International Legal Project Management

1. International Legal Project Management Konstantinos MARKOULAKIS, Lic. Spec., LL.M.

2. What is project management? A project is distinguished from regular work in that it’s a one-time effortto change things in some way. Project management is everything you need to make a project happen on time and within budgetto deliver the needed scope and quality. International Legal Project Management

3. The project balance quadrant International Legal Project Management

4. Stakeholders Stakeholders are the people who feel that the project might affect them and care about its outcome. It’s important to identify your stakeholdersso that you can understand their points of view and predict the pressure they may exert on the project. Talk to people who will be affected and actively seek out those who you think will care most. Understand their concerns and think about how to involve them in the project. International Legal Project Management

5. Stakeholders(cont.) The role of the project manager is to make sure that the different parties’ viewpoints are heard, and that everyone agrees to respectthe course of action chosen, even if, as individuals, they would have made a different decision. Project success depends on the involvement, trust and contributions of the stakeholders. International Legal Project Management

6. Stakeholders: The project sponsor The project sponsor is the embodiment of the project customer, that is, the person for whom the project is being delivered. Ultimate decision-making authority resides with the project sponsor. The project sponsor must be actively involved and take the project seriously. He or she equally needs to be senior enough to have the authority to make the very big decisions—even the decision to cancel the project if necessary. International Legal Project Management

7. Stakeholders: The project board The project board is a small group of people whose main responsibility is to make thereally big project decisions. Meet with the project board regularlyto provide progress updates and discuss any key decisions. The role of the project manager is to present options and recommend a course of action. Much of the true value of project management is in communicating to the stakeholders and project board, rather than the project team. International Legal Project Management

8. Stakeholders: The project team Ensuring that you have the right mix of abilitieson the project team is key. When you’re starting a project with a new team, sit down, one on one, with each individual. International Legal Project Management

9. Stakeholders: The project team (cont.) Collaboration requires excellent communication and is about working together as effectively as possible. As project manager, you’re responsible both for leading the team and for fostering an environment in which the team can collaborate effectively. Collaboration is about forming relationships. International Legal Project Management

10. Stakeholders: The project team (cont.) Putting individuals together makes them a group, but only when they can work together effectively will they really be a team. Helping your people to become a team, rather than remaining a group, is one of the most important rolesyou have as a project manager. International Legal Project Management

11. Project team building The stages that a group goes through as it becomes a team are: • FORMING: Need for a relaxed kick-off meeting. • STORMING: Differences of opinion (usually on project planning) come to the fore. • NORMING: Agreement on standard ways of working and the ways in which issues and conflicts will be dealt with. Beware of Groupthink! • PERFORMING: Reliance on each other for help and support, healthy ways of dealing with disagreement. • ADJOURNING: Sense of loss on separation. International Legal Project Management

12. Managing the project team A project manager has two roles: • manager, coordinating the efforts on the project, • leader, making sure that the project delivers the right results. International Legal Project Management

13. Team management tips Set up a regular team meeting. Encourage team members to raise concerns or ask for help from each other in this forum. Define an issue reporting and resolution process. International Legal Project Management

14. Remote team management tips Share lots of contact details. Pull together a skills matrix. Create group spaces. Be respectful of time and routine differences. Invest in relationship building. Become a contact hub. Become a facilitator. International Legal Project Management

15. Hershey and Blanchard model of behavior International Legal Project Management

16. Communication The only thing worse than confusion is when there is absolute clarity … over different versions of events! Being able to communicate effectively is a key skill for any project manager. International Legal Project Management

17. Communication (cont.) Communication is an area in which it isparticularly important to understand organisational culture. Ask the people you’re trying to communicate with whether your communication is actually working —don’t just keep doing what you’re doing, and risk having everything explode at a later date. International Legal Project Management

18. Forms of communication Interpersonal Presentational Many to many One- or two-way Push Pull International Legal Project Management

19. Content of communication Whatever the subject, you need to make sure that you’re clear on three issues: • Purpose: What are you trying to achieve? • Structure: How are you going to present the information? • Outcome: What should the people receiving the communication do once they have it? International Legal Project Management

20. General communication guidelines • If it’s personal, individual, or sensitive, deal with it one-to-one. • Separate meetings that have different purposes. • Choose the appropriate form for your purpose. Presentations are good for informing groups of people, they aren’t a good format for discussion. Similarly, turning a team meeting into a series of one-to-one discussions with individual members isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time except yours. International Legal Project Management

21. General communication guidelines (cont.) • Some methods support different forms of communication better than others. For instance, email is a good method for one-to-one and one-to-many communication, but terrible for many-to-many discussions or conversations. • Electronic communication lends itself to misunderstandings, particularly when a difference of opinion occurs. International Legal Project Management

22. General communication guidelines (cont.) • Assess people’s expectations of each communication method. Some people view email as a high priority, others believe that it’s a low-urgency form of communication, and that if something’s important, people will pick up the phone and actually talk to one another. Don’t try to impose your preferences on others, but understand theirs so you can communicate more effectively. International Legal Project Management

23. General communication guidelines (cont.) • Have a team discussion about communication to identify personal preferences. • Draft a simple communication plan outlining channels and forms of communication, frequency of communication and parties involved. The communication plan should cover everything from monthly email updates to daily meetings (for the project team) and fortnightly board meetings (with the project board). International Legal Project Management

24. Improve the efficiency of email • Write a good subject line. • Indicate the action needed. • Place a summaryat the start of your email. • If you need something done, set a clear deadline. • Use lists and bullet points. • Be specific about responsibilities and make it very obvious who’s meant to take ownership for a task or next step. • Keep it short and simple (KISS). • Know when to step outside of email! International Legal Project Management

25. Feedback Make sure that everyone knows how to communicate back to you! You need to know about great ideas, issues popping up on the horizon, and potential risks and opportunities. Some methods: feedback sessions during meetings anonymous “ideas box” (or webpage) informal meetings and contacts International Legal Project Management

26. The project cycle International Legal Project Management

27. Initiating: General If Initiating isn’t done right, you often end up in a situation where the project team members have very different ideas about the project’s purpose. Good initiation will also ensure that you identify all the project stakeholders up-front. Initiating is also the best chance you’ll get to define successand agree on the project’s success criteria. International Legal Project Management

28. The project initiation document Draft a document summarising: • the project’s objective (what you’re trying to achieve) • the key deliverables (how you’re going to achieve the objective) • the overall rationale for the project (why you’re undertaking it) • the initial timings (when it will be achieved) • the initial organisation (who is involved) • key assumptions and constraints • success criteria. International Legal Project Management

29. Definition of project objectives The objectives should be SMAC: specific, measurable, actionable, and consistent. The key feature is that at the end of the project, you should be able to say “yes, we did that” or “no, we failed.” There should be no gray areas. Throughout the project, you should be able to track the team’s progress towards those objectives. International Legal Project Management

30. Initial project timeline Plan the project timeline, listing major deliverables against the week or month in which they’ll be delivered. Gannt chart example: International Legal Project Management

31. Planning: General Planning a project is similar to planning a long-distance drive. Task-based planning vs deliverable-based planning: jobs vs products. The rolling wave approach: plan the project’s immediate future in detail (tasks), and plan deliverables that lie further out at a higher level. International Legal Project Management

32. Planning: a 6-step process • Break down the project into pieces small enough to work with. • Identify dependencies. • Estimate how long each piece will take. • Add some contingency. • Consider the risks. • Present the plan in a format that the team, board, and stakeholders will understand and follow. International Legal Project Management

33. Planning: Step 1 Break the single end-goal of your project into individual deliverables that are SMAC, small enough to be both achievable and measurable. International Legal Project Management

34. Planning: Step 2 Identify the dependencies: which deliverables depend on other deliverables, forcing a sequential implementation. resource dependency or work that by its nature demands to be done in sequence. International Legal Project Management

35. Planning: Step 3 Build an initial project schedule. The person (or subteam) who will actually undertake a given piece of work should create the estimates, so that the estimate can be realistic. Estimates are neither wild guesses nor deadlines. International Legal Project Management

36. Planning: Step 3(cont.) How to estimate time? • Use experience • Break down the deliverables further • Use averaging techniques: (Most optimistic+least optimistic)÷2 [Most optimistic+(4xmost likely)+least optimistic]÷6 Delphi technique International Legal Project Management

37. Planning: Step 3(cont.) Use a rolling wave approachthat gives very rough, broad-based estimates for any deliverable that’s too far out to estimate (typically more than eight weeks away), and only putting the effort in to breaking down in detail, and estimating properly, the work that’s coming in the immediate future. International Legal Project Management

38. Planning: Step 4 Add contingency, ie. extra time that is incorporated in the schedule to cover unexpected events as well as expected events that will have an impact on the schedule (task switching, other work, personal commitments). Add contingency to risky tasks. Contingency is another concept that is often misunderstood by project stakeholders. International Legal Project Management

39. Planning: Step 5 Create a Risk Management Plan: • Identify potential risks. • Rate them by likelihood and severity. • Choose which risks to plan for. • Make plans for dealing with those risks. International Legal Project Management

40. Planning: Step 5(cont.) Rate each risk, first on the likelihood of its occurrence (how likely is it to actually happen?) and then on its severity(how bad is it, if it does happen?). International Legal Project Management

41. Planning: Step 5(cont.) Decide on a response to each risk ahead of time: • Accept: There is nothing that can be done to reduce the risk, you can just hope it does not occur. • Avoid: The project plan can be modified so as to avoid the situation that creates the risk. • Mitigate: What will you do to minimize the impact should the risk event occur? • Transfer: Pass the impact should the risk event occur (for example, buy an insurance policy). International Legal Project Management

42. Planning: Step 6 The total project plan should cover: • deliverables and milestones: the items you’re actually going to deliver, broken down into logical, manageable chunks • schedule: timing of the deliverables, based on the estimates you’ve compiled • assumptions and constraints: the circumstances or factors you’ve assumed to be true, and that you’ve identified as limitations. • risk management: anticipated risks and the steps you will take to mitigate them if they materialise. International Legal Project Management

43. Planning: Step 6(cont.) A plan review is a short meeting (of not more than 30 minutes) in which you review the project plan with a specific group of stakeholders, taking people through the plan at a high level, and only going into the detail that is relevant to them. Take advantage of these meetings to clear up any confusion and deal with misunderstandings. International Legal Project Management

44. Planning: Test question(hint!) You find yourself in the midst of a project for which no planning has been done, but a final deadline has already been set. What do you do? • Break down the deliverables, gather the estimates, and decide how much contingency you’d have liked to have. • Remember the balance quadrant. • Ask for time or other resources. • Take the emotion out of the discussion. International Legal Project Management

45. Executing: The “owner” Each and every deliverable needs to have an owner. That individual is personally responsible and accountable for making it happen. That individual will either work alone on the deliverable or will co-ordinate the work of the others involved, will escalate issues to the project manager if it looks like things are going off-track, and will ask for help when it’s needed. International Legal Project Management

46. Executing: The “owner”(cont.) Assign ownership to the pieces of work that you and your team will be focusing on for the next 2-3 weeks (it can be difficult to make good ownership choices for work to be completed further out than this). Hold regular short (stand-up) update meetingswith the deliverable owners, making sure that they walk away from the meeting knowing their next steps. International Legal Project Management

47. Executing: The RASCI matrix The RASCI matrix defines the involvement of individuals in deliverables and work: • Responsible (owner) • Accountable (project manager) • Supportive (provides help or resources) • Consulted (controls quality) • Informed International Legal Project Management

48. Controlling: Understand, track, adapt Understand how you are doing: are deliverables being delivered? Track your progress: consult the deliverables’ owners. Adapt to changing circumstances. International Legal Project Management

49. Controlling: Project progress indicators • Scope delivered: which deliverables have been completed? • Percentage time that has passed vs time planned: ahead, on or behind schedule? • Budget used to date, compared both to the scope delivered and the time that’s passed. • Quality. International Legal Project Management

50. Controlling: “Issues” Issues are risks that have come to life; they are problems that mean you cannot carry on with the project as planned. Unidentified or unmitigated risks are handled at the level of the project manager, the project team or the project board, in increasing order of severity. Instead of dealing with the issues individually, a completely different tack may be needed to achieve the project itself. International Legal Project Management