12 Points to Ponder

Well we have to start somewhere. I believe that getting to know some basic ideas about projects involvement is key to understanding Project Management as a whole.

Included are twelve points that you should find interesting.

 

• Projects are temporary. You can’t consider a project to be that thing that you’re going to do every day for the rest of your career. Instead, it’s something that creates a particular product or service, and it has a clear end point. You might compare it to the creation of a syllabus or teaching a course. It has a finite beginning and end.
• Decide whether or not the project should happen. Not every project idea should be developed into a project. When you are beginning work on something, you want to determine if it’s a good use of your resources, what problem the project is trying to solve, and whether or not the project is the best way to fix it.  It can be very difficult to admit that what you’ve been wanting to do isn’t worth the time, money, and/or effort. But we have to be willing to call it like it is.
• Consider risks. If you’re going to tackle the project after all, you should analyze your potential risks. What events might derail the project? What are the likelihood of them happening? Working together to brainstorm what these things will help you plan for the events that seem most likely or severe. For example, your entire web project could be derailed by a server failure. For this reason, you should probably be obsessive about backup.
• Cost, time, and quality are co-dependent. In other words, once a project has been started, you can’t change its timeline without directly affecting its cost or quality. You can’t expect to get something done faster without either paying more or sacrificing some quality. This is why getting a plumber to your house at 10pm costs more than waiting for the next day. The same thing applies to any project you undertake with a team.
• Know what’s out of bounds. Determining what your project will not do is just as important as determining what it will since that can help prevent scope creep in the future.
• Develop a project plan with clear activities. At the beginning of a project, the size or scope of the task might seem overwhelming. (Ask anyone who’s ever tried writing a book!) However, breaking things into small and manageable chunks can help you eat that proverbial elephant. When working on a team, you should have these chunks start with a verb so your team members clearly know what you’re asking them to do.
• When making assignments, consider people’s interest as much as their skills and experience. Just because someone has a ton of experience designing websites doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that he wants to do. Letting people choose how they want to be involved in the project allows them to develop personally as well as helping the project.
  
• Let the person taking an assignment set the due date. It can be hard to manage a project and not come off as an ogre at times. But one way to shed the Shrek this is to let those who are getting the assignments decide when they can complete them. Their estimates won’t always be 100% accurate, but they will not have the excuse of it being a deadline that is imposed on them. Moreover, getting a team member’s input helps them feel more connected to the project.
• There are lots of project management tools; just use what works for you. This is pretty self-explanatory and is the subject of . If post-its and emails work for your team, then go for it. I have (or will be introducing) MS Project 2010. This is a valuable tool to add on your resume. In the end, it’s not the tool so much as the relationships that count for being successful at a project.
• There can only be one. In a progressive, liberal environment, we tend to want to let everyone get involved in decision making. In the end, however, you can’t really share project management duties. One person needs to be chief. But it also doesn’t have to be you all the time.
• Set meeting ground rules. It’s true that bad meetings are your fault—especially if you’re the project manager. Getting your team to agree collectively to how meetings will work will help things run smoothly in the future. And be sure to only hold meetings when they are necessary.
• Celebrate success. Since projects are finite, they will have an end…no matter how far off that might seem at present. When you get to this point, make sure that you figure out some way to celebrate the accomplishment. A celebration doesn’t have to cost a lot of money—or any—but recognizing others’ contributions and the completion of the goal is important.