project management success

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The Debate about Project Managers

Posted on February 29, 2016 | Leave a comment

Are project managers really needed for IT success?

GREAT QUESTION !

What do you think?

The question is, , , “Can you be successful without having an IT Project Management focus?” Give me your perspective in the poll below before reading the rest of the article:

OK, I hope you responded to the poll above and checked the results.

Now, it’s time for me to give you my opinion.

The question is, “Do you need project management focus to achieve IT success?”

My opinion, , , , ABSOLUTELY YES!!!

Projects are not successful on their own, , , they are successful because project managers make them successful.

Without a project management focus, the tasks that need to happen when they need to happen simply do not get completed without a project manager pushing them along.

Let me repeat, , , project managers make projects happen, , , projects do not get completed successfully on their own, , , they just don’t. In fact, projects will not be completed successfully unless someone:

pushes the project forward
checks to see that all tasks are completed on time
anticipates the obstacles that might jeopardize the project’s success

I’m a big believer in placing project management focus on the projects we undertake within an IT organization. To me, it is absolutely essential.

Let me back up just a second. Certainly, an IT organization can achieve some level of success without project management focus. Thousands of small and mid-size companies do it every day. However, your success will be limited and exposure for failure is significant, , , especially with large complex projects.

So, where does the project management debate occur?

What happens is that organizations that apply traditional project management methodologies tend to require quite a bit of overhead, , , too much, in some cases.

My sense is that there needs to be a reasonable amount of “monitoring”, “reporting” and “management” when you manage a project.

I’m not a proponent that says you need to produce all the reports and do all the things that are defined in PMI’s PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) or similar resources. I believe it requires too much overhead and administrative time.

What I do endorse is that you need a certain amount of structure (methodology) you follow and regularly scheduled status checks to help move a project along.

Operations people often do not want to spend the time to meet every week to discuss project status, identify risks, or discuss problem resolution strategies. They just want IT to complete the project so they can get on with their work.

The bottom line is that operational business people don’t always see the need for project management. Their approach is often, “Just do it, and leave me out of it.”

This is where the debate happens. How do we manage a large complex project so it doesn’t require an excessive amount of time and administrative effort but is sufficient to do the job, , , i.e., deliver the project successfully?

Without the process, odds are extremely high your project is going to fail. “Just doing it” simply won’t be reliable.

At a minimum, projects need seven things to consistently be completed successfully – on time, within budget and meet client needs:

Requirements definition – Some call this a scope document. No need to create a voluminous document here but you must quantify:
1. Project goals and objectives
2. Specific deliverables
Project Sponsor agreement on Item #1
Project Schedule that lists all tasks to be completed, completion time frames, and responsibility for completion
Budget that has reasonable amount of buffer
Staff the project with capable resources
Project Kickoff Meeting to get project team members on the same page and to reinforce commitment required
Weekly Project Status Meetings to check status and keep the project moving (i.e., to monitor and manage the Project Schedule)

All of these elements can be accomplished practically and simply, , , without lots of overhead. The point that needs to be made though is that each part needs focus and must be addressed if you want to deliver projects successfully.

For additional insight on managing successful projects, take a look at my book,
IT Project Management: a practical approach

Project success is the path to IT credibility

Posted on July 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

Delivering projects successfully creates IT credibility. Project failure causes you and your IT organization to lose credibility.

You must establish credibility to achieve IT success!

So, if project success is so critical to your success, what do you need to insure project success?

Well, it’s a little more than simply delivering a project successfully, , , there are other things to consider.

There are three key components to get the credibility you need. I’ll outline them for you in this article and we will follow-up with articles that dive into each to give you the substance you need.

3 Key components in managing projects successfully

First, you must be able to build an appropriate project schedule and manage a project to deliver it on time, within budget and meet your client’s expectations. To do this, you need a project management methodology and a few simple tools.

There are dozens of project management methodologies and thousands of tools and templates, even PM certifications to help you schedule and manage projects.

I use a simple spreadsheet to develop most of my project schedules unless a company requires me to use something like Microsoft Project. The tools are not nearly as important as how you go about the process of managing projects. I’ll show you my process in the next ITLever post.

Second, you need to communicate the status of active projects. At any given time, your IT organization will have several projects underway. Your ability to communicate the status and key issues associated with each project will help you deliver projects successfully as well as contribute to your credibility.

Recently, I provided management consulting services for an organization. When I got there they were in the midst of running many projects. I could tell there were a lot of projects underway or in the stages of getting started, , , but there was nothing in place so we could see what was going on. In fact, we couldn’t tell how many projects we had.

It’s sort of like driving blindfolded!

Understanding the importance of communicating project status effectively, I quickly developed a simple monthly report that showed the status and key issues of each project.

I’ll give you all the details in a future post in this PM series.

Third, you need to demonstrate your organization’s project success rate and the benefits derived from your efforts.

This is key. Your clients (senior managers, department managers and their employees) have short term memory, , , or no memory at all. They quickly forget what you and the IT organization have done for them.

You must keep a positive message of “IT value” in front of your clients. Otherwise, they don’t know what you are accomplishing for them or they quickly forget.

Again, I use a simple spreadsheet to track IT projects and to show the track record of our project success. In this simple tool, you will show how effective you are in delivering projects on time, within budget, and meeting client expectations, , , plus the benefits that were achieved.

I’ll talk more on this in the 3rd post to follow this one.

Summary
There will be three posts written this week that explains each of these three important components of gaining IT credibility with project success. In the posts, I’ll explain what you need to do and provide tools or templates to help you make it happen.

The additional articles follow this post or can be located at the links below:
Project success is path to IT credibility – Step 1
Project success is path to IT credibility – Step 2
Project success is path to IT credibility – Step 3

More details of the entire project management process and customizable tools I use are available in my book, IT Project Management: a practical approach