Key questions guiding the project formulation

“However you choose to define your project management methodology, all valid project management methodologies must be reducible to answering the following six simple questions;

• What business situation is being addressed?
• What do you need to do?
• What will you do?
• How will you do it?
• How will you know you did it?
• How well did you do?”
Wysocki, R. 2009
The essence of project management is the process of building the structure around the tasks, which are leading to the final goal and monitoring the progress of these tasks. As such, project management is all about structured approach. The problem with project management however, is that, as an academic and practical subject, it is not structured at all. Therefore, the biggest challenge for a project manager is the very essence of his job- creating the structure.
Wysocki is listing the questions that should allow project managers to tackle this problem. Whatever the project, these questions need to be asked and answered in order to begin, progress and successfully complete the project.
To determine which of these six questions is more important in ensuring the success of the project seems pointless. But is it really? If the project has begun with no or bad planning, perfect control and monitoring are not going to help. The plan and scoping will need to be revisited at some point, otherwise the project is deemed to be a failure. In order to ensure the project’s success, business situation needs to be analysed thoroughly, to assess the components and stakeholders of the project. Once these two are determined, the steps which need to be completed can be outlined- what has to be done and who will do it. Based on the above, the most influential questions are the first two, with the first one being more important: the business situation needs to be described and the required steps need to be listed.
Concerning the first question, in the investment fund administration world, the very basic business situation can be described by answering the following questions:
1. what is the process in scope (i.e. onboarding, offboarding, migration, etc.),
2. what are the service requirements (i.e. transfer agency, fund accounting, custody, legal and domiciliary, one of them, several or all, etc.),
3. what is the type of the fund ( i.e. investment objectives and investment strategy, legal structure, domiciliation, etc.),
4. who are the stakeholders (Investment Manager, current and new Administrator, etc.)
Answering the above creates a starting point, allows the project team to direct and organize the scoping and planning process. And this is what the second question is about. Once the requirements have been established, the steps that need to be completed in order to achieve the goal can be outlined.

Reference:
Wysocki, R. K. “Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme”; 5th edition; Wiley Publishing Inc.; Indiana; 2009

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