Effective project management

Andy Wills

The goal of this session is to teach you some key ideas in project management. We’re going to apply them to planning a final-year dissertation, but the principles are general and apply to any project you might end up managing when you graduate.

Goals and sub-goals

The final goal for most projects is easy to define. In this case, it’s something like “Submit a great dissertation report”. But final goals are also intimidating. How do I get there?

The key is to create a set of smaller, more manageable sub-goals. We can illustrate this for a really simple project. The goal is to make a cup of tea. Sub-goals might include boiling water, getting the kettle, and so on.

In the first activity, you wrote a set of sub-goals you needed to achieve in order to reach a “submit a great dissertation report” goal. You can use standard office software (e.g. LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, Google docs) to do this. Here’s an example

Critical path analysis

Critical-path analysis is a way of working out what order you need to achieve your sub-goals in order to meet your main goal. You start with your main goal, and work backwards. What is the last step you need to achieve before your final goal? For tea (if you’re making it properly!) it’s “add milk”. You then work back from there. Sometimes there are things you need to do but the order doesn’t matter much. For example, getting a cup, kettle and tea bag. You put those things at the same point on the list.

In the second activity, you produced the critical path for your dissertation. Here’s an example

Deadlines and sub-deadlines

Most projects have a final deadline, and different steps on your critical path take different amounts of time to complete. You use the final deadline, and the amount of time things take, to set yourself a bunch of sub-deadlines.

In the third activity you estimated how long each of your dissertation sub-goals would take and set your sub-deadlines. Here’s an example.

Scheduling your own time

So far, we’ve assumed that your project is the only thing you need to do in life. This is seldom the case. So, the next step is to work out what else is going on in your life over the course of the project, and plan around that.

In the assessment activity, you’ll put together a schedule for your dissertation, discuss it with your supervisor, and submit a version you are both happy with. Here’s an example.

Kanban: Tracking project progress

Kanban is a technique for tracking the progress of a project. It first became popular in software development, but it works well for most big projects. Once you have a set of sub-goals for your project, you can use a kanban cards and a kanban board to track progress. You can learn more about kanban on the excellent Atlassian website.

Here’s an example kanban.