Retooling

You may find yourself in a situation in IT where you have been asked to be both a developer and a project lead at the same time. Perhaps you are tired of having to learn a new a new technology every year or two to stay current in your job. Or perhaps you have gotten a taste of project management and you LIKE it.

There may be economic reasons why you also might consider moving from a technical role to a project manager. If your organization is looking at more outsourcing of jobs, or worse yet, entire departments, project management may be a more secure job. Most organizations keep project managers on staff while other positions go to other companies or locales. Your organization will need people in positions of oversight to make sure the outsource organizations do what they have committed to. More and more of that oversight is being done by project managers.

If you find yourself in any of these situations, it may be time to add some project management training to your skill set. Buy a good book on the subject or take a project management basics class to get the fundamentals down. Then practice what you’ve learned and get better with every project that you take on.

After you’ve been doing project management for a while, your growth and the natural desire to get better at your job will probably spur you on to purchase a copy of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide). This is the worldwide standard that has been accredited by ANSI, the American arm of ISO. The Project Management Institute (PMI), the project management industry’s premier organization, assists with the development and promotion of this standard, along with being an advocate for the industry, a promoter of educational and certification for project managers and advancement of the industry knowledge.

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Top Ten Tips for Project Managers

I thought I’d cover my top 10 list of tips for project managers. If you run into a concept or term that doesn’t make sense to you, check out my book Project Management for Mere Mortals.

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1. Be clear about the business result that your project has been commission to produce. Coming up with some razzle dazzle product or service that doesn’t meet your clients requirements will definitely make you famous within your company – unfortunately in the wrong way. It’s a reputation you don’t want.
2. Plan the work the best way to get it done, then crash and fast track to get to the requested date. Some of your project tasks may have synergies or relationships with other tasks that need to be preserved. Don’t lose track of these relationships as you build your project schedule.
3. As you complete an iteration of planning, be sure to desk test this iteration against the previous iteration to verify you are still in scope. You want to avoid scope creep at all costs.
4. Build completion criteria for each task. Completion criteria will keep both the project manager and the person working on the task clear about what “done” looks like. It’s such a simple concept that is frequently overlooked.
5. Team norms will help your team work together effectively. Anyone who’s worked in a non-cohesive work group can vouch for this one.
6. The effect of taking on a change request is not always equal to the number of days provided in the estimate. Be aware of the incremental effect. The more change requests that you take on, the harder it is for the team to transition to the new work that needs to be done.
7. Build cost estimates for every task in your project regardless of whether you are held accountable for a budget or not. You need the practice and later you can use these figures for Earned Value Management.

Communication – Another IT Weakness

IT people don't communicate very well. We sit in our cubicles and code or configure, maybe do email. As a Project Manager, you've got to find a way to get your team to communicate beyond Email. Let's talk about a couple of methods you might use to keep the information flowing on your project.

“Management by walking around” is one of the most effective tools I've see good project managers use. I know this takes some work on your part, but there is no more effective method than just getting up, walking around and stopping to chat with your team members. I try to do this at least once a day, in addition to some of the following techniques.

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Biggest Problem in IT Projects - Getting Good Requirements

One of the biggest problems you’ll run into with IT projects is something called scope creep. Scope creep is when the client changes their mind about the project or figures out that something is missing from the project after it’s already started. You’ll find lots of books on how to curtail scope creep, but the fundamental idea is to get clear on what the customer really wants before you begin the development process. So how do you do this?

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Countering The Overly Optimistic IT Estimate

Those of you who’ve been working in the IT world may have noticed that your projects rarely get done on time. This blog entry is about dealing with the ‘overly optimistic’ estimates your IT staff normally produces. Here’s a technique you can use to counter the overly optimistic developer.

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IT Project Estimates

Welcome to my first blog entry - all things project management, from the basics to credentialing yourself and even maturing your organization’s approach to project management. Let’s take a look at one of the more common PM problems - IT project estimates.

One of the biggest in problems in most IT projects comes down to estimating and getting clear about what type of estimates we’re really talking about. Most of the IT professionals I’ve worked with give you a number for an estimate– but I’m never quite sure what that number entails or what they were really trying to cover with that estimate.

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