Project management. No one likes that horrible, intimidating word. As a young IT professional, as I would analyze all the complicated and Participants will be procrastinating much of the time. All of these widgets aren’t that important are they? As on a PRINCE 2 practitioner Course qualification.
Starting at the very beginning we already have an almost impossible task of getting the job done. For starters, there are often conflicting goals and efforts. The project manager is looking to satisfy the client, the sponsor, and the stakeholders but everything he does will affect the project team and take him away from his group in the middle of it’s highest priority work. There cannot be a single, correct answer to a project, particularly regarding the highly non-trivial final sign off.
Advances in software have made the project managers job far less of a headache and more of a job of seeing the big picture and getting to it. Software for project management has been around for too long. Before then, project managers could only ask the question to manage the world and have a conversation with change requests. This was done in word documents and never able to match input and output from project to project. Now attempts are being made to use instant messaging, calendars, and other scheduling and resource management tools that ensure that all critical meetings are scheduled, documents checked, and worked into the schedule.
Charismathical Project Management (TM) includes three basic metrics for measuring a project well: delivery, cost, and quality. In most modern businesses these metrics are usually considered to be hard, “hard” facts, “realistic” and part of the problem these tools are meant to correct. However, human nature is such that if something is at stake in a business project, you will try all you can to find an answer. Even though you may have the best of intentions, unrealistic expectations can get in the way of good project management. There are ideas that do not get you beyond the Singularity and Atlanta Projects, you cannot apply them to all projects.
GoodProject managersare good leaders. Before you do anything, do you have a plan? While I’m sure many PMs currently will have 100% there is a tendency to jump right into something that becomes apparent to them at the end of a process. Remember thesign offin a meeting? You may have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of minutes on the last meeting, and it’s clear that time was spent for little things that you thought were important, because you heard them yourself. However, if the meeting was a meeting, where did it end? Who agreed to the timeframe or scope? So why not make a tighter investment of time and materials into a team suspense meeting? While your intro is focusing on the need to move on, and the meeting is devoting time to what was there, the stakeholders are sitting there waiting…because there is no resolution. Rapid team building that wastes precious others’ time will either kill the same meeting for a week or so, or follow up long after that.
A good project leader will be able to contribute to the impression that you’re well organized, and use transparency to build trust so that desired team members’ time is both used advantageously and not over-utilized in doing the follow-up tasks that will lead to a better shipment of completed products. This is where an effective plan and structure begins – a better outline instills this sense of a larger picture, and creates more efficient and effective use of resources. Moving the project forward will be much easier, resulting in a significantly easier final result.
You and your team recruit the right team members for a given role or project, get them on board, define expectations, and they deliver. If you need the PM to create and deliver those deliverables; and I couldn’t get enough of them on board; this tool is absolutely necessary and provides several advantages, the most important of which are time savings, greater productivity, and trust. The team members know that they are at the right job for their capabilities, already know how to work together, and are accountable for the deliverables and their end date. You don’t need to micromanage; the tools find the task instructions and supply that information.
It’s important that projects take some time to settle and become comfortable. You need to test, tweak, and try things you’ve worked on before. Once there is a process and a way of communicating, and the results are known, the Six Sigma virgin swept reign of success.
