Project Management
Understand Project Management
A project is a set of interrelated activities, involving a group of people who are working together toward a common goal over a period of time.
Project management is the planning, scheduling, and orchestrating of project activities to achieve objectives within a specified period of time.
Build trust with your team members. Acknowledge difficult situations, empathize with team members, admit you don't have all the answers, and ask team members for help. Listen to everyone's opinions. Explain all decisions. Lead by example.
Project management can be understood as a four-step process: Planning, Buildup, Implementation, and Phase-out. Activities can overlap between phases. Sometimes project management is linear, but sometimes it is adaptive (iterative).
Adaptive project management is about performing experiments quickly, striving for early delivery, staff projects with people who have a talent for adapting, and avoid over-relying on metrics (assuming predictability).
The enemy of innovation is not failure, but prolonged expensive failure. Experiments require discipline, and to be inexpensive. Identify uncertainties, rate them, list the highest rated unknowns, and start by testing them in order.
Establish Project Scope
Start by defining problems, not solutions. Then brainstorm alternatives, evaluate them, and choose the best one. Listen to the client's real needs.
Identify your stakeholders. Anyone who has a vested interest in the outcome of the project.
Define SMART objectives for the project. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.
Anticipate trade-offs in quality (scope), time, cost. Those three are competing demands. Find out which variable matters the most, and be transparent about compromises.
Beware of scope creep. Get agreement on scope ahead of time. Either list what's in or out of scope, or establish scope-tolerance parameters (or ranges, aka non-functional requirements). Get signoff on scope.
Once you know the scope, estimate project resources. Break the scope in Major tasks, then Minor tasks, then individual tasks. This division is called Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Estimate tasks in terms of dollars and person-hours (the mythical man-month, haha). Consider skills you will need to complete the tasks. Don't worry about these estimates not being precise. As a rule of thumb, multiply your estimates by 1.5x (also known as padding).
Create a project charter containing: mission statement, roles and responsibilities, sponsors, scope and objectives, relationship between project's goals and higher organizational goals, expected time frame and milestones, resources available to the team, constraints, assumptions, quality requirements, and major risks.
Develop A Schedule And Budget
To get a schedule, start by the deadline. Then work backwards, mapping interim deliverables. Identify bottlenecks and elaborate ways to address them. Establish a control and comm channel (governance?) system for updating the schedule.
Seek ways to make the roadmap more precise: spot errors, oversights, overcommitments, and bottlenecks. There are many tools to help with these, like Gantt charts, PERT (performance evaluation and review technique) charts, and Critical Path Diagrams (flowchart). Use these tools flexibly.
A budget is a financial blueprint that details measurable expenses and expected returns over a time frame. Even though the budget needs to be estimated at the beginning, it needs to be adjusted throughout the project. Typical expenses include people, travel, training, supplies, space, etc. Costs like insurance, licensing, and legal are often overlooked. For that reason, it's important to secure a contingency fund. Use the budget to decide if the project is even worth pursuing.
Assemble Your Team
PM's responsibilities: identify resources, recruit team, coordinate activities, negotiate with sponsors, mediate conflicts, set milestones, manage the budget. Ultimately, keep the work on track. It's more important to empower team members, than directing them.
The project can also have a team lead (TM). Their responsibilities include regularly communicating progress and projects to the PM, periodically assessing team progress and team's outlook, and making sure everyone's voice is heard. They play six roles: Initiator (encourage team to work), Role Model, Negotiator, Listener, Coach, and the usual Work.
A team member's responsibilities are to complete tasks on time, communicate concerns, support other team members, and ask for help when needed.
To assemble an affective team, one must identify required skills and find individuals who possess those skills (or train people). Assign people to tasks based on their abilities: Technical, Problem-Solving, Interpersonal, Organizational, Developmental, and Communication. Teams cannot be too friendly, too inflexible, or have internal conflicts.
Manage Project Risks
Risk management is identifying key risks and developing plans for preventing them or mitigating their adverse effects. It consists of three steps: conducting a risk audit, taking action to minimize risks, and develop contingency plans.
A risk audit needs ideas to be collector widely, and includes internal and external risks. Map risks according to their likelihood and harm. Start with the most likely and harmful ones.
A contingency plan deals with a potential problem. "If [...] happens, how could we respond in a way that would minimize the damage?"
Monitor Progress and Problems
KEep track of decisions, assignments, action items. Document meetings. Every milestone should include successful testing, and should be celebrated.
Track the major three components of change. Make sure, every week, we are:
- strengthening and enforcing the vision of where we're going
- helping people understand why they have to change
- helping people know what's the next step
Some common issues are: focus on the wrong tasks, poor work quality, and burnout.
Don't forget to monitor the budget, the schedule, the scope, the quality. Don't let control become micromanagement. Emphasize timely responses.
Stakeholder Management
Have face-to-face project launch meetings, it motivates the team. USe it to align roles and responsibilities, review the project charter, seek understanding of the project, outline the available resources and incentives.
Schedule regular weekly team meetings.
File progress reports regularly. Hold project update meetings regularly.
Close-Out
Hold a post-project evaluation. Evaluate the quality, schedule, and cost.
Do a project (blameless) post-mortem to review lessons learned. Review assumptions, estimates, productivity of meetings, what we would do differently.
Draft a final project report, containing the current status, future status, ongoing critical work, risks, handovers for other projects, and limitations.
Celebrate regardless of success.