Managing small projects during one large project

I’m looking for some advice on how to handle small projects that surface during a large (1 – 2 year) project.

We have everything in one workspace with our company name at the top. Under that, we have a project (ex: Large Project 1) that will take 1 year to complete.

Now, there will be other small projects (1 week estimate for example) that will come up that are a lower priority than Large Project 1, but realistically we will not say that we cannot get to your project until sometime next year.

So, we could move the small project up ahead of the large project. But, the small projects will just keep on coming and we’ll never get to the big project. What we would like to do is put the small project time-line inside the large project, which would be realistic (meaning we’ll get it done sometime during the large project…such as working late a few nights to fit it in). But, then it looks like it is part of the large project.

Any advice would be appreciated. This scenario happens all the time.

Now this is a great and classic project (portfolio) management question.

Before I start, I recommend reading a blog post by our Director of Rocket Science, Bruce Henry:
http://brucebrain.blogspot.com/2007/09/multi-ta…

In LiquidPlanner, we chose to have a Globally Prioritized Work Order (as seen in the (o) organize by projects view).

We believe that priority is a misunderstood concept by many tools. Most project management tools (like Microsoft Project) happily and routinely over-schedule people; but in the real world, that’s just not realistic. This is one of the main reasons that software teams hate classic project management tools. Traditional schedulers have tried to respond with “resource leveling features” but those are schedule engine overrides that basically mean “mess up my schedule” because the results are unpredictable and don’t match what people had in mind; they are rarely used.

LP solves this problem by introducing a strict global priority for the good of everyone. With this methodology, no two tasks on any given person can have the exact same priority. No two projects can have the exact same priority. It is impossible to overload somebody in LP, because work always flows forward respecting capacity.

This is a powerful concept because now, for the first time, an organization can have one source of truth about the prioritization plan of record. There can be organizational clarity about what is more important and this translates into front line productivity. GPWO helps convert strategy into execution.

OK, off my soap box and to your specific question… if the truth is, work will stop on the big project to fit in the little project that should be reflected by moving those smaller projects up in the priority order. The way I recommend doing that is to break the big project up into some smaller work packages (which in and of itself is a best practice).

For instance, you might have…

• Mega Project Milestone 1
• Interim Projects
  • Small Project
  • Small Project
• Mega Project Milestone 2
• Interim Projects
• Mega Project Milestone 3
• Interim Projects
• Mega Project Milestone Final Delivery

In this approach you can promise the smaller project sooner (quarterly?, monthly?) and not have to push them out a year but simultaniously are clear that the are not as imporant as the preceeding Mega Project Work Package. The more you packageize the Mega Project, the more fine control you have over the interim work.

I’ll add that in my last job managing a PMO, we usually had a hard time keeping our promises on those “quick fix engineering” projects because they always seemed important but not urgent enough to prioiritize above mainline work. We always wanted a tool that would “bring clarity” to the priority conflict issue with management; now it’s here! :)

OK… that seems fine. But I run a small business. Each client has their own projects (and sometimes multiple projects). However, I also have the day-to-day tasks of running a business: filing, responding to correspondence, employee management, accounting, meetings, that aren’t related to a particular project, but need to be done.

One way is to only schedule myself to work say 80% of the time (4 days) on the billable projects, leaving the other 20% for unbillable, but equally necessary stuff. But that means I might have two spaces I’m working in, without one common list. I don’t like that idea either.

This isn’t multi-tasking, but the reality of being the guy who wears multiple hats. However, the last thing I want to do is include “mundane office tasks” in the middle of our client projects. It mucks up the clarity of seeing what needs to be done for that particular project.

I don’t know if this is the right place—but is it possible to add an item in the priority list that belongs to a different project? So that the priority items are arranged according to priority, not necessarily by project?

I’m perfectly fine setting aside x amount of time during the day for the “little” stuff, but I can’t figure out how to effectively make it work with the current set up.

If it helps, we have an architecture office.

Got it. Have you looked at LP’s categories feature? (http://www.liquidplanner.com/forums/forums/2/to…)

You might want to organize your year long projects as categories and then have another category for the non-billable work. Note that in the category view, list order has no meaning (in the projects view list order is schedule priority). This is a bit more complicated to manage but it allows you to manage functional structure separately from time structure.

Charles is correct in pointing out the categories view. However I think they have the naming a little confusing and I made the same mistake as you the first time I tried to set up a project. The project view should really be called a priority or timeline view whereas the category view should be called either the project/requirements view. However naming aside, in the project view you should break you line items into groups based on priority or when then should be delivered. ie

Month 1 Sprint
- wk 1 items
- wk 2 items
- wk 3 items
- wk 4 items
Months 2 Sprint
- wk 5 items
- wk 6 items
- wk 7 items
- wk 8 items
...

In your categories view you break down your project(s) functionally

• Customer A Project
  - Planning Activities
  - Specification – Widget A – Widget B
• Customer B Project
  - Planning Activities
  - Specification – Widget C – Widget D
• Customer C Project
  - Planning Activities
  - Specification – Widget E – Widget F

Now any line items in your category view can be assigned to any priority slot in your projects view.

Again I think the term “Projects View” misleads people at first in trying to organize things according to functional grouping instead of priority. However once you “get it” it is very nice to work with.

Regards

Brad

Thanks for the great post Brad. We actually had long debates on naming these two trees. One tree is functional, the other tree is temporal. What you now see as “Projects” were originally called “timeboxes” in our early alpha tests and still are in the code. Categories were originally called Projects but it confused people. We found that people need to start in the temporal mode (Projects) and then grow into using both trees. That’s why we default to “organize by project”.

We are considering a change to the way categories work such that items will always be grouped by project under the category branches rather than the current flat list; any thoughts on that?

I think the current system of filters gives you exactly what you need. If I want to see the temporal view for only one category I can do that using the filter. However as the number of categories rises the drop down filter may becomes a little unwieldy and a way to pin the dropdown and scroll and select your way through it would help.

The two views are orthogonal and I think it would be a mistake to leak ordering from one to the other.

I think it was the nomenclature that got us all confused. “Category” for us corresponds to “Project” in LP. “Projects” then correspond to the “Task List” that needs to happen.

But I’m still fuzzy on “parallel” tasks between individuals in the same space.

How do we mix & match effectively & in parallel between people?

Or, here’s another way to express our confusion:

We have a client project. Staff member works on client project until 90% completed, at which point I need to review the project, provide corrections. Staff member finishes and we bundle it up and ship it out. In the mean time, while the staff guy is working on the stuff, I have other tasks I’m doing—I’m not needed on that particular project until near the end.

So in the Project view, do we schedule projects by person? Doing it purely by workitem can get confusing, too, as some of my work items aren’t needed until the end, but I’m doing stuff between now and then.

Assuming you are using LP’s categories for your logical project structure, one trick you can do is use the LP’s project containers to model a process or priority structure and drop parts of your logical projects into those time buckets. Easier to visualize with an example…

Suppose the team has the following work to do and I model it with LP’s category tree:

• Project Apollo
  • Requirements Work
  • Concept Work
  • Final Design
  • Code
  • Test
  • Approvals
    • Requirements Sign-off
    • Concept Sign-off
    • Design Sign-off

• Project Gemini
  • Requirements Work
  • Concept Work
  • Final Design
  • Code
  • Test
  • Approvals
    • Requirements Sign-off
    • Concept Sign-off
    • Design Sign-off

Using the project tree, you can prioritize these items independently and group them into any project container (or task list) that makes sense. In this example, I assumed the two projects are run concurrently and I roughly blocked out tasks by month until the end where I have two delivery containers with specific promise dates. LiquidPlanner will flow the work around on the schedule and alert you if any thing puts the two promise dates at risk.

• March
  • Project Apollo > Requirements Work
  • Project Gemini > Requirements Work
  • Project Apollo > Concept Work
  • Project Apollo > Approvals > Requirements Sign-off
  • Project Gemini > Approvals > Requirements Sign-off

• April
  • Project Gemini > Concept Work
  • Project Apollo > Approvals > Concept Sign-off
  • Project Apollo > Final Design
  • Project Apollo > Approvals > Design Sign-off

• May
  • Project Gemini > Final Design
  • Project Gemini > Code
  • Project Apollo > Code

• Deliver Apollo (promise date = 6/1)
  • Project Apollo > Test

• Deliver Gemini (promise date = 6/15)
  • Project Gemini > Test

In the end, it always comes down to finding the best way to model the way your team works with the goal of making sure you capture the realistic uncertainty and use that to figure out promise dates are you can confidently hit. Beyond that the best model is one that is easiest to maintain.

What you’ve outlined seems to make sense. I’m assuming that it works well for more than one team, too? That is, we want to have a complete picture of what needs to be done. In the above outline, are you creating a “month” as a project (using LP terminology) and then slotting the work items?

I suppose what I’m still unclear about is the multiple person flow. Each person is working on different tasks in parallel. Using your example above, Person 1 is assigned Apollo and Person 2 is assigned Gemini. I’m assuming that this doesn’t muck up the scheduling since they’re different “projects”.

(sorry for the delay) Yes, the “months” are really just prioritizing buckets. They could just as easily be weeks, quarters, stages, phases, sprints, milestones, or logical priorities like “Urgent”, “Important”, or “Maybe”.

The key is that they are in priority order and the schedule engine always schedules from the top to the bottom of the LP Projects List. One point about LiquidPlanner is there is never parallel scheduling (or split scheduling) for a given person. That would be the equivalent to saying a person can have two #1 priority tasks and we know that’s not really true, one is always slightly higher than another.

If you want to set promise dates or estalish dependancies on a set of work items (or even just two) being delivered you can always create a container for those items in the project tree, put those things in it and put your promise date or dependancy on the container. When you do this, it does not mater what order they actually get done in because the container represents the total time needed for all those items. A really smart way to use LP is to set promise dates on containers, not on individual tasks.

You can do some other interesting things with containers. You can delay the start of everything in the container and you can even set the contain to “don’t schedule” which effectively puts everything in the container on hold. This is great for things that are backlogged and should not be on anyone’s schedule.

I ran into this exact same problem after setting up all my projects in the priority tree when it sounds like they should actually be setup in Categories. I think it might make sense to change the naming on the UI to avoid this confusion. Perhaps Projects should be called Milestones and Categories should be called Projects?

We’ve considered that, well we are still considering it actually. We’ve just grouped it in with some larger improvements we have on the drawing board.

I got confused by this as well. I think the problem is newbies flock to the “schedule” tab in project view and categories are nowhere to be seen there. There should be an option to show categories along with task names, either as column like in the “estimate” tab, or as prefix on the name, such as “Visuals > Coding: My Account Page”. This would also help addressing the problem that tasks might have the same name and just differ by category, such as “Visuals > Design: My Account Page” and “Visuals > Coding: My Account Page”.

I just wanted to let you know how important this naming confusion is. Had I not found this post, I would have dropped liquidplanner into the bin because I would have found it too strict (planning projects in the schedule view just doesn’t work in reality). But having found this post and not thinking of Projects as Projects saved it from being tossed in with all the other project managers out there.

That being said, I have to explain the stuff in this post to every co-worker that I invite to a workspace (or show it to) which wastes my time and their time before they can even start using it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love what you have done here, but this little bit of confusion causes a lot of issues and makes liquidplanner a hard sell to my co-workers.

@treeder – we hear you load and clear. We discussed it today and moved it up to the front on the list of design issues to work on.

For both the “Sample Timeline Project” and the “Sample Waterfall Project”, the stuff set up under “Categories” can be seen as a WBS, or Work Breakdown Structure (see Wikipedia).
The stuff under Categories seems to be intended for recording how projects are organized. I can see how from the common “containers of containers” approach to project organization you could see the word “category” as applying, however, the word category does not take one’s mind there without a lot of explanation. The concept is a lot to cover with one, user-friendly word. Maybe “Structure.” But that takes us back to WBS.

The view for “projects” on the “schedule” tab really is prioritization and dependiencies.

I would see myself only using, with the current terms, categories on the estimate tab (to do my WBS) and and projects on the schedule tab (to figure how to get things done on time).

As a manager DBA (database administrator) for a medium size company, I am working on 5 to 15 different projects simultaneously, every day. Yes, at any one given moment I am working on only one. But I constantly have developers coming to me for mentoring, I have production emergencies popping up, and I have to engage in administrivia as a manager. To keep adding these tasks on the fly as they come up would be too much.

Since I have a certain amount of “unplannable” time in each and every day:

1) I would like to be able to specify that certain, ongoing responsibilities consume x% of each day, or

2) I noticed that I can set my “Availability per week (days)”. It might work if I was able to specify that I work 8 hours per day and I am available for scheduled projects 5.4 hours per day.

Also, it would be nice if I could put in my company holidays. Adding a vacation as a delayed task for an individual is a reasonable kludge, but adding every company holiday for every member would be annoying. Especially since they would be at the top of the project list and would all have to be marked as done the following work day.

We are fixing the terminology of Categories/Projects in our next release. Melinda is looking for a few customers to preview this, if anyone is interested email support@liquidplanner.com.

We agree with all your other requests and they are on our dev team’s project list.