Ensuring the Project is a Manageable Size

Good Practice: A very large project should be cut up into more manageable sub-projects, which only depend on completed sub-projects. The project planning methodology provides a good tool to subdivide a major project into more manageable sub-projects with short-term deliverables. Each project plan should itself be subdivided into a number of key milestones. This helps to provide continuous delivery and to ensure that actual progress is measured on a regular basis. For example, a recent large project involved two quite separate project plans for different stages of the project, development and implementation. Each plan consisted of approximately 300+ separate tasks and approximately 30 key milestones.

In his article 7 Steps to Project Success, Peter Draper suggests it is necessary to break up projects into smaller, independent sub-projects that are more easily manageable. These sub-projects must be:

• Small, that is, less than $1m.
• Fast, that is, takes less than 6 months.
• Compact, that is, fewer than 6 people on the team.
• Focused on key benefits and not just deliverables.