Project Mobilisation: Fail to Prepare = Prepare to Fail

It can be an exciting time when a new project is given the green light and the required mobilisation activities start in earnest. However, it is also potentially the most important phase of any project to ensure the right foundations are put in place to try and ensure success.

So what can be done to run an effective project mobilisation phase? From our perspective, the key is to the keep the approach simple and ask the obvious questions - something that is often forgotten or is bypassed in favour of utilising unvalidated assumptions.

So what are these obvious type of questions that need to be asked, let's take a look:

Why?

This should be the first question that is raised to the respective Project Sponsor, why is the project needed? The response may be relatively straightforward, for example, it is a regulatory driven project that must be done to preserve a license or reduce the risk of a substantial fine.

However, in many cases there will be subtle layers of detail that form the bigger picture of why the project is needed, hence the importance of continually asking the 'why' question. Having this understanding is also vitally important when aiming to get buy-in from other stakeholders as having the ability to tell a compelling story and to explain the benefits of why the project is needed will make this a significantly easier conversation to have.

When?

In a similar aspect to why the project is needed, having an understanding of when it must be delivered is also of pivotal importance. There could be various drivers for the expected delivery date, such examples could be a regulatory driven deadline, the expiration of an existing 3rd party commercial agreement, aligning to a wider strategic product launch; however regardless of the actual driver, having this information is critical given it will have a wider impact in terms of prioritisation, resource capacity planning and budgeting.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of impacts, however it does give some insight into what could be detrimentally impacted if the when isn't known.

What?

We have an understanding of why the project is needed and when it needs to be delivered, however an obvious and fundamental question that needs to be asked next is actually what needs to be delivered?

The importance of defining and agreeing the project aims, objectives and scope during the mobilisation phase is critical as it starts to provide tangible information that can be utilised to set those foundations that were mentioned earlier in terms of enabling project success.

As part of this questioning, having a greater understanding of the products, platforms, services, customers and markets that will be impacted is also of huge value and is fundamentally required to shape the scope. This also provides an added benefit of allowing stakeholders to visualize what is due to be delivered and provides them with an early platform to challenge what should be in/out of scope with the project team.

Who?

In respect to defining the 'who' it is important to differentiate between stakeholders who will be needed to deliver the change i.e. the Project Team and those stakeholders who will be required to support and contribute to it's success both during and post delivery i.e. Business/Operational stakeholders.

There is often a misconception when it comes to defining who is needed, with a greater focus often applied to defining the initial and ongoing resource capacity plan, without also taking into consideration the skills, knowledge and expertise that is actually needed to successfully deliver the project, which it can be strongly argued is of more significance.

How? 

In the context of project mobilisation, we aren't expecting a full technical solution to be defined, understood and agreed - that would be very much a cart before the horse approach!

However, what we do need to understand is can the proposed change be feasibly delivered within the current technical infrastructure or is this going to fundamentally change the technical ecosystem of the organisation and if so, do the benefits of the project outweigh the estimated costs?

We appreciate that the above approach is not exactly rocket science, however sometimes the simplest approaches work the best and asking what are perceived to be the obvious questions sometimes generates the greatest value instead of trying to move from 0 - 100 without having the right foundations and collective understanding of the rationale behind the project.

Thanks for reading