-
When IT Is Your Company’s “Piggy Bank”
February 10, 2012
-
4 Key Things a Project Manager Must Do
February 10, 2012
-
Essential Project Management
February 10, 2012
-
8 Traits of Top Project Managers - Part 1
February 9, 2012
-
Agile Project Management - Engaging Your Customer!
February 9, 2012
-
9 Tips to Avoid Traps in Project Planning
February 9, 2012
-
Why Projects Succeed - Executive Sponsorship
February 8, 2012
-
On Customer Participation in Agile Projects
February 8, 2012
-
A Project Charter for Lazy Teams
February 8, 2012
-
The Power of Process: How Bad Project Management Kills Great Ideas
February 7, 2012
Five Essential Project Management Tips
January 26, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices
Five Essential Project Management Tips
By Joanne Wortman
Below is a list of five Project Management tips, that, although critical, are often overlooked by quite a few Project Managers.
Manage your team, not your project plan. Your project plan file is merely a tool for planning and tracking. The key to success is your daily leadership of your team. Meet frequently with each contributor to your plan to understand where their difficulties are and to suggest tactics for moving past bottlenecks. This is much more valuable to the project than reporting that task 345 is only 45% complete as of the end of the week. This leads to the next resolution, which is:
Embrace collaboration tools aggressively. New times and new challenges call for new tools. Use project portals to the fullest. Get beyond Level 1 portal usage (shared documents) and fully exploit the discussion and alerts features. Build status dashboards for your executive sponsors, so that status communication becomes more than a once a week meeting or conference call. With widely dispersed teams becoming more the norm than the exception, twitter-like tools can help project managers to keep tabs on the current activities of all team members, and foster real-time assistance when team members tweet about a newly encountered difficulty.
Slim down that project plan! No, we don’t mean you have to lay off the end-of-project junk food binge (although you probably should for health reasons) … Your plan needs only enough detail to quantify effort, predict duration, and define a critical path. More detail beyond that means more overhead in terms of status tracking and replanning, and if this is not in the project budget, it’s only going to come out of your personal time.
Build contingency plans into your approach from Day 1. All that stuff about completing projects on time and within budget as the measures of project success is very pie-in-the-sky. There will be changes in scope. There may be changes in budget before you get to the build phase. The key milestone date may well be pushed up while you are still in the analysis phase. Have a clear idea of what’s essential for launch and what can be deferred from Day 1 and you will be in better shape to roll with the changes.
Align effort with risk. Don’t spend 80% of the analysis effort on 20% of the business functional domain, unless that 20% is the most mission critical, the most regulated, or the most central to driving revenue. As the project manager, you must rein in project team members who are focusing on areas that are not really central to the success of the effort. In this new tighter budget, compressed timeline world, there are going to be some bumps in the road. You need to make sure that mission critical requirements are safeguarded at the expense of those business requirements that are less crucial from a bottom line perspective.
Joanne Wortman, JWortman@edgewater.com, Director of Consulting, Edgewater Technology, Inc.
Joanne Wortman has been leading complex technology projects, M&A integration programs, business process reengineering efforts and change management initiatives for more than a decade. Her work has been published in Buyouts Magazine and at www.vcexperts.com. Ms. Wortman holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Edgewater Technology, Inc. is an innovative technology management consulting firm. We provide a unique blend of specialty IT services by leveraging our proven industry expertise in strategy, technology and enterprise performance management. Headquartered in Wakefield, MA, we go to market by vertical industry and provide our clients with a wide range of business and technology offerings.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
- Agile Project Management
- Ask the Hut
- Certification
- Change Management
- Communications Management
- Computer Based Information Systems
- Concepts
- Corporate Transformation
- Cost Management
- Critical Chain Project Management
- Delegation
- History
- HR Management
- Implementing Project Management
- Integration Management
- Lessons Learned
- Management
- Miscellaneous
- People Issues
- PMBOK
- PRINCE2
- Procurement Management
- Program Management
- Project Lifecycle Phases
- Project Management Advantages
- Project Management Advantages
- Project Management as a Career
- Project Management Best Practices
- Project Management Charts
- Project Management Definitions
- Project Management Ethics
- Project Management for Beginners
- Project Management Guides
- Project Management Musings
- Project Management Office
- Project Management Proposals
- Project Management Templates
- Project Portfolio Management
- Project Workforce Management
- Quality Management
- Requirements Management
- Risk Management
- Scheduling
- Scope Management
- SCRUM
- Soft Management
- Time Management
- Training
- Uncategorized
3 people have left comments
Hi Joanne - I just read your post and agree that it’s important to “Embrace collaboration tools aggressively” - and that Twitter-like tools can help to keep tabs on current activities of all team members. You might be interested in looking at ProjectThingy - an embeddable project and file collaboration widget - it not only addresses many of the things you mention but also has a new twist: just copy and paste some html into a web page to put it on a web site. It’s at projectthingy.com. I’d love to hear what you think!
Joanne,
I agree with the notion of focusing on the project team more than the mechanics of the project. Using an integrated Project and Portfolio Management software solution helps to free up the time to do this. The best project managers I have worked with manage by exception. They are prepared for problems with pre-planned contingencies that go beyond simply padding out the time it takes to complete tasks on the project schedule. It is the team leaders that have the insight and solutions when needed, so maintaining strong relationships is really important.
Having a prioritised list of project deliverables at hand helps you slim down the scope when your project gets resource constrained. Having held both Product Management and Product Marketing roles in large project teams, I totally agree that maintaining a focus on what features that provide the most value for the projects customers are the ones to focus on. Engineers always want to sneak “cool stuff” into a project and unless that cool feature provides competitive differentiation, its biggest impact on the project is often the risk that comes from using unproven approaches.
I agree with the statements above all TEAMWORK IS THE KEY.