Top 10 Problems, #10: Try to use Project as a free-form brainstorming tool

Preface

This blog post is one in a series of 10 based on a presentation I developed, “Top 10 problems new (and not so new) Project users have, and what you can do to ease the pain.” I first gave this talk at a Puget Sound PMI chapter meeting. I later gave an updated version of the talk to my local chapter of the MPUG Project User Group. As you might expect, at the PMI meeting the discussion tended more towards the broader project management issues, while at the MPUG meeting more towards specific features in Project. In fact at the MPUG meeting I had my computer projecting and we played around with Project features that related to some of the issues I brought up.

Top Ten List

In the process of writing the Project Step by Step books (starting with the 2000 edition and continuing through the current edition) with my co-author Tim Johnson, I observed first-hand some of the problems Project users encounter. Some of these problems are straight-forward gotchas in the software, but many common problems were really about how people define, understand and practice project management. In this and the other posts in this series, I’ll guide you through each of the top ten problems new or inexperienced project managers encounter, and what you can do to help identify and address these problems.

Problem #10: Try to use Project as a free-form brainstorming tool

Project is not especially well suited for free-form brainstorming of complex workflows.

There I said it. I often find people who are trying to develop workflow models in Project that define the activities required to complete some end result: who does what, and in what order activities should be completed. The problem they encounter is that it’s fairly difficult even for an experienced Project user to get the flexibility they want to answer broad framing questions before diving into details like task durations, resource units, and so on.

Let’s Go Swimming

I think that mapping out a complex workflow is a prerequisite activity best done before building a complex schedule in Project. In other words, answer the broad questions “What are the activities involved” and “Who does which activities” before starting up Project. The specific format and tool I like is the Cross-Functional Flowchart diagram, commonly called a swimlane diagram, in Microsoft Visio. Here is one example.

TIP  Click the screenshot image to see a larger view.

 

What I like most about the swimlane diagram is that it keeps your focus on the actors first (that is, who performs the action of the task; the doer), and the activities second. Later in Project we’ll call the actors “resources” and the activities “tasks,” but for initial brainstorming often the most critical question you can ask is, “Who should be involved in this process?”

Who's on First?

I like to compare this strength of a swimlane diagram with that most common of all workflow diagrams, the standard flowchart. The way most of us draw flowcharts is that we identify activities (tasks) in boxes, and use arrows to show sequence. What’s normally not included in the flowchart is the actor—who performs each activity. Yet in my experience this is precisely the question that does not get sufficiently answered and plants the seeds for all kinds of problems in complex work.

To illustrate a complex process in a swimlane diagram, you must first define the actors required; their names appear as labels of each row. This focus is essentially a part of stakeholder analysis, which any seasoned project manager will tell you is a major part of their day job—“Who are the stakeholders (individual people, groups, or organizations) who have a role that should be made visible in this process I want to illustrate?”

What Time Is It?

Like a Gantt Chart view in Project, the swimlane diagram (when laid out in horizontal orientation, which I prefer) follows a left-to-right time sequence. One thing I like about the swimlane as a planning and visualization tool is that you don’t have to pay too much attention to the specific timeframe or durations of activities. That focus will come later in Project, which is well suited for crunching duration-based math problems. Sometimes though you should include at least a general timeframe as part of a workflow illustration, and the swimlane format can accommodate you. Here for example I’ve added a lane to my diagram for a timeline (this is a standard Visio shape), and adjusted the widths of some boxes (tasks) to roughly indicate durations:

 

I’ve now changed my initial swimlane diagram from a generic or timeless representation of a process into a specific, time-bound example of that process. I can now further fine-tune the workflow details with the identified stakeholders. It’s not a big leap to move from this format to a real schedule in Project.

TIP  Click the screenshot image to see a larger view.

 

Because I kept the high-level developmental focus of this schedule in the more malleable swimlane format in Visio, I was able to more easily confer with stakeholders and fine-tune the details of the process before diving into the richer (though more rigid) interface of Project.

To Boldly Go…

For new complex work you may be the first person in your organization (or the world!) to try to illustrate the required workflow. Once when I faced this situation, I relied on an even simpler tool—a whiteboard and conference table at which were seated most of the stakeholders we would represent as actors in a swimlane diagram. I started by first leading a discussion about the stakeholder roles, and drew them on the whiteboard as row labels. I then asked each stakeholder (and in some cases proxies for stakeholders I did not have access to) to label the work they thought they’d do in this process on yellow sticky notes. By this I mean I asked them to actively participate: get up out of their chairs, go to the whiteboard, and put their sticky note activities in their lanes of the diagram I had drawn on the whiteboard. I believe the face-to-face and active (i.e. physical) participation by the stakeholders helped create a stronger sense of shared ownership of this process definition than if those stakeholders had more passively participated (mainly verbally) with me “driving” Visio or Project on a computer and projecting onto a screen.

When our whiteboard first draft of the process was visible to the stakeholders, they immediately saw some problems such as bad assumptions they had made about what other stakeholders did or did not do, bottlenecks in the process, and even one key stakeholder role we had not previously identified. After a couple of rounds of fine-tuning the workflow, we had what the stakeholders agreed was a workable representation of the process in question. I then transferred our whiteboard creation into a Visio diagram. From my perspective the greater value I added was as facilitator of a process, and the value to the stakeholders was the process itself at least as much as the finished diagram. With this high degree of stakeholder participation and buy-in at this early developmental stage, my chances of creating a workable schedule in Project were substantially improved.

 Hands-on with Project Step by Step

To read more about this blog entry's subjects in the two most recent editions of Tim Johnson's and my Project Step by Step books, see the following cross-references.

Entering tasks

• Project 2007 Step by Step: "Creating a Task List," pg. 36.

• Project 2003 Step by Step: "Creating a Task List," pg. 32.

 

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Comments

[Brian Kennemer]

No it does not do brainstorming well but it is also a lousy desktop publishing tool and is terrible at driving screws and removing unwanted hair. :-)

Great Post

[Denis]

I heard that MS Project 2010 has some mode that allow you to plan from top level. Does it help in free-form planning?

[Carl Chatfield]

I'm not publishing anything about the Office/Project 2010 beta yet, but you can see what Microsoft has made available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/project/2010/en/us/default.aspx

Best regards, Carl Chatfield

[Denis]

Thanks Carl. Are you going to write a book on 2010?

[Carl Chatfield]

Yep, working with Tim Johnson on the Project 2010 Step by Step now. I'll have lots more to say about 2010 later.