western parts of the US by drawing these areas more firmly into the “Union” and making the transportation of goods much faster, flexible and more cost effective than before.

Challenges
To seed a collaborative solution, two companies, the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad, were chosen with Central Pacific starting in Sacramento and building east across the Sierra Nevada, and Union Pacific building westward from the Missouri River.
There was a simple business plan. The project was funded by the issuance of 30-year U.S. government bonds to private investors. The bonds were planned to be paid back (and were in full) by the sale of government granted land and future passenger and freight income. The bonds had different values per mile dependent on the terrain being covered to ensure that the challenges of the land were overcome. They were set at $16,000/mile for level track, $32,000/mile for track laid in foothills and $48,000/mile for track laid in mountains.
Getting materials to the Pacific end of the railway proved tricky. All supplies had to be effectively exported 18,000 miles from the East coast to Sacramento either via ship round Cape Horn (100-200 days) or across the nascent parts of the Panama Canal (40 days). The material then had to travel 130 miles (210 km) up the Sacramento River to the terminus.
Flexibility
Provisions in the Acts of Congress drawn up to deliver the project were made for telegraph companies to enable them to combine their existing lines with the Railroad’s telegraph lines as they were built. These lines provided rapid communication for ordering more supplies or particular types of men with specific skills and all for scheduling the trains which had to go both ways on a single track.
Of course a railway needed other infrastructure and so a 400 feet (120 m) right-of-way grant on either side of the track was granted to build stations, sidings, yards, maintenance buildings and while some of this land had the potential for mineral mining or was farm or forest land the majority of it was valueless desert.

Keys to Success
Apart from the immense government funding needed to convert such a project the main key to success seemed to have been the people. Such a project needed lots of engineers and surveyors and these were on hand mainly as Union and Confederate Army veterans who had built, protected and maintained the rail network in the East during the Civil War and as result already knew most of what had to be done and how to direct workers to get it done. Indeed most of the semi-skilled workers on the Union Pacific railway were recruited from the ranks of ex-soldiers on both sides of the war alongside emigrant Irish workers who were escaping poverty and famine in Ireland.
The Central Pacific employed many emigrant Chinese manual labourers for construction who were themselves escaping the poverty and terrors of the Taiping Revolution in the Kwangtung province in China.

Footnote
Travel on the new railroad which cost $50m began five days after its completion. Before it was built it cost nearly $1,000 dollars to travel across the country but after the railroad was completed the price dropped to $150 dollars. And despite the effort put in by all the workers there were two separate fares, one for ‘immigrants’ and one for first class.

Top 10 List
Number 10 – The Channel Tunnel

The 10 Greatest Project Plans The World Has Ever Seen – Number 10

September 18, 2014Project Planning, Uncategorizedadmin

This post is part of our series on the greatest project plans the world has ever seen.
The idea behind this series of blog posts is to review some of the greatest human achievements. How they were made real by people who took project planning really seriously. The rankings are the results of a small survey and I would love to hear your views and suggestions for projects I have missed or discounted.
The number 10 slot is occupied by the Channel Tunnel (Le tunnel sous la Manche)
Start
The first thoughts about a tunnel linking the two countries appear in the early 1800s when a French engineer proposed a tunnel lit by oil lamp and trafficked by horse drawn carriages, with an added feature of a mid-Channel island to change horses. There then followed a series of ideas from both sides of the water that were equally ambitious and which ultimately led in 1881 to 1-mile long pilot tunnels being dug on both sides. These were sadly abandoned when the British starting worrying about national defence.
There were many more false starts up to, during and after WW2 and it wasn’t until the 60s when a full geological survey was carried out that it started to seem feasible. In 1974 tunnelling started again but stopped soon after.
It wasn’t until 1985 that a contract was awarded and construction started on a budget of £2.6bn.

Goal
The goal for the project was ultimately to provide a quicker and cheaper way to move people and freight primarily between the second and third largest economies in Europe. In that sense this goal was completely achieved. In 2012 over 20m tonnes of freight was shipped through the tunnel along with over 18m passengers.
The political goal of more closely joining together two countries that had a long history of love and hate is still inconclusive. It was completed on schedule but not to budget, running almost 80% over.
Challenges
Getting two cultures that had traditionally agreed on little over hundreds of years to work together on such an undertaking was always going to be a test and so it proved. It was, at the time, the most expensive construction project the world had ever seen.
As construction goes building three 50km tunnels mostly underwater, starting from two different points and meeting in the middle using 10 different construction companies (five from each country) and using over 15,000 people, was perhaps an even greater challenge.
The engineering problems were immense; not least what to do with the estimated 10 million cubic metres of chalk and earth that came out of the tunnels (see Samphire Hoe).
Keys to Success
Commercial commitment seemed to be the key to the project as it was only when it was privately funded that it actually happened. Joined up thinking, although a little sporadic, on such a high risk project between the two Governments, led by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, was essential and this gave the commercial backers some sense of risk management along with a 65-year BOOT (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer) agreement which allowed the project enough time to realise a return.
Communication through engineers working with other engineers also seemed to be the key to success, especially dealing with changing conditions 50m under the sea bed, and led to the tunnels only being a few centimetres off dead centre when they joined in the middle.
Footnote
Even the best plans have a flaw as was discovered in 2005 when Lance Dyer a 38 year old South African was arrested by French police after he emerged from the 31-mile tunnel in Calais having walked undetected for 15 hours from Folkestone in a pair of flip flops.
Andrew Hatcher is the MD of The MAPP which provides simple visual planning solutions.

Simple Project Plan in 3 Easy Steps

September 18, 2014Project Planning, Uncategorizedadmin

What is it about creating a simple project plan that makes people sigh?
When anyone mentions planning, all you hear are groans and then a catalogue of reasons to avoid being dragged into the dreaded ‘planning process’.
Similar protests can also be heard when a plan is produced which allocates people to tasks they either don’t really want, or don’t feel able to complete. The effort that can then go in to avoiding doing the tasks and avoiding being found out can be immense – and for most organisations results in an enormous waste of resources.
We have been looking at the reasons why project planning fails and it seems there are a few key issues that need attention, but the most important factor is… Engagement,
It sounds straightforward, but getting people involved and engaged at the start in making a simple project plan is crucial to getting support in implementing the plan.
We have found this engagement needs to involve at least three elements:
1. Ensuring everyone knows where they are starting from
This means all team members should know what the current state of play is so they can answer the ‘Where are we now?’ question.
2. Ensuring that everyone knows where they are going to
This means that a common, measured, timed and realistic goal for whatever is being undertaken is agreed and understood by everyone involved.
3. Making the steps between start and goal clear, prioritised and owned by someone in the team.
By taking these three steps any team can significantly reduce the likelihood of a plan failing to deliver on its goals.
So whatever you are planning why not see if The MAPP can help you take the three step pathway, enabling you to create share and execute your simple project plan successfully.
Andy Hatcher