A Practical Guide to Project Management
Let’s begin from the start, i worked 6 years being help desk, support engineer and even team leader of a support team, while going back and forth in IT, i realized that the only technical, just look at your screen and search for solutions type job wasn’t for me. I was always thrived in my career when i had to deal with humans, communicating, bringing people together and connecting with one another.
When i went from Brazil to Portugal, i wanted to understand my future, what was the career path i really wanted to follow and i found Project Management.
I talked to professionals in the area and researched what would be the best courses and certifications to enter the area and this right here is all that i learned and how i learned it, so let’s start with the learning part
The Who, the What and the Why?
It is safe to say that even if you never heard of project management, you possibly did something similar to it, the easy example is planning a birthday party, you made a plan, talked to the people of interest, made a budget, made a timeline and delivered a party. Maybe it wasn’t all this steps but something similar, this in itself is already a project.
What is a project?
A project is a temporary gathering of multiple different resources for the development of something specific and unique and are constrained by time, cost and resources.
How to define and organize a project?
We have to establish the goal, scope, time, budget and the organization.
Day to day life of a project manager?
But without all the pretty words what does a project manager do in the daily basis? This answer is tricky because it varies from project to project.
A project can be building a brand new skyscraper, hosting a wine event or simply developing a new software.
Generally we can say that a project manager have some activities that will cross all of those projects:
- Planning and organizing
- Controlling the budget
- Managing tasks
Is there demand for all of this managing?
Project Life Cycle
The phases of a project
Before the project we need to understand the each step of a project, why is important and what is done in each iteration.
The first step: Initiating a project
So the first part is to initiate a project, in this part you will have to figure out the basic questions such as:
What is this project about?
Who will work on the project?
What are the costs and how long?
The main defining points in the beginning of a project are: Goals, Scope, Deliverables, Success Criteria, Stakeholders and Resources
The holy trinity of projects:
Every project have three very important factors to it, that cannot all be accomplished the same way, if you change one of this factors the others will have to be rearranged too, those factors are:
Time: How long the project will take
Scope: Requirements, qualities and specifications of the project
Budget: How much it will cost
Each one of them will interact with the other, bigger scopes means bigger costs etc.
Constrained, Optimize and Compromise:
Let’s talk a little bit about scopes:
The definition of what can be done is critical.
Think about it, the first thing we have to understand in a project is what are the boundaries of this project? What is the size? Where does it end?
This is the scope, I will give you an example.
Let’s say that the project objective is to put water in a glass.
Pretty simple right? Well it depends.
- Where is the water?
- Is it kilometers away?
- How much water?
- What is the size of the glass?
- Is there a specific way of pouring the water into the glass?
All of those small questions can severely change the scope and maybe even make the project fail
The ones who will execute:
This is your team, the people that will be hands on, performing the work. But how to choose your team? Here are a couple of useful tips to take into consideration.
- Motivation: What are their motivation and will they match with the rest of the team?
- Skills: What can they do, what tools do they bring?
- Availability: Are they available?
Organization and Stakeholders:
Last but not least, what are stakeholders?
Stakeholders are everyone how is involved and impacted by the project.
It can be the client, third party services, even directors.
Here is some quick questions you should ask yourself to understand the stakeholders of the project:
- Who will be doing the work?
- Who is the project manager?
- Who is paying for the project?
- Who will consume the product or service?
- Who are those affected by this project?
As a project manager you will need to treat stakeholders differently depending in there involvement of the project or how they are impacted by it and even their level of interest.
To help with that we have a tool that indicates how to deal with every type of stakeholder depending on their interest or power level.
Documentation and tools:
By now you understand that a project manager deals with a lot of information on a daily basis, tasks, budget, timelines and much more.
How can we keep everything intact and keep eyes on in every single progress?
Thats where we use tools and documentation, here are some tools to help you document and arrange your project:
Each one of this tools has it purpose and even different purposes, it is good to check each one of those and learn at least the basic. It will help you understand and have more practical knowledge of what the project consists.
Quite the important step: Planning
Planning was the whole plan all along?
Planning helps us to understand the project scope, to set the intentions of the project. Have ideas of how the execution will be done, who is involved and ponder what the outcomes of such actions are.
Plans generally include tasks, milestones, people, time and documentation.
Understanding what needs to be done:
Work Breakdown Structure is a tool that is used for understanding visually the scope of the project.
It works in a hierarchy of:
- Project
1.1 Subprojects
1.1.1 Work Packages
1.1.1.1 Activities / Tasks
Work Breakdown Structure is a very effective tool to understand first your milestones and every task that has to be done to conclude each milestone.
Let’s have an example of a construction project below:
The best advice is to take the time to breakdown the important milestones and then talk to your team and figure out together task by task.
Keeping real with your timeline
After doing the task breakdown we need to understand something very important: How much time will it take?
And the answer is generally tricky, how can we be really certain of the time of a task? Well that’s the thing generally we can’t
What we can do is have a estimation of time and try to understand that this can change with the ongoing of the project.
You should always count with your team to create those estimations and remember sometimes it takes time to get better estimation aligned with the capacity of the team.
What about the critical path?
What is the critical path? The critical path is all the tasks and deliverables that are involved directly with the success of the project.
Lets imagine we are creating a ice cream truck, tasks associated with the critical path can be:
- Buying ice cream
- Checking the best truck for an ice cream truck
- Getting customers
Tasks off the critical path are:
- Adding sandwiches to the products
- Creating different flavours of ice cream
- Buying extra wheels
Time to think about the budget
Almost all of us already have done a budget to some extent, if it was to buy furniture or to buy food for the month, maybe even when buying liquor for a party, the simple way is a budget is the necessary monetary resources planned for an objective. In the case of the project that can depend in many variables, you will generally tie your budget with your milestones and schedule, specially because the schedule have all the tasks associated with the completion of your project.
Is important to note that the type of budget will be highly associated with the company your in, each company have their best financial practices.
Taking a step further: Improving the plan
Finally we have a plan!
We created the scope, developed a timeline and made a budget, everything should be okay now or at least it should be?
Well not yet, we have ourselves a plan but now its time to improve and understand that not always what is in this plan will happen.
That will be our first topic, let’s talk about risks!
What to do when the whole plan can fail? Risk Management.
So in summary this is risk management, thinking about when our plan go wrong and the concept of how can we prepare for that.
Risks are potential problems that might happen to your project in the future, when dealing with risks we have 5 phases:
Identifying, Analyzing, Evaluating, Dealing and Controlling and Monitoring
- Identifying a risk is just understanding what risk exists in your project
- Analyzing a risk is to assess the probability and potential impact of this risk in your project
- Evaluating is to gather all data of previous steps and prioritizing the risks
- Dealing is to come with a plan for every risk, your plan sometimes might just be to accept the risk and move on
- Monitoring is to keep tabs in the risks and mitigate them if necessary
Can we see those risks coming?
When thinking about risks we have to understand that there are risks that are easy to see it coming, but there those who we would never predict, here are three types of risks:
1. Foreseeable Risks: Variability, Alternative Paths
Risks that we know will happen, and we can plan and understand those while planning the project
2. Complexities: Project Tasks, Stakeholders
Risks that we can’t plan because of the complexity, we know its there but we can’t plan the mitigations
3. Unforeseen Uncertainties: Novel Technology, Novel Markets
Risks that are unforeseeable, we don’t know they will happen
Communication is key!
Another way of improving our plan is thinking ahead in communication, this is one of the most important roles of the project manager, making sure everyone is on the right track with the same information.
If communication fails the whole project can fail, how can we make sure we have good communication?
- Have a communication plan
- Understand that people are different and need different ways of communication
- Be clear when transmitting a message, be sure what you are saying is what you really want people to understand
- Get feedback constantly and improve based on it
Always have documentation!
Along the whole project you will have a lot interactions, receive information, create different material with different subjects, all of that needs to be documented in a clear way.
It is very important also that this documentation can be centralized and be available to whom ever needs it.
Documentation is very important for the current team to be able to have the information, but also for retrospective, to look back and learn from old projects. Documentation can also be requested by stakeholders, so is always good to have it available.
Having a good documentation is having a solid base for the project, something that you can always rely upon.
Time to just do it: Execution
What we as project managers do now?
Okay, we spend a long time crafting a plan, thinking about risks, stakeholders, documents, budget and a million more details, what do we do now? Do we just let the team follow the plan and lay ourselves back?
Actually execution might just be the hardest part, you will have to deal with situations, new risks and basically the unending changes that a project behold. Let’s get started with some fundamental concepts of the execution part of the project.
Not according to the plan: Change Management
How to deal with changes? It might be changing the functions of employees during a project to dealing with the client trying to get used to the new software that you delivered. So many changes in such a small amount of time. That is change management, dealing with all of this and succeeding in this adaptation, here are some core values of change management:
Getting better all the time: Continuous Improvement
One of the key concepts is continuous improvement this is basically the skill of improving the process as we go along with it.
Thinking of new ways to improve the project is a responsibility of the project manager, imagine this situation:
- A team is having to make some heavy data spreadsheets, they take 45 minutes to manually input the data.
- After checking the possibilities you identify that this is creating a delay in the project
- You create and test some automated spreadsheets that automatically input the data
- After a week of testing the time is reduced from 45 to 5 minutes
- Talking to the team and after seeing a great improvement you decided to use the automated spreadsheet as the new official tool
Congratulation you witnessed a PDCA, a methodology used for continuous improvement. Its a great tool and very simple to use, here are some details of how it work:
We have a lot of other great tool as DMAIC, 5 Why’s and a lot more other tools and techniques to improve, as more you know it is better to adapt to different projects with different needs.
Work Methodologies
While working in a go horse mode might be fun, there are ways more efficient to divide, organize and work with a good methodology.
Work methodologies will generally define what you do on a daily basis, what type of meetings you will have and even how you will measure the work done by the team, not to mention it will give you a mindset of how the project should be paced.
The most popular we have is scrum, that took the market by storm but there are others such as Agile, Kanban, Lean, Six Sigma and many others.
Knowing and mastering this working methodologies is crucial for being able to overview and monitor the project progress.
- The very first one: Waterfall
Why don’t we go from one activity to another just like a waterfall, simply follow each step by step sequentially top to bottom and everything will be done…
someday.
That was the idea behind the waterfall, a simple and direct way to go about work methodology. - The popular kid on the block: Agile
So let’s suppose the project doesn’t go according to the plan, we need adaptation, quick changes and iterations mainly done in small pieces this is where Agile comes in. - That one the everyone uses: Scrum
Scrum is very popular and used in a lot of different projects, it comes from the same principle of Agile, actually even being a part of an Agile methodology but has a very unique approach and structure.
Always together: Teamwork
No matter what project you will always have a team, the team is a very important part of the project, but to understand a team and teamwork we have first to understand that everyone in the team is a individual with different motivations.
The first step to create a good team environment is to get to know each individual and what motivates them, after approaching each individual goals you can start creating a sense of objective to the team itself.
Here are some key actions the will help you create a better team work:
- Good communication and listening skills
- Having a comfortable environment
- Guiding the team to a clear objective
- Demonstrating empathy
- Motivating the team
- Celebrating successes
All of those are different methods to help you build a good team with and amazing teamwork and with this having a more efficient project.
All good things must have an end: Closing the Project
Closing a project is a fundamental part of a successful project, but even if it looks equal closing a project is not the same of finishing a project.
How so you may ask? Closing a project is completing the whole process and ensuring the final result is satisfactory for the final client.
In rule we will use three marks that must be achieved for closing a project:
- All work must be completed
- Agreed project management processes are executed
- Formal recognition of stakeholders that the project is completed
A good tip for closing the project is to check all the official documentation of the project and if it’s requirements and promises were fulfilled.
Reaching the end: Conclusion
What happens now?
There are many places you can go to further your understanding of project management, also many techniques and methodologies we did not approach. The journey is long but rewarding at the end, here is a list of courses and certifications that are useful:
You can also check https://www.pmi.org and get the certification that translates the most for your amount of experience.
Thanks everyone that got so far, every piece of feedback is appreciated in this journey and i hope for everyone a great evolution and a lot of project to manage!
