How to enable Projects to see the DAYLIGHT

Starting to blog again.

I have always wondered why projects and troubles go hand in hand. There seems to be a natural affinity for troubles to appear right through the course of any project. Its only the size of the trouble that varies. Now I am convinced that project management has the right tools to tackle troubles in every phase of the project. Most of the tools help in capturing the right information required for the project and communicating them. Troubles don't seem to like the undiluted truths.

Early on: Here the troubles threaten to pre-maturely terminate your project before seeing the light of dawn.
The PM tools that help you very early are in assessing the
1. BUSINESS CASE(ROI, BCR, NPV) and building a safety net around your project. This will make it very clear to others WHY you are doing this project?

Planning: Here the morning troubles that threaten are you the lack of information, lack of knowledge and lack of access to the key people, lack of structure to show others WHAT you are going to DO, WHEN you are going to DO it, HOW MUCH money it will cost you? lack of a MEASURE whether the customer will like what you are making or if you are doing as well as you initially thought or if you are doing better than the best in your industry.
The following PM tools can help you here,
1. WORK STRUCTURE
So Identify your project's key stakeholders. Arrange and collect the needs and expectations of your key stakeholders through face to face meetings, conversations, prototypes.
Identify the work required, necessary tasks, steps required to produce the deliverables. Finally the size, shape, color, texture of the deliverable or result as defined by the customer is made very clear. The WBS(Work Breakdown Structure) advertises the scope of what you have to DO and NOT DO clear to ALL.
2. SCHEDULE AND COST STRUCTURE
The Project Schedule announces to the world, the number of activities that you will DO, in which order and agreed MILESTONES and a DEADLINE. The project Cost budget is a clear manifesto of the cost limits that help in designing the EVA sounds alarm bells, when you are close to falling into dangerous waters of schedule or financial troubles. Select a right type of contract and a right partner will help you in tackling some types of troubles.
3. MEASURE
The Quality METRICS identifies key numbers and charts, that again set tolerance limits to the size, shape, color, texture of the deliverable.
PARETTO CHARTS help in identifying the root cause of your troubles.
CONTROL CHARTS help in identifying the tolerance limits for serious troubles.
FLOW CHARTS help you do better than last time in tackling troubles.
RUN CHARTS help you see a pattern due to changing troubles and hence predict the future
4. SUPPORT STRUCTURES that are initially shaped
RISK REGISTER
RACI MATRIX
REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY MATRIX
RESOURCE CALENDAR, ROLES, RESPONSIBILITIES, REWARDS
CONTRACTS TEMPLATES
LESSONS LEARNED DATABASE

Executing, Monitoring, Controlling: Here the mid-day troubles can have the greatest impact and come in the form of unplanned changes, unforeseen issues, anticpated and unknown risks, unknown accountability, people unavailability, people conflicts, contract defaults, unknown status of work, etc
The PM tools that can help you stand firm are,
1.REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY MATRIX
2.RISK REGISTER
3.RACI MATRIX
4.RESOURCE CALENDAR, ROLES, RESPONSIBILITIES, REWARDS
5. ISSUE LOGS
6.CHANGE REQUESTS, LOGS , CHANGE CONTROL BOARD
7.PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK SESSIONS and AUDITS
8.PERFORMANCE STATUS REPORTS
9.RECORDS CAPTURING AND MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Closing: The tools above will make it a satisfying project evening, where the only remaining task is to capture the lessons learned before it vanishes with the sleep and dreams of people. This provides the input to your unique potion, that enables another PM to have the strength for a new PROJECT DAY. This also enables the organisation to build a ROCK on which to stand.
1.LESSONS LEARNED DATABASE

PM Benefits - Success is Repeatable

Project Management framework ensures a REPEATABLE process which makes it easy for an organisation to perform a future project better than a previous project. It also gives confidence to the customer that an organisation can consistently achieve success under various environments and conditions.

1.The REPEATABLE PROCESS ensures that projects are planned and executed CONSISTENTLY across the dimensions of an organisation, location.
Example: In a core banking program consisting of multiple projects that involve the deployment of core banking solution in a global bank that has branches in multiple countries and cities, the projects need to be consistent across the whole bank, across locations.
Two or more project managers in an organisation will follow the same process steps in starting and completing a project, ensuring consistency in the performance of projects across an organisation.
It will also ensure that two different project managers, one representing a customer and another representing a vendor are able to understand each other. This will make sure that one project manager can take over from another in an emergency.

2.The REPEATABLE process will ensure that projects are planned, executed EFFICIENTLY by an organisation across the dimension of time.
The future projects will use the basic standards or core standards of past projects. Innovations will be built on the standard foundation of common processes. This will ensure that the project wheels are not re-invented.
Example: The core banking upgrade projects in a bank involves replacing the old banking system with a new system while retaining the customer and account data already in the system. These kind of projects involve conversion of data from the old system to the new system. This is the common, standard characteristic in all core banking projects. The knowledge of project management process called SCOPE MANAGEMENT helps in providing a boundary around the work that is performed. This helps the organisation to perform future projects with the common patterns of past projects but also adopting new customized, innovative techniques that can make core banking conversions happen faster, with higher quality.