Archive for the ‘Project Management’ Category

Project Management Best Practice Tips – Planning the Project

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Tonight’s lecture with the professor was interesting.  We learned about the actual planning process that typically takes place on projects.  This is essentially the core of Project Management.  Here are my key takeaways:

Key Takeaways:
1. Don’t confuse Technical Requirements vs. Deliverables
2. Do WBS starting from Deliverable and then go down to the Subdeliverables and Tasks
3.  Choose the communication plan carefully to keep your stakeholders informed of the project 

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1. Don’t confuse Technical Requirements vs. Deliveables
Deliverables are the major components not the minute specs. Rookie Project Managers typically make the mistake of treating the intricate details and specifications of the projects as deliverables. This is problematic because it makes the rest of the planning process more difficult and confusing because it gets too granular up front especially when you do the WBS (see bleow).  Technical Requirements are the low level detailed requirements and should not be confused with the overall deliverables of the project.  Otherwise, you’ll have a bunch of detailed requirements and no clear concept of the deliverables which makes talking to the client difficult as well as planning the work required.

2. Do WBS starting from Deliverable and then go down to the Subdeliverables and Tasks
When you do a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure), make sure to do it from Deliverables (a noun) and go down to the Subdeliverables and then further down until you reach the Tasks (a verb). Don’t jump into tasks when you are trying to identify the work. Its crucial to start with Deliverables and Subdeliverables and tasks (eg. Venue, People, Activities). Everything will eventually lead to a task at the bottom.

3.  Use a Dependency Map to keep key parties informed throughout project via Communication Plan
Project Managers need to carefully choose what is the communication plan with key stakeholders in the Project.
What is to be communicated – need to cater what you want to communicate to each group of stakeholders.
When it is communicated – need to determine an optimal frequency of communication for each group
How will the communication be sent - Will it be email?  A Report?  Hardcopy?  Need to define this.
Who will receive the communication (this is derived through the Project Dependency Map) .  As well, you need to determine who will execute the communication on the agreed upon schedule.

Overall, these are some of the key best practices when engaging in the planning process of a project.

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Management By Walking Around – A Project Management Tip

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

This evening I learned a good simple tip about management and project management.  Its known as MBWA aka  “Manage By Walking Around“.  Its another interesting technique I learned in class.  Its key points are essentially:

- Initiate contact with the key players on a regular basis by walking around to visit people.  It works because its supposed to build trust with the people.
- Spend most of your time wandering around to establish face-to-face interactions
- Maintain familiarity to understand others and to sustain relations
- Reduce tension because not all encounters are prompted by problems

I think  I will try this technique at work on a scheduled basis.  I setup appointments to myself in MS Outlook (my planning tool) to ensure that I will get to walk by each key area on a scheduled basis.  (The reason I keep this list is so that I don’t forget anyone important).  If everyday i go from person to person to say go for a coffee or have a lunch with, it will to build trust with these people.  My prof emphasized this in order to build the loyalty with the team.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Key Project Management Skills and the Project Selection Process – Class 2

Friday, September 25th, 2009

As part of my day job I work with many project managers at work.  Each PM I work with has their talents and strengths.  But each also has their weaknesses. 

When it comes to project management, I am surprised that one of the most fundamental things that I did not learn when working with PMs at work is the importance of building alliances with resources that you have no authority over. 

Key Takeaway:
- When a Project Manager has no authority over resources in a project (which is often the case on most projects), the Project Manager must cultivate the relationships with the resources in an informal manner.  This includes chatting with the individual resources and potentially even “befriending” the resources in order to gain the trust and committment from resources to work on the project. 

Its amazing.  During the class tonight we were asked to read through a case study.  It described the activity of a Project Manager in what seemed to be a typical day.  The key points I got out of the 2 page case study was that there was this PM that would go from person to person chit chatting about the latest gossip and what people were doing on the weekend.  Granted, the PM did do other things as well like meet with the clients to talk about scope creep etc and managed those quite well.   At the end of the case study we were asked whether or not the PM was doing a good job.  To me, I felt that the PM was doing a lousy job because all she was doing was going from person to person chit chatting about what was happening in the person’s personal life.  During the day, the PM had the audacity of turning on the music in her office and resting.  This gave me a very bad impression of her as a PM.  So naturally I responded that way.

Little did I know that that was exactly what a good PM ought to be doing.  IE building alliances with people that she did not have authority over.  Professor Bedour Osman did a great job in explaining why it was so important for the a PM that gets a job at a new company to get to know the staff and to befriend them.  This was a major epiphany for me because I turned around to my experience at work with all of the PMs that I’ve worked with over the years.  I always seemed to have the impression that the BEST PMs were always the ones I got along with best.  The absentee PMs were ineffective in my mind.  The ones that were authoritarian never got their way since they did NOT have authority over the resources in the project.  As such, it was a huge lesson learned that a successful PM is one that gets work done through others that the PM has no authority over.  How?  Through building alliances and building friendships with the resources on the team.  Because of this, I like this course because I’m actually learning something useful at work.  As an Architect, I think I need to do more of that.

The rest of the class discussed the project selection process.  This was the usual info I expected:  eg. doing an  assessment of different projects based on criteria that is weighted and with each option scored.  Refer to my other post for more info on this.

All in all, it was a good class.

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Project Management Overview (Class1)

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Last night I had a great first class at the Project Management MGMT6000 by Bedour Osman.

Key Takeaways
1. Projects – have a beginning and an end
2. Project Success Criteria: Project was completed as per Scope, On Time and On Budget
3. 3 Triangle Contraints – Schedule, Scope, Budget. If one task takes longer than expected, it may impact Schedule, Budget or scope or a combination of all 3.
4. When faced with doing something that has never been done before, make sure to have the resources needed.  That includes people, tools, materials, etc.  An example used was what would you do if you had to build a pyramid and it had never been done before? 

During the class we watched a video by National Geographic that described the process of constructing the Dubai Palm Tree islands, one of the megastructures of the world.  It was really interesting to find out that about all the challenges and obstacles this project ran into and what was done to get around each problem.

Things like:
1.  Figuring out how to create an island out in the water – seeking the right resources (world reknowned)  engineers who had performed land reclamation projects
2.  Locating the right source of materials to form the base of the island - eg. rocks from nearby mountains had to be detonated with explosives.Â
3.  Locating the right type of sand – from dredging up the sand from under water and using the “rainbow” technique of having the sand dredged up from underwater and literally sprayed on top of the rocks.
4 . Leveraging technology – the project required the use of GPS which was still fairly new to guide the team on how to pour the rocks/sand so that it made the shape of the palm tree
5.  Doing continuous tests – to make sure the construction was going as planned.   The project required the use of divers to constantly check that the rocks that were forming as part of the foundation had no weaknesses
6.  Doing continuous tests for the water circulation and redesigning as required – At a certain point, the project team found out that the water circulation for the islands were not sufficient and would cause the water to stagnate.  To mitigate this problem the team had to adjust a do a slight redesign which essentially opened up some sections of the island to let sufficient water to flow through to make sure the water would not stagnate.

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