3. You have a very specific idea. You want to complete your project in a very specific manner to
achieve an end result (e.g., a report) that best responds to the assignment. In this case, you need to plan
well ahead so that each team member’s contribution is aimed at the result you want, and not just
executed in the way the team assumes you want it done.
4. Your team is made up of employees from several departments. When you work with a team of
employees from your department only, you can supervise their efforts daily. However, when several
departments are involved, or when your team includes people outside of your company or division, it’s
not as simple. In this situation, you may need to supply instructions in greater detail to ensure that each
phase is completed in the way you want it to be and in coordination with other team efforts.
PROJECT NARRATIVES
When you need to give your team more help than a simple assignment to complete a phase, you will save time
and duplication by preparing narrative instructions. These do not need to be extensive—you certainly don’t
want to write a one-hundred-page training manual. They won’t be needed for every step. Supply narrative
instructions only where special care is needed or when you want the job done in a specific manner.
You may also need to write instructions for team members who do not understand how to execute a task. Just
as employees in your department sometimes need more supervision, project team members cannot always
take an assignment and complete it without your help.
Example: One phase of your project involves designing a simplified form. You know your team member is
familiar with this, as she has designed forms in the past. Thus, you do not need to write an extensive training
narrative for her. However, you might need to list guidelines covering such things as your desire for
simplicity, a short list of information you want captured on the form, and a reminder to submit a draft of the
form for your approval. These guidelines and procedural steps can be briefly described in narrative form; the
step is shown on the network diagram only as “Design a new form.”
The narrative section needed for this step can be very brief. For example:
Design a new form, remembering that we are striving for simplicity. Arrange the information
being reported in the same sequence found on source documents. When the first draft is
complete, submit it to the project manager for review and approval.
When you work from a network diagram, you should consider the need for narrative support at each step. To
reduce the volume of extra material, keep narratives as short as possible, and avoid explaining the obvious
points. You should describe processes or provide guidelines only when steps are not self-explanatory or when
you expect questions to come up.
Your project team might find brief narratives reassuring as the proceed, especially if they are not used to
working from a network diagram. A good many projects are executed haphazardly, with few controls and
without the organizational support that a diagram provides. Thus, you may run into resistance to the idea of
highly organized processing. Until your team members are trained to think in terms of the overall project and
its execution (as expressed on the network diagram), they may have difficulty working from a diagram alone.
Sometimes you may have to describe the entire project even before your team is selected, since you won’t
know whom you will need for your team until after you’ve completed a preliminary network diagram and its
accompanying instructions. Don’t make the mistake of picking a team first and then having to alter the work
to fit the people. It makes more sense to select your team members after the diagram and narratives have been
prepared so that they can properly execute each phase of the project.
However, the organized approach works well even when your team is chosen before you’ve broken your
project down into phases. For example, you may be given a team to work with, or your department may be
given an assignment and expected to function as a team. While this alternative is not as desirable for effective
project management, it is unavoidable in many situations.
In such cases, the narrative sections should be written for each team member, not for the overall project or
phase. Even though you don’t yet have your team together, you still should know what skills you will need to
complete the project.
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