Basic Project Management

Project Management exists on many levels and with many degrees of complexity. For example, at one end of the scale, I learned project management in the Navy, training to use PERT systems in shipyards on New Construction. I was on USS Enterprise during refueling and USS Virginia when it was built. Building something as complex as a Nuclear Cruiser is a massive undertaking requiring not just one project manager, but many of them.

At the other end of the scale, project management can be just a step above time management where instead of just a task or a set of unrelated tasks that need to be completed, you need to complete a set of related tasks all of which lead to some goal. Building a Customer Facing System is in between these limits.

Most of the CFS projects I’ve worked on have been on the order of 100-300 thousand dollars, but I’ve project managed several which were over $100 million which involved complex systems, thousands of agents, multiple sites, and so forth. No matter what the size though, there are some constants in Project Management.

Over the years, I’ve needed to teach basic project management to teams that simply never thought of it as important. I’ve taught it to developers, consultants, architects, magazine editors, executives, and others. For the last several years, I’ve used the book To Do Doing Done by Lynne Snead & Joyce Wycoff as my text. For a more detailed treatment that covers the full range of project management, I refer people to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) PMBOK:

I’m going to expand on some of my other writings I’ve done on project management to highlight some things that EVERYONE should know. This isn’t about being a project manager, but it’s about understanding enough of the basics that

1. You understand when you need a project manager
2. You understand what the project manager is telling you
3. You understand why the project manager is asking for some things

VPIC

I’ve been in too many projects where there was a rush to jump in and get things done. This is a major mistake!

Let’s understand something right at the beginning, no plan in the history of the world has ever worked EXACTLY as planned! Things change; Needs change; Circumstances change; and we just down right make mistakes. it happens on every project. Some people tend to think the time spent planning is a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth

Planning is essential to successfully completing a project, not because we’re going to build a perfect plan, we’re not. It’s essential because of the time you spend thinking about it. Thinking through what you’re going to do, thinking about contingencies, thinking about resources, all of that gets you ready for real life.

Overall, a project will roughly break itself down into 4 major pieces according to Snead & Wycoff. These go under the acronym VPIC:

• Visualize - every project starts with an idea, something you want to do or build, so we start by getting a clear picture in our minds of the end point
• Plan - once we know where we’re going, we need to know what we have to do, who’s going to do it, and how much it will cost in time, effort, and money.
• Implement - any project involves some amount of communication and control. When there are several people involved, this becomes more obvious, but even if we’re working on something alone, there is still a need to manage communications and control the project.
• Close - one of the big things that often gets missed is closure. I’ve seen to many projects where the people thought it was done when things when the goal was reached. If you don’t do some clean up and take advantage of the chance to learn something, you’ll never get better.

Over the next several weeks, I want to expand on some of these themes and relate them to more formal project management methodologies. We’ll talk some about several methodologies I’m familiar with:

• PRINCE2 Methodology - (Projects In Controlled Environments). This is the standard in the UK and I was trained on it when I was working on projects in the UK. It’s a thorough, comprehensive system.
• PMI Methodology - (Project Management Institute). Another comprehensive methodology
• A variety of methodologies adapted to specific areas like Agile Development

We’ll spend some time discussing methodologies and what they can do for us in case you’d like to learn more.

Categories: Project Management