Five Immutable Principles of Project Success (A 5 Part Series)

This series of articles provides answers to the questions asked by the five (5) immutable principles of any successful project. Answering these questions is the role of the project management team.

1. What Does DONE Look Like?
2. How Do We Get There?
3. Do We Have Enough Time, Resources, And Money To Get There?
4. What Impediments Will We Encounter Along The Way?
5. How Do We Know We Are Making Progress?

The answers to these questions is provided in a set of articles each is guided by the underlying framework of a project, program, and portfolio management system built on Deliverables Based Planning^®. This project management method can be applied to the development of any system, no matter the business or technical domain. Any successful method must connect projects and their deliverables, with the programs that collect projects into beneficial outcomes and the portfolio of programs and their business outcomes connected to strategy, mission, and vision.

This series of articles follows the 5 principles two further levels down.

Overview of the 5 Immutable Principles

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Project managers are tasked with a wide variety of duties, many are vague, some are difficult, but none are really rewarding in the absence of a chance of project success. It is this Probability of Project Success that drives many project managers to seek out new and innovative ways to Increase this probability. These 5 Immutable Principles are the basis for Increasing the Probability of Project Success.

When we speak about projects, there are five attributes that must be established before addressing the Five Immutable Principles of a successful project.

These five project attributes are:

• The Situation – projects are risky, by their very nature. Handling or retiring risk is a core success factor.
• The Problem – project management makes use of processes to create measurement data. This data must identify tangible outcomes, their measures of performance, in units meaningful to the decision-makers.
• The Need – project management is about avoiding surprises. Measures of physical percent complete used to forecast future performance.
• The Context – organizations execute projects. Adapting the project management processes to the organization's culture to the risk tolerance of the project’s environment is a critical success factor.
• The Solution – defining the tangible deliverables as measures of increasing maturity increase the probability of success.

As well as these 5 Immutable Principles, the project manager must provide accurate and credible information to the decision-makers:

• How much is this project going to cost when we are done?
• When will we be done?
• Do we have some notion of the business value produced by the project and how is the project going to meet the goals of the business by delivering this value?
• What activities will be performed in what order to produce this business value?

The 5 Immutable Principles

The following article provides more detail about these 5 Immutable Principles, the practices that implement them, the artifacts that are generated from the practices, and most importantly, how the project manager can put these principles and practices to work in a variety of business and technical domains. But first, let’s look at descriptions of the 5 Immutable Principles.

1. What Does Done Look Like?

• • Done is described through a set of Capabilities possessed by the project. These capabilities describe the operational behavior of the system in terms of “operational concepts.” Capabilities answer the question -what does the system do to achieve the beneficial outcomes for the owners?

• • Capability planning means “planning under uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable for the wide range of needs for the business, while working within an economic framework that requires choices be made.”
  • By identifying capabilities, the technical and operational requirements can be traced from the Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) to each deliverable. Capabilities state “why” we want this system.

2. How Are We Going To Get To DONE?

• • Starting with each desired capability, a set of technical and operational requirements must be built. Each requirement must be testable and traceable to the desired capability.  Requirements are elicited from through a fact-finding and classification process. The evaluation and rationalization of the requirements answer the question “why do I need this?” in terms of operation benefits.

• • With these requirements, we need to determine what the PLAN is for arriving at DONE? The PLAN is the STRATEGY for the successful completion of the project. The plan describes the "path" to the end. The Plan describes what "done" looks like. Not only at the end, but along the way to "done." The Plan describes the increasing maturity of the deliverables of the project. The units of measure for maturity and when a specific value for this unit of measure should be present. This means the plan has a sequence of increasing maturity.
  • The Plan is NOT a Schedule, which is time-based. The Plan is sequence-based, relationship-based, and maturity based for the deliverable. The Schedule tells us "when" this maturity should appear.

3. Do We Have Enough Resources, Time, And Money To Get To DONE?

• • Once we know what done looks like in units of measure meaningful to the decision-makers and our Plan and Schedule to reach DONE in planned time, with the planned budget we must determine if we have enough of everything we needed to reach DONE.

4. What Impediments Will We encounter along the way?

• • Risk management continually assesses what can go wrong in the project, determines which is these risks are most important, and implements strategies to handle these risks. Risk Management is not Issue Management. Risks are things that may happen in the future with some probability of occurrence. Risks, when they do happen with, have some undesirable impact on the project. This impact has a range of possibilities as well.

5. How Can We Tell We Are Making Progress To Plan?

• • With our plan, schedule, resources and a clear and concise description of DONE, how can we tell if we’re making progress toward DONE? Do we know how much progress we should make at some point in the future? What are the units of measure for this progress?