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The Principles of Project Management
zedguy writes "Ask someone what 'project management' is and you're liable to get a few blank stares — it's one of those fields people have heard of, but probably have problems pinning down a definition. So that is what the first section of the book does: provides a definition that can be summed up as applying tools and skills to complete a project. That then leads to what exactly is a "project": a set of tasks with a time-frame and goal of somehow adding value. So yes, the introduction does involve a fair bit of terminology that isn't going to be familiar to many readers coming from a coder's background, but there's a helpful appendix that lays out many of the terms. Just as important, the introduction explains what project management is not, some of the misconceptions and why it's good to know." Keep reading for the rest of Zoltan's review.
The Principles of Project Management
author
Meri Williams
pages
204
publisher
SitePoint / O'Reilly
rating
8
reviewer
Zoltan Hunt
ISBN
0-9802858-6-0
summary
A practical introduction to project management
With the definitions out of the way, readers then get into the start-up tasks. First, there's looking for projects (find opportunities), deciding is it's a good opportunity (this is a bit of office politics — you want to know soon if the your project has the necessary support from management) and even if the task warrants a project — one of the key points is that a project is not on-going maintenance — it has a goal and a completion date.
Once you have decided to undertake a project, the next steps involve a proposal, identifying stakeholders, setting up an organizational chart and establishing communication protocols. This is the soft skill side of project management — a lot of the work is keeping the people the project is for interested and informed on where the project is heading. Much of the advice is practical — including dealing with the stakeholders who just aren't that interested in your project and picking a good project board — the less the better. Finally, once this is established it's time to make sure everyone is on the same page and agreed on the deliverables (the specific things the project will achieve).
By chapter three ("Getting the Job Done") we're into the actual material many readers (including myself) think of as project management — setting schedules, breaking deliverables into discrete tasks. For that, there's a lot of practical advice here — especially around making estimates and communicating them to stakeholders and team-members so they are not mis-interpreted as wild guesses or hard dates. Particularly good was the advice on refining estimates from a general size (is it a small, large or extra-large task), then, as the date got closer, change it to a more accurate estimate. As well as measuring performance, some management tools like work-flow and Gantt charts and issue lists are introduced in this chapter.
The last two chapters look at managing your team and completing the project. The "Keeping it smooth" chapter gives a good overview of the people management skills you will need working with team members. There's a fair bit of overage of team building (forming, storming, performing and adjourning) and a bit of coverage of collaboration over distances. Having done some small group management in the past, I think it covers all the bases well and it's applicable outside of project management as well.
Like many of the new SitePoint books this book explains a complex topic with a few illustrations and a clean layout. They're using that humorous information schema (light-bulb, bicycle horn, hand grenade) to good effect. One example of this is in Getting Started chapter: There is a section talking about what goes in a Project Initiation Document (PID), and there are break-out boxes on what it is not meant to take the place of.
For an example of the layout, the "Keeping it Smooth" chapter is a good example of how this book is organized; Topics are broken up by headings with points arranged as lists of short paragraphs, which makes it easy to skim. While it's a small book — 200 pages, about 25x20 cm — it's still good to be able to skim.
The glossary covers the particular usage of words in the project management domain.
Appendixes A-C list some tools,other resources (books and blogs) and C provides a list of qualifications and associations.
For a topic I was quite unfamiliar with when I started, I'd recommend this book as a good overview to the topic. The chapters follow a chronological order through a project — from picking a project — including those to avoid — planning and executing, managing the staff and stakeholders and finally, finishing your project and handing it off.
The author, Meri Williams, writes two blogs: GeekManager and Meriblog which readers might want to check out for further material. While each field has it's jargon, project management has a number to learn — and this book does a good job explain it.
You can purchase The Principles of Project Management from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Once you have decided to undertake a project, the next steps involve a proposal, identifying stakeholders, setting up an organizational chart and establishing communication protocols. This is the soft skill side of project management — a lot of the work is keeping the people the project is for interested and informed on where the project is heading. Much of the advice is practical — including dealing with the stakeholders who just aren't that interested in your project and picking a good project board — the less the better. Finally, once this is established it's time to make sure everyone is on the same page and agreed on the deliverables (the specific things the project will achieve).
By chapter three ("Getting the Job Done") we're into the actual material many readers (including myself) think of as project management — setting schedules, breaking deliverables into discrete tasks. For that, there's a lot of practical advice here — especially around making estimates and communicating them to stakeholders and team-members so they are not mis-interpreted as wild guesses or hard dates. Particularly good was the advice on refining estimates from a general size (is it a small, large or extra-large task), then, as the date got closer, change it to a more accurate estimate. As well as measuring performance, some management tools like work-flow and Gantt charts and issue lists are introduced in this chapter.
The last two chapters look at managing your team and completing the project. The "Keeping it smooth" chapter gives a good overview of the people management skills you will need working with team members. There's a fair bit of overage of team building (forming, storming, performing and adjourning) and a bit of coverage of collaboration over distances. Having done some small group management in the past, I think it covers all the bases well and it's applicable outside of project management as well.
Like many of the new SitePoint books this book explains a complex topic with a few illustrations and a clean layout. They're using that humorous information schema (light-bulb, bicycle horn, hand grenade) to good effect. One example of this is in Getting Started chapter: There is a section talking about what goes in a Project Initiation Document (PID), and there are break-out boxes on what it is not meant to take the place of.
For an example of the layout, the "Keeping it Smooth" chapter is a good example of how this book is organized; Topics are broken up by headings with points arranged as lists of short paragraphs, which makes it easy to skim. While it's a small book — 200 pages, about 25x20 cm — it's still good to be able to skim.
The glossary covers the particular usage of words in the project management domain.
Appendixes A-C list some tools,other resources (books and blogs) and C provides a list of qualifications and associations.
For a topic I was quite unfamiliar with when I started, I'd recommend this book as a good overview to the topic. The chapters follow a chronological order through a project — from picking a project — including those to avoid — planning and executing, managing the staff and stakeholders and finally, finishing your project and handing it off.
The author, Meri Williams, writes two blogs: GeekManager and Meriblog which readers might want to check out for further material. While each field has it's jargon, project management has a number to learn — and this book does a good job explain it.
You can purchase The Principles of Project Management from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
See also: The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
like the Cliffs Notes for the PMBOK?
That then leads to what exactly is a "project": a set of tasks with a time-frame and goal of somehow adding value.
Thank god we've gotten that out of the way. I guess now that we've adequately defined work, I can go get some work done. See ya'll at the next meeting.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
It seems to make more sense to me when I think of project managers as time accountants. They have time budgets and scopes and reports and things that relate along the lines of a financial manager running a business.
Only Project Managers have completely different names for those things, but the better ones do a lot of time reporting and time budgeting.
I'm pretty certain that many people with a 'coder's background' will be all too familiar with some of that terminology, after they've been in the workforce a year or two.
Worst investment I ever made. My memory is hazy, but I seem to recall it set me back five hundred bucks.
So with the manual open, I created a new project, and then the manual said "Enter your tasks".
Well, Hell, if I knew what my tasks were, I wouldn't need a project management tool. I gave up on it completely.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Succinctly well stated.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Know when to cut your losses if you can. I used to work for a team that managed a component used by several projects at a large client, and one of those projects was run by a real textbook case of a nearly psychotic bully. After a while, my management decided that the pay wasn't worth the damage he was doing, and pulled our people off the contract.
Our management was smart because they actually gauged the cost-benefit ratio of keeping our people on that contract and realized that yes, numbers might go up for a quarter or two, but employees would start leaving, and that would be worse for business than dropping the contract.
the technical discipline that tells us that nine women can make a baby in one month.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Focusing on time alone can lead you in the wrong direction. PMI offers some free information on their website on Project Management (pmi.org) that can help you get some hand on PM from a general overview perspective. It's about managing all resources, not just time or money and ultimately PM is about efficiency. Time is just one piece of the puzzle. One project can be closed ahead of schedule and be crap at the same time.
PROJECT PHASES:
Phase 1: Uncritical acceptance.
Phase 2: Wild enthusiasm.
Phase 3: Dejected disillusionment.
Phase 4: Total confusion.
Phase 5: Search for the guilty.
Phase 6: Punishment of the innocent.
Phase 7: Promotion of nonparticipants.
Not really.
I'd say that Project Management involves juggling three things - Schedule, Scope and Budget (think of it as a triangle).
Usually, any change in project direction, requirements, resources or funding affects one of the 3, and you need to juggle between the 3 to find an optimal state.
"I can attest that even in our own field there is a flexibility to the terms "project manager" and "project". Consider it a holy war of sorts."
Of course that happens only when you use Vi. Try Emacs instead.
From long experience, I can say that there are two things to do which get products out on time: 1) Pare requirements to the absolute minimum. Decide which features are required, and which are nice to have. And forget about the latter. (The engineers will stick some of those in on their own, according to their passions). 2) Keep everyone working in parallel. Ferret out any situations where someone is waiting for something, and eliminate those. And you'll see that in many cases those "waiting" scenarios indicate more serious misunderstandings about who is doing what.
Large software projects can succeed but they require
1) A PM experienced in software development
2) Good communication and trust between the PM, the developers and the client
3) Support from management, especially in making the correct resources available to the project at the correct time
In my experience the two most common factors that contribute significantly to the failure of a project is poor specification and constraints exerted by the rest of the business on key resources.
I'm a couple years into my architecture career, and I've been working at a firm where there's basically zero organization. What that means is that everyone gets put in charge of their own projects and is basically left to fend for themselves (even the summer interns.) It's a very inefficient and strange way to run things, but somehow the guy running the firm has run it that way for decades and still manages to get tons of work, so he'll probably never change.
But I'm not going to refute your point, my experiences actually reinforce it. The first project that I was in charge of (started less than 6 months into my architectural career)was an absolute nightmare for me. The biggest problem that I had was in terms of understanding the process. That's something that you can't just sit down and figure out, no matter how many hours you put into it, it's something that can only really be learned through experience. I think it's even more of an issue for architecture than it is for something like your average software project, because there are a lot of very specific hoops that a building design has to go through in terms of government regulations/building codes/etc. Lots of little things that aren't necessarily hard to deal with, but if you don't know that they're an issue and don't deal with them at the appropriate time, you're going to have some serious headaches somewhere down the line.
It was a ridiculously stressful experience for me, and while I learned a lot, I feel like I learned more about how not to do things, instead of how to do things. That's bad, because while there might only be a few or even one right way to do something, there's usually thousands of wrong ways to do it. So I'll just make a bunch of different mistakes next time.
The other thing that you're spot on about is the ability to make assertive decisions based on experience. Lacking in experience, I was very reluctant to make decisions on many issues, and you can be sure that the contractor could tell I didn't know what I was doing. Many more headaches resulted from that.
I've read articles and interviews of college kids where they say that they were hoping to get a job as a consultant. I can't imagine why anyone would want to consult with someone who just got out of college.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Obviously it didn't occur to you that Architecture has meanings other than what you do.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Though project fiscal performance is important I think the most important aspect of a 'qualified' project managers job is knowing what to do when things do not go as planned. I think the best example of a project manager would be
General Leslie Groves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Groves
who's responsibility it was to keep everyone on task and on schedule. By taking on planning and logistics he allowed the scientists to focus on what they do best.
Which is the mark of a good project manager. The ability to take away useless task and decisions allowing you to do what you do best as a team member.
So I've read through many of the comments and have a few thoughts regarding them. My background comes from being a BA transitioning into a PM. I also have the PMI certification.
1) While delegating out tasks and keeping track of time and budget are part of what a PM does, it's been my experience that the above is the minimum for a good PM. I've found that companies value not only someone who is going to manage the tasks, but also work with the business to help finalize the definition of the project and realize all the various business scenarios they will face before the project ever starts. This helps prevent scope creep and gives the architect a clearer picture of what is wanted. From my experience, I've never managed a project solely on tasks alone. If I don't understand the entire business aspect, I don't do the project.
2) There is certainly a need for a PM and a Technical Architect. The distinction I've experienced is as a PM, it is my job to define how the system should work from an operational perspective and outline all business rules. It is the architect's responsibility to design the systems in a manner that will be reliable to meet the above directives.
3) Waterfall vs. Iterative Development. My personal thoughts on this, and this is up for interpretation by anyone, is that the best method is a hybrid of the two. There's no reason I can't go through an intensive definition and design exercise prior to starting the project and outline all the business rules/operations. However, a good PM knows how to manage the business' (read executives) expectations on when the project will be completed. Always build in a buffer. Once the Project Plan is complete, iterative development can begin, working on chunks of functionality broken down into short term goals.
4) Good PMs should be honest and stick up for the technical team as much as the business. They should know when to push back on which side.
Now open for complaints...
There are (at least) two definitions for "Project Manager". One definition is what we would like the term to mean. The other definition is how most others use the term. The term "Project Manager" has has been corrupted, like "Engineer" and "Hacker".
In the non-slashdot world....
1. An engineer could be a person to cleans toilets (building engineer or sanitation engineer).
2. A hacker is a person who engages in fraud and who uses a computer.
3. A project manager is an administrative assistant who distributes schedules, meeting minutes, and status reports.
I've only worked in one company that did not use definition #3. All other corporations where I've worked have used definition #3. There was even one company that asked that a new hire have a PMP. But the actual work they did was definition #3. They only managed paper, not people or money.
The top 12 techniques that are used in real life:
The things all these have in common are:
So what happens is everyone attempts to "negotiate" the length of time something will take, rather than realizing that it's not something that is negotiable. If it takes X time, it takes X time, all things remaining equal.
That old saw - "price | quality | speed - pick any 2" was optimistic. Going too fast inevitably results in both lower quality and higher costs down the road, as bugs that aren't fixed at an earlier stage end up being either more expensive to fix, or show-stoppers. Planning for quality initially takes more time that *seems* unproductive to *cough* "certain types of people" *cough* but it's also, in the end, cheaper, and quicker. Problem is that too many people think that development is just "throwing code together, finding and fixing the bugs, and deploying".
"Price, quality, speed" - either expend the time to get high quality, or you'll waste money and any speed gains are temporary at best. Instead of cutting quality, cut feature scope, and kill off any attempts at feature creep - that's where the biggest problems are. If whoever is managing the project hasn't got the backbone to do that, they deserve yet another death march.