Top Tips for Planning and Managing Your HR Project.

Are you planning a new HR project? 

Not sure where to start or just want to brush up your skills and make sure you impress? 

This useful blog covers off the key phases of your project and some useful hints and tips to get you started.

Phase One - Define

The first thing to do is define what the project is. You won’t be able to deliver something you can’t describe.

Defining the project means working out what problems your project is looking to solve.  By understanding this you will be able to measure your success - did you solve those problems or have you still got them and half a dozen more.  

Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve means you will be able to clearly document what is in and out of scope.  This will help you later in your project to keep to the task in hand and stop your project growing beyond what was intended.  Often when a project gets going, people see it as an opportunity to solve their problems too and as your project is already in progress it’s easier for them to add to yours than start their own.  That's exactly how scope creep happens.

By clearly defining your scope you minimise the risk of this happening and if you do end up having to include their problems you can easily show its effect on your timeline.

Phase Two - Plan

Failing to plan is planning to fail

The planning stage often takes longer than expected, but failing to plan is planning to fail.  This phase is where you will be documenting your high level timeline and getting it signed off by your project sponsor. 

Setting the expectation on a realistic timeline is vital to any project's success, and by extension, your success as the project lead.  It’s also often the phase where you will meet the most conflict.

This phase will require some tough conversations and our best advice is listen to those delivering on what they think is practical.  They know how much work is actually involved, if they are telling you it takes four weeks and your CEO says it should take one, if you agree with the CEO to keep them happy, you’ll fail. 

You may want to shave a bit of time off, anyone that has done a project before always puts a bit of contingency in but don’t be unrealistic.

Identifying who you need to support your project and planning any other resources is part of good project management.  Remember that you may also need to factor in recruitment or backfilling of roles into your time and budget. 

If you have tight timelines the recruitment of the project team can severely hamper your progress. This is where the use of contractors can be useful.  They can usually start at short notice and are used to getting to grips with what’s happening quickly.

This phase should also include planning your communications.  Poor communication can kill a project. Engage the right people at the right time.  Often the purpose and benefits of the project are written at a level where those on the receiving end of the project don’t get it or don’t care.  They are more worried about what’s in it for them and if you’ve failed to tackle this in your communications they are unlikely to be successful.

Defining and setting up your project meeting structure and governance forms another key part of the planning process.  This will keep people on track, manage changes to project scope, budget and resource and help you escalate risks and issues.  Without this structure you’ll find it difficult to hold people accountable and leverage support when you need it.

Finally you want to have a high level understanding of the impact of the changes. You’ll explore these more as you implement, but forewarned is forearmed.  This type of assessment will allow you to identify any risks, teams or people that you think may be resistant to change and any processes. And any systems or policies that may need updating. Remember to account for the knock on impact on other teams and their processes.

Phase Three - Implementation

Before you implement, have a go / no go check.  Look at your plan and have a final review to make sure you’ve covered everything.  The final check allows the project team to highlight any concerns or risks before you start to implement.  It also allows you to revisit anything or carry out any missing work before you start the ball rolling. As the saying goes, measure twice and cut once. 

Implementation is where your project starts to gather pace and good project governance is key.  Your regular project meetings need to be more than just a progress update, they need to be a space where the team can share problems and work with each other to solve them.

Implementation is where the problems with your original plan and impact assessment will be exposed.  There will always be things you forgot to take into account or the key person you accidentally missed off your communications who holds a vital piece of the puzzle.  Having an environment where the project team feels safe to have honest conversations about what’s not going well as well as celebrating key milestones will ensure your project moves through this phase successfully.

Problem solving, being adaptable and calm in the chaos of change are great skills to have as a Project Manager during implementation.  

By having a clearly laid out plan, with the dependencies noted you’ll save a lot of time and effort when things change.  A good plan is easy to update if a key deadline suddenly shifts.  It also means you can quickly see the onward impact of that change and highlight early any future issues.  If you understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together you’ll know what happens if someone is trying to bang the wrong piece in the wrong place and what needs to happen to make it fit.

Phase Four - Sustain

This phase is the one that are most often overlooked.  The sustain phase is where you look at how to make your change stick.  It’s about winning the hearts and minds of those who are directly affected and putting checks in place to ensure things don’t slip back to the way they’ve always been. 

Communications in this phase are as vital as during implementation, you’ll want to celebrate successes and good practice.  Show the project is working and the benefits are being realised.  Sharing success stories also helps you get the final few people to embrace the changes.  They will see others have tried and succeeded and it may allay some of their fears.

Creating a training plan that covers not only implementation but also how you are going to train any new hires or promotions into the team and also provide refreshers will ensure that any expected ways of working and systems are embedded from day one and continue to be at the forefront of people's minds.

 Phase 5 - Review

The review stage is where you get the project team together and collect any key learnings.  This is like gold dust.  Documenting and learning from any mistakes and also any successes will save you future time and effort, meaning next time you carry out a project everything will be easier and better.

If you’re in the process of planning your HR Project and reading this has made you realise you could do with some independent advice or support that’s where we can help.  

We have a range of ways in which we can support you and your project.  

• You may just want some simple templates to use to scope, plan and track your project, we have toolkits that do that.  
  

• If you just need someone to cast their eye over your plan and make sure you’ve not missed anything - we offer coaching sessions.  
  

• Or if you don’t have the time to do all this yourself and want some more intensive and dedicated support we can offer dedicated time to you and your project to help you get it up and running quicker and easier.  

Please do get in touch using our contact us page, we’d like to hear about your project and explore how we can support you in successfully delivering it.

The information contained above is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this blog are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this blog. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this blog. Snow Limits Consulting Ltd disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this blog.