Purposefully managing projects: using project management principles to manage volunteers and expectations.

SINCE I CAME TO WORK AT THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE TWO YEARS AGO, I'VE been impressed with the level of rigor my peers apply to managing programs and services. With 150,000 members in 150 countries, PMI, headquartered in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, is a global advocacy group that sets project management standards; provides access to a wealth of research, training, and information; and advances the profession. As you might guess, PMI doesn't just promote its standards to its members. It also uses them to manage many of its own projects and long-term programs.

During my time here, I've learned that a standardized approach can be particularly beneficial to an association--especially when we're tapping the expertise of volunteers who may be from far-flung geographic areas and who use differing specific business processes to get things done in their daily business lives. The power of project management lies in working in a systematic, consistent, and predictable way. At PMI, we generally break a project down into five activities: initiate, plan, execute, monitor and control, and close. (See sidebar, "Five Essential Elements of Project Management," for further information.)

While entire books, including the one from which the sidebar material has been adapted, have been written about project management processes, the emphasis of this article is on the all-important initiation stage. In this phase, the association commits to the project and establishes its objectives, including defining the project's scope (or content), responsible parties, and deliverables. These objectives are then communicated to--and must be understood by--all stakeholders, including the staff and volunteers on the project team.

David Hillson, a risk management consultant based in the United Kingdom, has served on numerous PMI volunteer teams across the years. From his professional and volunteer experiences, Hillson says that what happens--or doesn't happen--at the initiation stage can often be at the root of project failure or volunteer under-performance. At PMI, we consistently use two tools to get the initiation phase off to a good start: a team charter and appropriate technology.

Framing the project

One key to successfully managing volunteer projects is to help volunteers see the big picture from the start. We do that through a team charter, a document that spells out a project's mission, parameters, and desired outcomes as well as the available organizational resources. The charter provides a list of activities that individuals or teams can use to ensure that a) they do the activities that are important to the project, b) those activities are done correctly, and c) the project turns out as intended.

At PMI, a team charter is an essential volunteer management tool. In fact, we usually develop an internal draft charter before we recruit volunteers for a given project team. A draft helps us define the volunteer skills that we need and gives the project its boundaries. In our experience, if we recruit the team and then write the charter, too often the team will want to go well beyond what can be reasonably accomplished in terms of deliverables, available time, and budget, and volunteers will be frustrated from the start. That said, labeling the initial document as a draft gives volunteers an opportunity to participate in setting the project's final scope.

Team charters can range in length from a single sheet of paper to 10 pages or more depending on the project. Here are some sample components:

* Project name and staff sponsor

* Current and future customers and their needs

* Final deliverables

* Team boundaries (i.e., the scope of the project team's authority)

* Required reviews and approvals (i.e., which project deliverables must be reviewed, when, and by whom)

* Product milestones (i.e., deliverables, completion dates, and approval dates)

* Risks (i.e., possible problems the project could encounter and strategies for solving them)

* Project team members identified by function

The thorough, finalized project charter can lead an association directly from the initiation phase to the next project management stage: planning. When creating plans, team members expand the information contained in the charter to include the specific steps needed to create the intended products or services. During the next stage--execution--the project team submits regular summary activity reports, based on the charter, to the staff sponsor for review.

According to John Roecker, PMI's professional development programs manager, "People new to project management often don't want to put in the time for up-front planning and developing a strong team charter. I can't emphasize enough that the more thought you put into getting the team charter right, the easier execution becomes. There's far less opportunity for team members to stray from their original intent, and if they do, it's easier to refocus them." As the proverb goes, "Well begun is half done."

Providing the tools

If developing the team charter is the heavy lifting of the initiation phase, then technology provides the dolly. PMI regularly uses online tools to speed communication and bring geographically dispersed volunteer teams closer together. Technologies such as e-mail, conference calls, collaboration and project-planning software, and Web-net meeting tools are the heart and soul of PMI's virtual teamwork. We also frequently employ collaborative Web sites--dedicated, easy-to-manage online communities for everything project teams need. Teams use their personalized sites to post and share documents, schedule meetings through a calendaring system, and communicate via a team-member list-server. Collaborative sites also provide a way to pose single-question surveys to gauge team member response to a specific course of action, for instance. Other components of collaborative Web sites include

* news stories relevant to the work of the group;

* discussion boards (which could be led by staff or a volunteer);

* a calendar of relevant events and deadlines;

* a list of projects being conducted by subteams, including their status and priority;

* shared files--such as administrative documents, advisory group contact information, relevant research, and meeting notes; and

* helpful Web links.

If you're interested in creating collaborative sites for your association's teams, contact a vendor that provides software for online communities. Or consider adapting the project management software you already have; just make sure it provides scheduling, document retention and retrieval, e-mail capability, and so on. Ideally, your technology will enable team members to access and update information in real time so that everyone can keep the project moving forward 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As part of the ongoing monitoring and control of the project, the staff sponsor can check the team site to see what has been posted and how many people have opened and responded to documents. If it appears that some volunteers have not participated, the staff person can check in with them.

Setting plans in motion

According to Steve Fahrenkrog, PMI's director of knowledge delivery and an experienced team leader, the most important aspect of working with volunteers is making expectations clear. By creating a strong team charter and using collaborative technology, you spell out responsibilities and deliverables and give volunteers a means to easily communicate with each other on those responsibilities and deliverables. Employ these project management tools during your next project, and I sincerely believe that you'll see them as indispensable for achieving your association's desired results.

RELATED ARTICLE: Five Essential Elements of Project Management

Accomplishing any task, particularly one involving multiple volunteers scattered around the country or world, is always easier when standards are in place. A strong advocate of standardization and project management, the Project Management Institute, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, is no stranger to the methodologies of standardization and has written the book on project management--literally. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), published in 2000 by the Project Management Institute, is a standard that outlines the five steps necessary for the successful completion of any project: initiate, plan, execute, monitor and control, and close. The following is an explanation of the five process groups, adapted from the book. The figure is also reproduced from the book.

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Initiate. The initiation process authorizes the overall project or the next phase of a project. In this phase, project objectives are established, scope is defined, and responsible parties and deliverables are identified.

Plan. The planning processes are precisely that--the defining and refining of the best courses of action to take to attain the project objectives. Planning falls into two categories: core planning processes and facilitating processes.

Core processes are those that have clear dependencies that require them to be performed in essentially the same order on most projects. Examples include scope planning, schedule development, resource planning, and cost budgeting.

Facilitating processes are entirely dependent on the nature of the project and are performed intermittently and as needed--though they are not optional. Some of the facilitating planning processes include quality planning, staff acquisition, and risk identification.

Execute. Planning paves the way for executing, which involves coordinating resources, human and otherwise, to carry out the overall project plan. Because of the ongoing role execution plays in project management, its processes are also divided into core and facilitating subgroups. The central core process, project plan execution, oversees facilitating processes such as team development, information distribution, and solicitation.

Monitor and control. As the figure below shows, controlling processes have a strong presence in all but one of the project management stages. These processes ensure not only that project objectives are met, but also that corrective action can be taken should a problem arise. In this phase, performance reporting and risk monitoring and control are core. These watchdog processes work with facilitating processes such as cost control, quality control, and schedule control to ensure the project stays on track.

Close. The watchful eyes of the controlling processes eventually lead to closing, where the project is accepted and brought to an orderly end. The two main components of closing are contract closeout, in which any remaining open items are resolved and the contract is settled, and administrative closure, the gathering of information to formalize project completion, including compiling lessons learned for use in future projects.

It is important to note that the individual processes are not one-time events. Rather, they are overlapping activities that occur at varying levels of intensity throughout the course of the project. Using these standardized project management practices can help organize any project, and make said project a smoother, less stressful endeavor.

BY REBECCA MOORE, CAE 

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL CRAMER

Rebecca Moore, CAE, is manager of cooperative relations with the Project Management Institute, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. E-mail: [e-mail].