About

When I was first exposed to organised project management 20 years ago, I took to it like a duck to water, because I had effectively been managing projects all my life. I just didn’t know that’s what it was called, or that there were competing schools of thought about the best way to deliver. I found all of this incredibly exciting but what I didn’t realise was project management was then (and still to a lesser extent now) not considered a ‘real profession’. PMs were seen as unnecessary overheads as the client knows what they want, how much it will cost and how long it will take.

Projects end so I have always either been in a project or looking for the next one. With increasing rapidity, I found each new job (for the most part) was being offered because of some variation of it had come off the rails and the client needed it fixing. But the problem is these projects were up and running. They were staffed, designs had been chosen, shovels were in grounds (coffee mostly).

What I then usually found is the project hadn’t been well shaped, key risks had not been identified, compounding risks had been minimised, motivating benefits were less than clear, stakeholders were misunderstood and boundaries were non-existent.

But still the client expected me, the new guy to fix it.

PMWise and GKB is how I fix it.

We have all seen the building shows, happy couple with big dreams and the host asks ‘how long and how much’. Cut to the end of the show, years behind and way over budget, the couple barely keeping it together, the host smugly pleased. Great drama, woeful project management.

The issue is people have a set amount of money, they have an arbitrary deadline (it’s always Christmas). They set these two as the immovable bookends then try and shoe horn everything in between. Partner 1’s everything is not the same as partner 2’s, and the TV cameras eat it up.

GKB does many things different to traditional project frameworks, but the first thing it does is it properly and fully describes the whys and the whats of the project BEFORE it talks about the how longs and the how muchs.

With GKB and PMWise the couple explore and describe their dream home (or any other project) which defines what is in and what is not (very important), why they are doing what they are doing, what level of quality they need to achieve, who will need to be a part of the team, what are the things that could and possibly will go wrong and how to manage and account for them ahead of time, and only then do we talk about time and money.

Fully informed the couple might see they need more money or more time, they can see what each other’s ‘everythings’ include and maybe negotiate down to something that meets their core needs while still sitting within their budgets.

They might see Christmas was never going to happen and rethink the whole idea.

Stopping a bad project early is as successful as delivering a good one on time and on budget.

The first half, “Problem to Plan”, where we convert a nagging problem into a fully fleshed out plan, is built. We are currently working on the client management and application administration piece, hoping to be finished shortly (thanks to Opus 5.5). The last piece will be delivering the plan which we call “Do, Doing, Done” or “Do to Done”.

We’re hoping to be done by Christmas(!)