Projects - Getting your house in order

Outside of my usual life of dealing with problematic programmes I've recently been doing something completely different and yet I've been coming across similar themes and issues

I've been renovating an old barn on our farm to turn into additional living space - its phase 4 of our, so far, 13 year project which started when we bought a run down farm in West Wales all those years ago. It occurred to me that those of us who work in challenging business programme environments have a lot to learn from the building industry.

So the barn, its been one of those nice to have requirements that continually gets looked at and then parked. Eventually time, money and resources come along, but more usually the nice to have requirement becomes a must have. So having looked at this barn for much of the 13 years we have lived on the farm we've had many ideas for it, ranging from an indoor swimming pool, a man cave with full size pool table, kids play room and a larger kitchen none of which have materialised. In actual fact its served other purposes including stables for the horses, a day room for the dogs and recently our workshop but the new must have requirement is a live-in annexe for a member of family who has some health issues requiring more care than can be provided in his current accommodation in a residence in the nearby village.

So with a nice to have requirement shifting to a must have, we now have had to draw up a list of sub-requirements and prioritise those - first of all financial constraints (project cost control) - what can be done and what needs to be done in the time (critical path), as well as future proof the expenditure (benefits realisation).

1) Kitchen - A kitchen requires additional planning permission. A Kitchen requires additional wiring and building regulation considerations and looking at the future, would we really need an annexe with a kitchen especially given the resident won't be able to cook for themselves anyway. Future wise - would we rent it out - probably not. Prioritise the kitchen as low - the cost benefit analysis doesn't stack up

2) Bathroom space - priority must-have. But it brings with it complications - it requires drainage and linking into the mains sewer system (not simple when you need to put a pipe through a 4ft thick stone wall). It requires running water and a method of heating water. Priority high, but additional decisions to be made and some early dependancies in the plan.

3) Heating - priority must-have. Again more decisions - standalone central heating system with new boiler (must run off oil as no mains gas where we are) or find an efficient way to heat from the system in the main house. Significant cost benefit analysis required on the expenditure of a new boiler!

4) Lighting - yes, but now we have a dependancy. The annexe location is between the main house and one of the main barns, which is now going to be converted to become the new workshop. The old workshop has to be cleared out of the annexe space and relocated to the new workshop - firstly to free up the space to build and then secondly to create a new working space - but the power requirements for the new workshop need to be sorted out and taken out of the old workshop - anyway you get the idea. Needless to say a sub project has now been created to relocate the workshop with all the necessary requirements to enable that to be done first, but also the dependancy is that needs to be fully completed before stage one of the main project can start, including sorting out the power feeds.

So, rather than doing IT projects the last few weeks, our farm manager Ian and myself have been converting this barn (9metres x 4 metres) - we've laid the pipes, first fit wiring, stud walls, a floating floor to compensate for the slope in a 200 year old Welsh barn, plaster boarding and insulation. Every evening we sit down and order what we need for the next day and every morning, without fail a delivery van turns up with the ordered items and we proceed on the next stages. Within a couple more weeks it will be done, electrics tested by a professional, plumbing commissioned and the fresh plaster will be painted. We'll be ready to move him in, done just by two guys in just 4 weeks.

Every building endeavour is a project, planned and executed in the same way as any other project. Yet I didn't use MS Project to plan it, I didn't record any change requests in a log and I managed the dependancies by sight. There was no professional PMO team ensuring programme and project governance, tracking risks and issues, but the rules are still maintained - building regulations and planning control have to be adhered to and are monitored in the same way that your PMO controls and reports on your project. No army of testers, yet everything is still tested. There weren't any project meetings but the two of us regularly talked over coffee as to what we needed to do next. Ian didn't try to finish plaster boarding before I had finished laying cables in the wall - if he had, it would have just created more work for us both! As for problem solving - we often had to stop and think about a simpler way of achieving the power solutions we needed or the run of the copper pipes for the heating as our first ideas were usually too complex or too difficult to achieve.

The dependancies are there, just not recorded on a complex gantt chart, they are just known, visible and the critical path is there - staring you in the face. Yet when was the last time you heard about a building project fail in the same regular way as a high profile IT integration or business change programme seem to.

In the building trade, experience and expertise lead the way, there is a set approach and rules are present. So what can system integration programmes learn from the building trade?

• Keep things simple and don't reinvent the wheel

• Completing dependancies before starting the next one minimises rework

• Signing off stages ensures the correct procedures have been completed satisfactory before changes can no longer be made

• Projects over run and estimates are just that - plan contingency and expect to use it

• Establish a good requirements management regime and prioritise

• Establish good vendor management and get to know them well - you never know when you will need them to pull out the stops

The excuse I think we use is that business change and software are less tangible than a building project - its often difficult for many benefits to be realised without physically being able to see something working or visualise what it will look like and hence the rigorous controls required on transformation programmes. But if you've ever built or renovated something you'll know its often not until the last minute that you really see what you've achieved.

So if we can learn anything from the building trade its this - if you think you are over complicating things you probably are - there is probably a neater, more straight forward solution and stopping and thinking, calling on your experts and acting on making those decisions then your project will be simpler, more streamlined, create value and realise benefits earlier.

That will give you more time to look at that nice to have bucket list - you never know, one of them may just become your next must-have requirement.