BALANCING THE GLOBAL FEW WITH THE RELEVANT FEW IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

摘要

Projects are of growing complexity. There are more stakeholders, and they do not necessarily have more requirements, but their requirements are definitely more demanding and there is a higher chance of conflicts among them. The project goals need to be achieved with frequently limited resources, whether human, material and/or financial. This poses a formidable challenge to project managers, who need to have the global view. But having such holistic view is far from being sufficient. It is also necessary for the project manager to know what the relevant few tasks in the project are. The typical project planning techniques, such as Gantt charts and PERT or CPM diagrams, focus excessively on time and/or on task sequencing, giving the project manager very little visibility of many critical issues required for an effective and efficient management of the project. This paper shows how the tasks in the project Work Breakdown Structure should be scrutinized, at the beginning of a project, in order to identify which ones are those relevant few, from five key perspectives or quintants: performance; cost; time; external dependencies; and skills. The identification of these five subsets of relevant few tasks, among which there could be significant overlaps, will help the project manager achieve the project goals. Balancing the global view and the relevant few allows the managing of projects with a systems approach. A real project is used, as an example, to illustrate the identification of the relevant few tasks per each of the five quintants.