Our Approach to Project Management

by Seth Sinclair, Member

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.  It’s essential to remember, however, that in every successful journey some steps are more important than others—and the very first step is the most important of all.  Start out in the wrong direction, and your thousand-mile journey can easily require covering twice that distance to complete, and take much longer than you’d imagined.

Project management operates under the same principle.  Even the most difficult and complex projects begin with small steps and tasks to bring about their successful completion.  And just as our intrepid traveler would benefit from a map, projects tend to be more successful when those who are charged with accomplishing the mission know, as early as possible in their journey, what route they will use to get the results they seek.

Every project we take on is unique in some way and, to a degree, a venture into the unknown.   Further, projects are inevitably constrained by time, money, scope, and quality.  How do you achieve your objectives in light of these challenges? 

Our approach is to spend time with our clients in the earliest phases of project initiation defining desired outcomes, measureable success criteria, and other critical project characteristics.  We capture this information in a Project Charter, a broad but brief document that serves as valuable communications and planning baseline.  Some of the items recorded in the charter include business needs, significant deliverables, dependencies, stakeholder expectations, and major risks.

We do this because we know that projects fail in the beginning, not in the end.  By talking through what we are being asked to do before we begin, we are able to  achieve our client’s desired outcomes.  Like our intrepid traveler, it’s easy to correct one small misstep; but the further we go in the wrong direction, the harder it is to reach our true destination. 

Some clients, we know, are fearful of asking us, or any consulting group, to participate in their project management process.  They fear that consultant involvement will add considerably to the cost of accomplishing their mission—especially when the task they need to accomplish is not perceived as complex. 

One of the things Sinclair is really good at, however, is scaling our project management participation to the appropriate size and scope of the project.  We believe, as does the Project Management Institute (an organization of professional project managers of which I am an accredited member) that the amount of project management should be equal to the scope of the project. We work hard to ensure the level of our project management participation is scaled to meet our clients’ needs.

Our success is defined by our clients’ satisfaction in meeting their desired project outcomes. From simple tasks to complex missions, we’ve learned that the path to success is much smoother when we use project management to map out the route before we start.