RECENT LESSONS LEARNT ... AGAIN #4

​Looking forward saves money

​A series of blogs of lessons learnt or re learnt from a recent project, after all we all have room and need to keep learning!

EXPLANATION

Working with a company with low PM maturity is fun and frustrating.  The main thing that is missing, apart from the vision from experience, are the protocols that protect them to gain certainty.  This goes the other way when they start to mature. 

You then have too many before a happy balance is reached between flexible and inflexible.  The main win on this last project was that when the project went into the home straight, we had cost certainty. 

Now this may be obvious, but this projects complexity was that it had no defined scope at the start.  Nothing to cost against.  So the project had to be flexible to define the scope that fitted into the program and cost. 

As the focus went past the cost stage and into the program stage, we had flipped the mentality and gained certainty on the more fluid design ideas and cost, ensuring that prices were fixed. 

This could have really delayed the program had this process not been integrated into the project as opposed to being a task.

SYNOPSIS

If it wasn’t for laying the foundations for a shift in focus the project would have ground to a halt. That focus had to suddenly change.  A sudden change usually means someone misses out. 

In this case it would have been either the client through the quality they were getting or the contractor in terms of over delivering for the allocated costs. 

It allowed for everyone to understand and know they were getting the value that they wanted.

LEARNING
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Looking forward and anticipating the major risks or required change in focus, helps you put the foundations in place for when they need to happen.

​This ultimately will save you money and time if people feel comfortable when those more difficult stages of a project happen.

​Thanks for reading
 
Simon