Take the Time to Estimate and Plan

– – At its most fundamental level, project management is about “time” where tasks occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines project management as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.” I have had the experience of reviewing Statements of Work (SOW), Requests for Proposal (RFP) and work with cross-functional delivery teams and customers on progress, customer satisfaction and team satisfaction (three minimal touch points in many CXOs dashboards).

– – According to Mike Cohn (an Agile thought-leader and founder of Mountain Goat Software) 2006:

Nearly two-thirds of projects significantly overrun their cost estimates (Lederer and Prasad 1992)

Sixty-four percent of the features included in
products are rarely or never used (Johnson 2002)

The average project exceeds
schedule by 100% (Standish 2001)

– – In a recent web poll released by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) nearly 28 percent chose poor communications as the number one cause of project failure. My experience is that this comes from management, i.e. bad management decisions. Failure to communicate the need and risk of not staffing an SOW or an RFP with the right resources “will” cause an impact on progress, customer satisfaction and team satisfaction. While this may increase Cost of Sales (COS) your get this back in gross margin, satisfaction points, and retained customers and employees. Time is irreversible so communicate the need to properly resource your SOWs and RFPs so that you can Estimate and Plan Well, Start Well, and End Well.

For one company these practices and principles helped:

Increase business development efficiency up to 19% by creating a Pursuit Services Desk that streamlined SOW and RFP processes improving both cost of sales and customer satisfaction.

Increase gross margin up to 6% by implementing a portfolio governance / assurance framework.