My Project Management Lessons

I know what you just thought about, Requirements?

But to define requirements, we must understand the scope of the project. So, the first thing in a project is “Scope”.

Scope identifies the boundaries of the project, what are supposed to be achieved by the project and what not.

Scope statement helps the team

in planning the requirements gathering

in validating the requirements

in making decisions on the change requests

According to Oxford dictionary, Project is “an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim”.

In other terms,

It is a planned set of related tasks to be executed with in a stipulated timeline constrained by resources.

Every project is born because of a change in business. The goal of the change can be to build a unique Product or to implement a new Service or to achieve a better Result.

Features of a Project are

a beginning and an end

a planned approach

designed deliverables

constrained by resources and

resources allocated to the tasks

Project resources include 

Time

People

Budget

Equipment and 

Facilities

What does project manager do?

Filling and Coloring Excel sheets

Chasing team for status

Forcing team to work late to be on time

Are these the major responsibilities? If so, why the pay is more?

-Because Project Manager masters the project management.

What is Project Management?

-One of the critical processes of any project which connects plenty of the project activities of the project as well as keeps the team together.

What are these critical processes?

Initiate: The pre-sales guy wins the project for the team. This is where PM takes over the project. 

1) Understand the problems :), 

2) Negotiate on the CAN and CAN’t(at least, show'em a work-around) be fixed items

3) Get the sign-off on the Requirements sign-off

Plan: Plan the team, resources, cost and time. If PM takes a wrong step here, ther will be bad consequences in the next phases. E.g., Team may have to work late, Project may be called-off, You may lost your job too. Scary, right? Now you get how important this phase and how tough PM’s role is :P

End of paper work…

Execute: There enters the team and here is the actual action starts.

Each team member will be given responsibilities to complete on time

1) PM keeps track of the status of various activities and verifies against the project schedule.

2) PM has to update the senior management and the client on a regular basis. So he should chase the team for the status.

3) PM has to make sure the timelines are met and the cost/effort is under control

Control and Validate: Adhere to the agreed terms as per the project plan, quality assurance and communication plan. In cases where there are no such terms, PM still should document and take necessary measures to avoid problems in future.

Each and every activity should be validated against some criteria to make sure the success of the project.

QA team helps the Project team to make sure the control and validation.

Conclude and Evaluate: This is the time to implement the system and close the project.

Then starts Evaluation where PM team studies the actual effort spent and the estimated effort. This tells if the project is 100% successful.

During this phase, the major issues faced by the team are documented so that the knowledge base is maintained which can be used in other projects to save time.

So, what is the Story Line?

All this stuff is responsible and sensible too, in some cases.

Conclusion is, PM should understand the processes and supporting tools (Excel is a must, haha) well.