Fundamentals of Technology Project Management

Index

Preface to Second Edition

Since the first edition of this book was published in 2004, there have been many changes in the way we live, work, and communicate. One of the most significant changes is that project management is no longer considered to be just a job; it is now recognized as a legitimate profession. Formal project management training and certification are now required by many employers when hiring project managers. Many universities offer bachelor’s degrees and MBAs in project management and technical project management. The introduction of new technologies has made it more practical, efficient, and cost-effective to create virtual workplaces and teams. Most organizations have some kind of work-from-home program that allows employees to work from home some, or all, of the time. Many households these days have a home office for exactly that purpose. Employees consider it a perk to be able to work from home on a regular basis. These technology advancements have also changed how we think about project teams. A few years ago we assumed that project teams were primarily in the same geographical location. Meetings were conducted in-person with all, or most, of the project team present in the same room. These days, in most organizations, it is common to have one or more team members working and communicating virtually. It is no longer considered necessary to bring the entire team together in the same room for a project meeting. Teams are national and multinational. This is taking today’s project managers to an entirely new level. Not only do you need to be skilled in the art of project management; you also need to be a competent virtual manager. It is exciting to see the project management profession growing and maturing at such a rapid pace.

Certifications in project management enable project managers to manage projects using standard processes and terminology. Before process frameworks such as PMBOK® Guide and PRINCE2®, project management terminology differed greatly from organization to organization and project manager to project manager. There are still terminology differences between the various project management and quality management standards, and it is unlikely they will ever be exactly the same. However, there are now a lot of similarities, and understanding the framework and processes from one standard will make it easier to understand those from another. As more and more project managers become proficient in these standards, we will continue to move closer to a global project management terminology. The profession has come a long way in the past few years, and it is destined to go a lot further in the next few.

What Is New in the Second Edition

The second edition of Fundamentals of Technology Project Management includes some exciting additions and updates.

The two most widely recognized standards in project management today are the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and the Office of Government Commerce’s PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE2). These standards are both designed to be used in conjunction with, not in place of, an industry-specific methodology and project management skills. This book provides both. To make it easier to apply PMBOK® Guide or PRINCE2 standards to your projects, the content in this edition has been updated and reorganized to align the methodology and terminology more closely with these standards. Each standard has a dedicated chapter. Additionally, information is included throughout the book that maps the content directly to both the PMBOK® Guide (v4) and PRINCE2 (2009) processes, knowledge areas, and themes.

The content throughout the book has been updated to include information on managing remote project team members. This includes removing assumptions that project team members will be present in the same room for team meetings, kickoff meetings, brainstorming, and lessons learned. The book has been revised to include information about virtual communication, virtual presentations, and virtual leadership.

The second edition also includes a brand-new chapter on social media. This chapter explains social media in detail, from social and business networking to Wikis and online videos. It includes lots of practical advice on how to use social media responsibly, how to create project team rules and guidelines for social media use, and how social media can be used in the workplace to enhance and improve communication.

The project scheduling chapter has been completely rewritten to include a generic guide to creating a project schedule using any scheduling software, in addition to step-by-step instructions on how to develop a project schedule using Microsoft® Project® 2010.

Appendix C has been rewritten to include new tools and technologies and an updated recommended-reading list.

The document templates have been updated with a new look and layout to make them easier to use. Many of the templates have been updated to include additional information. There are new documents and renamed documents. These changes are to bring the documents up-to-date and to ensure that they are in alignment with PMBOK® Guide and PRINCE2 standards.

Introduction

The term project management refers to the carefully planned and organized effort to complete a specific task in a specific timeline. Project management has been around since the beginning of time. It may not have been called project management and the leaders of the projects may not have considered themselves project managers, but they started with a plan and a goal and they followed a process to accomplish a desired outcome. In other words, they managed the project.

The construction of Stonehenge, the megalithic ruin located on Salisbury Plain in southern England, began in 2950 BC. It is believed that there were three main phases of construction that occurred at different times over a number of years. The last phase of development was concluded in 1650 BC. This would definitely be considered a long-term project by today’s standards! The building of Stonehenge, both the why and the how, remain a mystery and the subject of much speculation to this day. How were the stones moved from their original sites to the site of Stonehenge, which was many, many miles away? What was the purpose of Stonehenge? Was it a giant observatory or a place of worship? There are many theories and legends on the subject, but what interests us most is how they approached this huge undertaking. It is hardly likely that a group of people got together and said, Let’s bring a lot of big stones from as far away as we can and put them in holes in the ground here, and then they all went off independently and started moving rocks around. There must have been a vision for what Stonehenge was going to be, a plan for how it would be accomplished, and someone must have coordinated the execution of the plan. A significant amount of manpower would have been needed to move the stones, together with some ingenious method, or methods, for moving them such a great distance. There must have been a reason that those particular stones were the ones that had to be used. We must also assume that there was a design for the arrangement of the stones and a specific purpose for the stone circle after construction was completed. Someone must have managed each phase of the project to accomplish such an amazing feat.

Let’s bring ourselves forward a few thousand years and explore how project management has evolved into the structured discipline it is today. In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) began his work on scientific management. Up until then, it had been assumed that the only way to increase productivity was to make people work longer and harder. Applying his scientific reasoning to the work being performed in steel mills, Taylor, however, showed that output could be increased by improving the processes used to achieve those outputs. During this same time period, Henry Gantt (1861-1919) studied the order of operations in Navy ship construction before and during WWI. His Gantt charts, task bars, and milestone markers outline the sequence and duration of all tasks in a process. Gantt charts are used to this day as a standard analytical tool for project managers. Gantt is also credited for bringing a human element to management by his emphasis on a favorable work environment having a positive psychological effect on workers. During the few decades up to and including WWII, a growing emphasis on marketing approaches, industrial psychology, and human relations began to further change the face of business management.

In the 1940s, the post-war shortage of labor, combined with the ever-increasing complexity of projects, required changes in organizational structures to support the changing environment. PERT charts and the critical path method were introduced. These new methods enabled managers to effectively control intricately engineered and extremely large and complex projects such as military weapon systems. The new management methodologies being utilized for military projects were soon incorporated into other industries as business leaders looked for new ways to manage growth and development in a fast-changing and competitive business environment.

In the early 1960s, general systems theories of science began to emerge as drivers of business processes. At the same time, project management, as a career in its own right, came into being. Since the 1960s, numerous theories, methodologies, and standards have been introduced in the management of systems, knowledge, workflow, projects, and data. There has been a growing emphasis on business strategy, organizational change, and human relations skills. Every decade brings with it a need to develop projects with even greater complexity and speed. At the same time, projects must be implemented with fewer resources, lower costs, and higher quality. The ever-increasing diversity and complexity required for managing people, systems, and data has led to the substantial growth in the project management field.

As recently as 15 years ago, project management was not seen as an important or necessary role in many companies. Those companies spent millions of unnecessary dollars and thousands of unnecessary hours implementing projects without the use of the advanced tools, techniques, and methodologies required to create the timelines, cost control, and risk management necessary for cost-effective development. In the last decade, the project management landscape has changed dramatically. It is no longer seen as superfluous middle management but as playing a critical role in meeting business demands for high-quality, quick-to-market products and services.

Project management has gained popularity over the past few decades due to significant changes in the way companies do business. These changes have been driven by the demands of global competition, the introduction of virtual organizations and teams, rapid technological growth, downsizing (requiring more cost-effective and efficient development), higher-quality goods and services, and faster time to market.

Project management is one of the fastest growing career fields today, and this growth is predicted to continue for the foreseeable future. Project management skills are becoming a required core competency for many management positions in growth-and quality-oriented organizations. Today, project managers are in high demand worldwide to implement projects worth billions of dollars in both the public and the private sector for corporations, governments, and nonprofit organizations.

About This Book

This book is a practical guide to project management in the technology sector. It is designed to help you develop the skill sets you need to be a successful project manager. The book assumes no previous knowledge of project management. It has been written with the needs of the beginner to intermediate-level project manager in mind. However, this is also an excellent book for seasoned project managers who are ready to take project management to a new level by adding more structure and methodology to the project management process. Fundamentals of Technology Project Management complements standard process frameworks such as PMBOK® Guide and PRINCE2®. These industry-independent process frameworks are designed to be used in conjunction with a project methodology to standardize processes and terminology. A process framework is not a replacement for a project management methodology, and it cannot teach you how to become a project manager. This book is designed to give you the knowledge, skills, and tools needed to implement a project, with or without a process framework.

This book is an informational and easy-to-follow guide that not only explains what is required to successfully complete each phase of the project lifecycle but also explains in understandable terms how to do it. The book includes 62 project document templates designed to lead you methodologically through each of the six phases of the project lifecycle: planning, design, development, integration, deployment, and post-deployment. The book includes techniques for consistently and accurately monitoring the health of the project and simple methods for analyzing the results to quickly and easily recognize when corrective actions are needed. You will be guided step-by-step through processes to help you minimize the effect of problems as they arise and to get the project back on track swiftly and efficiently. This book clearly defines the process, the documentation, and the skill sets required to implement projects successfully: on time, within budget, and with high quality. It includes proven methods for building motivated and energized teams and suggestions on actions to take to deal with difficult or negative team members. You will learn how to maintain the right balance between people management, task management, schedule management, and personal career management. Armed with the knowledge and tools in this book, you will be well prepared to effectively and confidently manage any technology project and well positioned for maximum success in today’s competitive marketplace.

The case study in Appendix A is a guide for the examples that appear throughout this book. You can download a compressed file containing the 62 templates for the documents that you will need to create during the project lifecycle at http://www.mc-store.com/5131.html. The password for the download file is projectmgmt.

Special Thanks

I would like to thank the following people for their contributions during the creation of this book:

Special thanks to Erika McCulloch for her valuable contributions to the first edition of this book. Thank you also to Katie Tipton at MC Press for suggesting a new edition and supporting the process to make it happen. Thanks also to Kathy Nelson for her invaluable copyediting skills.

Where to Find Me

Facebook:

Fundamentals of Technology Project Management on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fundamentals-of-Technology-Project-Management/250037798355957

Blog:

Working With or Without Walls, management blog http://workingwithoutwalls.blogspot.com

Twitter:

Project management, virtual management, and leadership tips on Twitter @ColleenGarton

Company Website:

Garton Consulting Group

http://www.gartonconsulting.com

Part I

Introduction to Project Management

This part of the book is an introduction to the discipline, art, and profession of project management. It explains the principles and structure of project management, projects, and project teams. The project lifecycle is illustrated together with a high-level overview of the project management methodology contained in this book. Project management and quality management standards are reviewed with an explanation of how they integrate with the project methodology and direction to add more structure to the management of projects.

CHAPTER 1

The Principles of Project Management

A project without a project manager is like an orchestra without a conductor. You can have the best musicians (or engineers) in the world, but without the leadership of a talented conductor (or manager) who understands how everyone’s piece must fit precisely together, in the right order, to produce the final product, the orchestra (or the team) is not going to perform well and the results will be poor.

A Project Manager’s Value to an Organization

To realize its full potential for a great symphony or a great technology product, a team needs direction and guidance from a leader who can see the big picture but understands enough about the details to be able to lead the team to success. In technology, this person is the project manager. The project manager’s value to the organization is the same value that the conductor brings to the orchestra. Just as successful orchestras would not dream of performing a concert without one, successful companies should not dream of launching a project without a project manager. It happens, but fortunately not as often these days as in the past. Companies have learned their project nightmare lessons! The project manager is the glue that holds the project team together. It is a vital role and carries with it a lot of responsibility. The success of a project is determined primarily by the quality of the project manager. Never underestimate the value that the project manager brings to the team or to the project results.

The Difference Between a Project, Program, and Portfolio

A project is an undertaking to create a product, service, or process. Though different variations of the product, service, or process may be included as part of one project, those variations are based on the core project objective. For example, a project may produce a product that is available in five different colors, sizes, or languages. These variations could be split into separate projects, but if the bulk of the project work is the same, it would usually be considered one project.

A program is a collection of projects that have been grouped together because it is beneficial to manage them in a coordinated way. The projects may not be related from a business perspective, but it makes sense to group them into a program for project management purposes. For example, the projects may share common components. It may be beneficial to leverage or reuse technology from one project for another. Similar skill sets may be required across multiple projects, so those projects would be grouped into a program to enable development schedules to be coordinated appropriately. A project may not be part of a program, but a program will always comprise more than one project. A project manager may manage multiple projects within a program or may manage just one. A program manager is responsible for the high-level management and coordination of the projects within the program. The program manager has overall responsibility for the success of the program and, therefore, for each project within the program.

A portfolio is a collection of products, projects, programs, services, or other work that is grouped together at the business level for strategic business reasons. The projects or programs may not be directly related and may not have any interdependencies at the project-development level. A portfolio manager may be a business manager or a project manager. The portfolio manager’s focus is on making sure that the portfolio has the right mix of components, features, or projects to meet specific business objectives. A project or product portfolio can be likened to an investment portfolio. For example, an investment portfolio often contains a diversified collection of dissimilar investments. The investments are in different market sectors and have different strategies and goals. Some may be focused on growth, others on income. An investment portfolio may contain a mix of products, such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and real estate investments. They include foreign and domestic investments, long-term and short-term investments, low-risk and high-risk investments, and so on. The reason the financial investments are managed as one portfolio is because the combination of investments is required to meet the investment goals of the investor. A project or product portfolio is managed in a similar way and for similar reasons. A portfolio view of projects, products, and/or services enables an organization to make sound business decisions that enable the organization to meet strategic business objectives. An organization may have just one project portfolio for all projects or a collection of portfolios with different portfolio managers.

The Structure of Project Management

Project management can be divided into three distinct areas (see Figure 1.1):

Standard/Framework

Methodology

Project Direction

Figure 1.1: Three Areas of Project Management

Standards/Frameworks

Project management standards/frameworks are generally not designed to be industry specific. Some quality management standards are industry specific. More than one standard can be applied to a project at the same time. There are various standards/frameworks that can be applied to the management of projects. A standard is a framework within which the project is managed and implemented. A project management or quality standard is used to ensure quality and consistency throughout the life of a project. Not all organizations use standards/frameworks for project management. As the project management discipline is maturing, it is becoming more common for standards/frameworks to be applied. Standards are explained in more detail in the next chapter.

Methodology

Project management methodologies are generally designed to be industry specific. Some methodologies may be designed in a modular fashion so you can choose the modules that apply to your specific industry. A methodology needs to be tailored to fit the type of project you are implementing. For example, you would need a different methodology for a construction project than for a software project. The methodology included in this book is designed specifically for technical/IT projects. There are many project management methodologies in use. Some are widely used methodologies, and others are proprietary methodologies created for use by individual organizations. A methodology details what will happen, and when, throughout the life of a project. It organizes the project methodically and defines the steps that need to be followed to complete it.

Project Direction

Project direction is the management and coordination of the standards, methodology, tasks, and people who are part of the project. People refers to everyone who is involved in your project. This includes your project team, steering committee, executive management, stakeholders, project managers, people managers, the client, vendors, partners, support personnel, and anyone else who is involved with your project in any way. Project direction is taking the individual parts and bringing them together to form the whole. It is the conductor, coordinating the musicians and instruments to perform a perfect symphony.

Project management involves the management of all three areas. This includes applying the standards, following the methodology, and directing the project by effectively managing the people.

This book includes a methodology. It explains what you need to do and exactly how to do it. It includes information on how to successfully direct a project. This includes the management and coordination of team members’ tasks and the growth and development of individuals.

The Role of a Project Manager

A project manager (PM) has various functions or roles. Project managers will find themselves wearing many different hats during the various phases of their projects (and very likely at different times in the course of each day!). The specific roles a project manager will be required to fulfill will differ to some extent depending on the company for whom the project is being managed. It will also differ depending on the particular needs and requirements of the department or client for whom the project is being developed and the nature of the actual project itself.

There are different types of project managers. You will find that most technology project managers fit into one of the following broad categories. The first are technical project managers who have a background in technology. They have a technical/ engineering degree and have some hands-on experience in the engineering field. Secondly there are the career project managers. They have some level of technical skill and knowledge but have opted for the project management career path rather than the engineer/developer one. These individuals usually possess excellent organizational and leadership skills, which led them into a career in technology project management. Some companies specifically require one or the other type of project manager for their open positions. Others will be open to either. In choosing a career in technology project management, it is beneficial and smart to have both strong project management skills and strong technical skills. However, companies are more likely to hire a very strong project manager with little to no technical experience than to hire a technical manager with little or no project management experience.

A project manager wears many different hats and is known by many different names. These are not the names that your project team may call you behind your back when you ask them to work the weekend but the different names used to describe a project management role in an organization. More than one name may be used to describe the same role, or there may be multiple roles with the same name that differ in specific responsibilities. There may be similarities in skill sets and even some overlap in role responsibilities. For example, on larger projects, the project management role may be broken down and performed by several different people. Each of those people will have a functional job title. On smaller projects, one person may perform all those functions him- or herself.

The previous section explained the differences between project, program, and portfolio management. Though these roles are well defined, some organizations interchange the job titles, which can cause some confusion. For example, during my project management career, I was given the title Project Manager when I was performing the role of a program manager. There was no distinction at that company between the job titles for these two roles. l was once a project manager for a single project, but my title was Program Manager, as was the title for all the project managers who worked for that company. At another organization, my title was Product Manager* even though my role was really that of a program manager. Confused yet? It can be very confusing, and the main reason for this is that formalized education, certification, and terminology for project management is relatively new. Consider also who in the organization decides which job title is given. If it is someone with little understanding of project management discipline and terminology, he or she may have no idea that there is a difference between a project manager and a program manager! The Project Management Institute (PMI) has helped to standardize a lot of the terminology used in project management. However, not all organizations, or project methodologies, have adopted the standard terminology. PRINCE2 focuses on roles specific to a project rather than defining a person’s job or title. One person may perform one role or multiple roles. The PRINCE2 framework does not define project management at a program or portfolio level.

A project manager role can also be referred to as a technical manager, a project coordinator, or a project scheduler. In some companies, a project coordinator is an assistant to the project manager, responsible for managing schedule updates, creating status reports, and taking care of general administrative tasks. A project scheduler most often refers to a junior project manager who is responsible for keeping the project schedule up-to-date and working with the senior project manager to resolve any scheduling issues.

When searching for a project manager position, check for job titles that include the word project, program, or portfolio. Always read the job descriptions thoroughly to ensure that the role is a good fit for your experience and expertise.

Management

The most important role of a project manager is to manage the project through all stages of the project lifecycle. This will include ensuring that the project stays within budget and is delivered on time and with high quality. This book is designed to guide you through each stage of the project by giving you the tools, skills, and knowledge you will need to consistently deliver successful projects.

Communication

A vital key to successful project management is communication—not just any old kind of communication, but two-way, open communication. Quantity is never a good substitute for quality. Communication must be tailored for your specific audience. A one-size-fits-all approach is not going to work. You will be communicating with different groups of stakeholders that could include salespeople, marketing, product management, engineering, clients, quality assurance, senior management, accounting, and outside vendors. These different groups of stakeholders will be looking for different information from you with differing levels of detail. Personality types will also determine how much and how detailed the data you share/present needs to be.

So how do you figure out what information each group or person needs from you? One sure way of finding out is to ask them. You may talk to one stakeholder who tells you, I only want to know if there is a problem. I will assume things are going well unless you tell me otherwise. Another may tell you, Don’t come to me with a problem unless you have a solution. If I cannot do anything about it, then I would rather not know. Let me know once the problem is solved, and just tell me what the schedule impact is and what plans you have in place to counteract the impact. Then there are the people that want to know every little detail of what is going on: Send me an email every day/week, and update me on where we are with every aspect of the project. Let me know when each and every milestone is completed, and inform me immediately of any potential issues that you anticipate in the following week. The list of responses to this question can go on and on. Never assume that you know what someone needs from you, and never assume it is the same as what someone else needs. People always appreciate being asked for their opinions and preferences. It not only makes them feel that their opinions are important; it also makes you look like you are a good manager who is setting a solid foundation to ensure that everyone is informed appropriately, thereby giving the project the best chance of success.

Human nature is a strange thing. It is usually the case that if someone believes you value their opinions, they will also value yours. If you hold them in high regard, they will also hold you in high regard. After all, you must be really smart to have noticed how smart they are, right? Thus, it is always good to ask for others’ opinions and to pay attention to what you hear. You do not have to agree with them, but be respectful and thank them for their input. You do not have to comment on how useful, or not useful, it was! There will be situations where you will not be able to reach agreement. In these situations, you can agree to disagree as long as it is clear who the decision maker is going to be. By listening and responding to input from your team members and stakeholders, you are empowering them to continue to contribute to the process. They will feel that they are adding value to the project and to the project team.

Presentations and Reporting

Creating and/or presenting various project presentations to clients, stakeholders, and team members is an important and often time-consuming part of a project manager’s role. Throughout the project, there will be a lot of presentation work. Presentation meetings require careful planning and execution. During the design and development phases of the project, there will likely be weekly or monthly (or possibly even daily) project status meetings that will be much more informal. The overall length of the project, and the phase of the project that you are in, will determine the frequency of status meetings. For instance, if you are working on a year-long project, you may have monthly or biweekly status meetings during the development stage of the project and increase this to daily meetings in the few weeks or days prior to deployment (release) of the product.

Project Documentation

A project manager is often responsible for writing a certain amount of the project documentation. The amount and level of documentation you will be required to create will depend on your level, and areas, of technical knowledge/expertise and your knowledge of the product. Some of the documents are standard project management documents written by the project manager. The client, business managers, business analysts, engineers, or vendors will write others.

In addition to these documents, there will be numerous presentations and progress and status reports created regularly throughout the project lifecycle. If your project team is a permanent team (not created on a per project basis), you may need to create a Team Charter and/or Mission Statement for the team. If you are directly managing people, you will also be responsible for documentation such as Personal Development Plans, individual team member goals and objectives, and annual (or project-related) employee performance reviews.

Appendix D includes a flowchart and a list of all documents required during the project lifecycle. A template for every document is included in the download file that accompanies this book (available at http://www.mc-store.com/5131.html).

Even if you are not involved in the actual writing of these documents, you are likely to be involved in the reviewing of some, if not all, of the documents. The first time you see the Proposal Document may be when you receive it from your sales department. Be aware that you might get a bit of a shock (salespeople often oversell on the features of a product and undersell on what it will cost to develop). You need to read the documents and ensure that you understand what you are committed to. To fully understand your project, you need a good, solid understanding of what your product is and what your product can (or will) do. Reading the technical and user documentation is a great way to get up to speed on these areas quickly.

The project documents are covered in more detail in later chapters.

Estimation

Estimation of project tasks is a complex, and never exact, science. Project managers are responsible for working with their teams to produce the initial, high-level, detailed, and final estimates. Estimating complex projects takes a lot of coordination, and there is often a tight deadline for completion. Unless you are an experienced developer, you will need help from your project team to create realistic estimates. The rule of thumb is that engineers usually overestimate what they can accomplish by at least 20 percent, so be prepared to update their estimates accordingly. This will vary from person to person, and you will need to monitor their results with estimating to gauge what kind of adjustment you need to make before submitting your estimates. If you work on the same team/product for some time, you may be able to create the estimates yourself without additional technical assistance. It is great if you can do that, but remember to ask for a sanity check from someone else on the team before submitting estimates. You might have missed something really important that was not evident to you from the estimation request but will be to the engineer who will be implementing the feature.

Project Scheduling

The project manager is responsible for the creation and management of the project schedule. There are many project-tracking software programs available that you can use for creating a project schedule. The basic principles of tracking project status are the same, or similar, in the majority of the programs. Some have better functionality and are easier to use than others. You may be able to choose what tools you can use for your project, or you may be required to use standard tools as defined by the company who is funding or implementing the project. This book includes a generic guide to creating a project schedule using any scheduling software. In addition, I have created a step-by-step guide to creating a project schedule using Microsoft Project software. Microsoft Project is one of the more popular project-tracking tools in technology project management.

Creating a project schedule can be relatively easy if you have a small project with few resources and minimum dependencies. It can also be very challenging, especially if you have a large, complex project with multiple engineers and skill sets and complex dependencies between tasks and features. For smaller projects, creating a schedule can be accomplished in as little as an hour or two. Larger projects can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks! Do a sanity check on your schedule with one or more of your team members before you finalize it. You may have missed something that will adversely affect the schedule.

Managing the ongoing schedule tasks and interim (or internal) as well as final releases is the most challenging part of scheduling. In your role as scheduler, you will need to recognize problems that will have schedule impacts and know what processes to follow if there is a problem. If you are a junior or assistant project manager, you will likely have a senior, or group, project manager to help you manage these problems. For smaller projects, or if you are the only project manager on the project, you will be required to manage this yourself.

Updating the schedule and ensuring that the implementation team is kept up-to-date on changes to the schedule are a part of the status reporting and management responsibilities of a project manager’s job. Proactively getting status updates from individual team members and communicating this status to the relevant stakeholders, with the appropriate level of detail, is the responsibility of the project manager. Keep in mind that the frequency of status reporting should be appropriate both for the length of the project and the phase of the project that you are in. You do not want to ask for progress reports from your team members on a monthly basis if the project is going to be only four months long. This will not give you adequate time to respond to issues. Similarly, it is unlikely that you will need daily progress reports during all of the phases of a two-year-long project.

Managing the Project Team

There are various management structures (which will be covered in more detail in the organizational structure section in this chapter), and some of those structures require the project manager to also be a people manager. This has advantages and disadvantages, and you will form your own opinions about which method you feel is most advantageous as you learn more about the different approaches to managing projects and project teams.

Project managers who are responsible for the management of their project teams have a whole host of additional responsibilities related to managing people. These include coaching and development; personnel issues; tracking work hours, vacations, and sick time; setting business and personal objectives; reviewing performance; technical training/development; team motivation; and individual performance management.

Virtual Management

In addition to various organizational structures, there are also different work environments. The days when everybody who worked for a company worked in the same location are long gone. These days it is very common for companies to have geographically dispersed teams or local teams where one or more employees or consultants work remotely some or all of the time. Managing people from a distance has similarities to managing people locally, but there are also a lot of differences. The differences are often subtle, and without the necessary adjustments to management and communication techniques, you may find that your remote team members become alienated from the rest of the team. Managing remote employees, full or part time, requires a proactive, and inclusive, approach to communication and teambuilding.

Conflict and Change Management

As a project manager, whether or not you are also a people manager, you will be required to manage relationships between your team members and with your stakeholders. This will include managing conflict as well as managing change. Regardless of how well planned a project may be, unforeseen changes and project demands can take their toll on you and your team members. Managing the impact of these changes can be challenging. Conflict resolution and change management are important aspects of the project manager’s core responsibilities.

Contributing to the Company’s Management Team

As a member of the management team, you are likely to have additional responsibilities directly or indirectly related to your project. These can often involve numerous meetings; reporting, collecting, and/or analyzing business/productivity metrics; process improvements; project proposals for future projects; planning for the next project while implementing the current one; and budget tracking and reporting, to name but a few.

Dual Roles

On smaller projects or within smaller organizations, you may find yourself in the dual role of project manager and lead engineer, or project manager and technical writer, or project manager and product manager; the list of combinations is endless. Being in the dual role of project manager and a contributing member of the development team can be challenging. You are, in effect, managing yourself, which means that you have to hold yourself as accountable as you hold the other members of your team. For smaller projects, there may not be enough work to keep a full-time project manager busy, so being in a dual role is the best way to accomplish at least some level of project management for the project. This can also be a good way to start the transition from engineer or engineering lead into a project management role. On larger projects, it can be much harder to split your time between two very different roles, and you can often find yourself trying to do two full-time jobs. This is where you must focus a lot of attention on your own personal time management and ensure that you are not overcommitted. Trying to do too much will result in you doing a passable job in each role but not excelling at either. This is not good for the project or for your own self-esteem or career goals. Managing multiple projects is also common. The likelihood is that you will be working on more than one project at a time. This may mean that you are managing more than one project team or that you have overlapping project teams. In this situation, you need to ensure that you and your team are giving each of your projects the appropriate amount of time and attention.

Being an Employee

So, let’s imagine that you are employed as a project manager for a large company. The chances are that your manager will set formal goals and objectives that you need to accomplish over the following year. You will be required to keep your skills and knowledge up-to-date. You will have some personal objectives that require you to improve on some aspect of your job (communication, for instance). This is your role as an employee and as a team member. It is an important role for the project manager and one that is sometimes neglected in the rush to get the project implemented. This is an area that requires focused attention if you are to continue to grow and develop as a project manager. It is an essential ingredient in meeting your own career goals.

In conclusion, a project manager has many functions that constitute this role of project manager. It is hard to get bored in a project manager role when there are so many functions that need simultaneous, and often equal, focus. It is an important position in a fast-paced environment. Consequently, it is easy to get burnt out. For this reason, it is very important that you manage your own time effectively and not feel pressured to set unrealistic deadlines or consistently work long hours.

Skills Required for Effective Project Management

To be an effective project manager you need a fairly diverse set of skills. To develop these skills, you need a certain level of talent in quite a few areas. For instance, you need to be organized. If you live your life in a totally chaotic way, never remember to pay bills on time, turn up late for everything, and hate having to live by a schedule, this is probably not a good career choice for you! An important note is that being a great engineer or an accomplished technical lead does not necessarily mean that you will make an effective project manager or that you will enjoy being a project manager. Project management should not be seen as the obvious next step on the career path of an engineer who is looking for what he or she should be doing next. Project management is a career in itself, and though it requires some level of technical acumen, it is not going to be a good career choice for everyone who possesses some technical knowledge.

You can develop the skills you need to be an effective project manager as long as you have some basic talent or skill to build on. You need to be passionate about this career choice. It will be challenging and demanding. It is also going to be fun and very rewarding. It will require a lot of effort on your part to develop and hone the skills necessary to enable you to have a successful career in technology project management. This exciting career opportunity offers a myriad of opportunities for advancement.

Organizational Skills

Organizational skills are essential for a project manager at any level. Whether you are an assistant project manager, a junior project manager, or a senior project manager, you will not be able to function without excellent organizational skills. You will be juggling multiple tasks and dealing with lots of different people. You will be committing yourself to deadlines both personally and for your team, so you need to be sure you can deliver on them. This means that you need to have a really good sense of where you and your project team are with the project at all times. You also need to know how much wiggle room you have available to work on tasks not directly related to the development of your product. This could be reporting, budgeting, or attending planning meetings. A project manager constantly has a whole host of requests coming in from every direction imaginable.

You need to be able to organize your project, your own personal schedule/calendar, and those of your team members. Organizing your team is not telling them what to do; it is working with them to help them to manage their own time and to ensure that they have the time and resources to implement the tasks you have assigned to them. You are empowering your team members to achieve their objectives. You will be required to constantly prioritize and re-prioritize tasks for yourself and your team members. You need to be able to respond to changes quickly and effectively.

Organized means knowing where the file is that you need for your next meeting, arriving on time for your meeting, and being prepared. If you are hosting the meeting, you should ensure that you have prepared an agenda, that the agenda has been distributed to the attendees ahead of time, and that you have a clearly defined purpose and goal of the meeting. No one wants to spend time in meetings that are not productive or effective. If the meeting is not adding value, productivity, or effectiveness to your project, perhaps you do not need to hold the meeting!

Engineers, developers, and technical staff cannot be expected to be the best organizers. It is a great bonus if they are, but the success of the project hinges on the project manager’s ability to effectively organize all aspects of the project and the project schedule.

Without good organization, you will not be able to schedule effectively for you or for your project team(s). You will not be able to prioritize and re-prioritize appropriately. You will be unable to communicate effectively and accurately to your stakeholders regarding the status of your project. You will also have no idea whether or not you can deliver your project on time, with high quality and within budget. You should always know where you stand, and even in the early stages of the project, you should have at least an 80 percent level of confidence of whether or not you will be able to deliver your project on the specified completion date and within the specified budget.

Leadership

A project manager is a leader, not only for the project he or she is managing but also within the organization for whom the project is being developed. To lead effectively, you will need to develop a high level of leadership skill. Organizational ability is a prerequisite for building effective leadership skills. Leading a project team can be a complex task. Unlike management in some other fields, technology management works a little differently. For instance, the manager is not necessarily the highest paid person on the project team. It is not unusual for senior engineering employees to be earning a higher salary than their manager is. Unless you came from a senior engineering position before becoming a project manager, the chances are that your team members will determine how the project gets implemented. You will communicate what needs to be accomplished, and their job is to figure out the best way to implement the solution within the allotted time and with the required functionality. You have a responsibility to remove any obstacles that prevent your team members from spending the maximum amount of their working time on tasks directly related to the development and implementation of the product.

Respect for your leadership is not a right, it is a privilege, and it needs to be earned. Your team needs to see you demonstrating your contribution to the project and the team in order for you to show that you are adding value to the process. The team may not always agree with your decisions, but they need to have confidence that you know what you are doing. You need to demonstrate integrity and treat others with respect and dignity at all times.

People Management

In your role as project manager, you may also be a people manager. You may be directly managing some, or all, of your team members. An effective manager needs to be able to set work assignments and track progress. This is, basically, the project management part of your job. In addition, other important skills are required to build and maintain a highly productive and high-quality team. You will need to coach and develop your team members. You will need to help them create and achieve their individual training and technical-development goals. If you work remotely from some or all of your team members, you will need to perform these tasks with little, or no, face-to-face communication. It is important to ensure that all team members are given the appropriate amount of attention and guidance regardless of their geographical location.

You may be responsible for goal and objective setting at the start of each year and for producing formal written performance reviews for each employee at the end of each performance cycle. Knowing what contributions each team member has made to the project or projects and to the team is essential to accurately and appropriately deliver performance feedback to your team members. Companies determine the level of salary increase, bonus, and other compensation given to each employee based on performance-review feedback from their manager. Therefore, honest and constructive feedback is critical to both the company and to each team member. Knowing your team members individually and understanding their work styles and their career goals are essential to developing highly motivated and productive team members.

An old adage states that we should treat others as you would like to be treated. That is a nice sentiment, but I question whether this approach will help you build a successful team. You need to treat others as they wish to be treated and not as you wish to be treated. Everyone is different, and we all have different needs. We are motivated by different assignments and by different rewards. Take the time to find out what those motivations are for each member of your team. Do not assume that you know what motivates and inspires someone. Ask them; you might be surprised at what you can find out. You might also be surprised at how easy it is to make adjustments to the way you manage that person that will prove to be mutually beneficial. We are all different, and diversity builds excellent teams. As a manager, you need to learn how to manage in a diverse environment and develop skill in adjusting your management style to fit the individual and the situation. These are important keys to successful people management.

Communication

Project managers need excellent communication skills, both written and verbal. You may not start out as excellent, but you must continually strive to get there. Communication skills are like your golf game (this will ring a bell for any golf players out there). You are never quite good enough; you can always improve your game, and just when you think you have attained excellence, you play a really bad game and end up back where you were a year ago. You must practice constantly to keep your skills honed. There is no such thing as too many lessons. You can learn from books, from classes, and from other people. One thing you will never be is a perfect, infallible communicator. When things go wrong; if you misjudged how to handle a situation (just as you may have misjudged getting that golf ball onto the green), you need to put it behind you and continue without losing your confidence. Tomorrow could be an excellent communication day!

Being able to communicate clearly and effectively is fundamentally important. Knowing how to stay high level and not getting into the details is critical. Your role is to communicate what someone else needs to know, not to impress him or her with how much you know. Knowing what level of detail your stakeholders and team members need is a skill that you will learn to develop both from reading this book and from personal experience.

High-quality written communication is a necessary skill for any project manager. You will be required to write documents, reports, emails, and, possibly, employee reviews. These all require more than basic writing ability. If your writing is not very good now, I recommend that you brush up on that skill as soon as possible. One way to improve your writing ability is to read a lot of material similar to the documents you will be writing. This will give you a feel for the content and the style of the communication. Many companies have specific formats or templates that they use for documents and reports. This makes it a little easier to get started, and you can read some of the previously written material to get a feel for the style and tone commonly used at that particular company.

Communicating virtually is different from communicating face-to-face. As with any other kind of communication, the more you do it, the more skilled you become. The most challenging aspect of virtual communication is avoiding distractions, for you and for the person you are communicating with. Multitasking while communicating virtually does not make you more productive. It makes you unprofessional and sloppy in your work. If you are not paying attention, you will miss important information and you risk alienating the person or people to whom you are communicating. You don’t have to be able to see someone to know they are distracted and not paying full attention. Demonstrating respectful behavior means stopping what you are doing and giving others your full attention.

Time Management

Engineers are not generally known for having great time management skills. It is the project manager’s job to help his or her employees accomplish their tasks in a timely manner regardless of how good the employee’s time-management skills are. You need your team members to be at meetings on time, and you need them to focus on the assigned tasks and not get distracted. Be creative when you come up with ideas on how to accomplish this. One project that I was involved in had a rule that if you were late for a meeting, you had to tell a joke, sing a song, or dance for the team. After that rule was introduced, there were only two more latecomers to the meeting for the duration of the project. One habitual latecomer stated that the thought of having to perform in front of the whole team cured him of his tardiness. He figured out how to set reminders on his calendar and paid attention to them! This kind of rule may not work well in corporate settings, but it might be just the ticket in more informal environments where the team members know each other very well! Another rule I have seen that works quite well is not allowing latecomers into your meeting unless they bring donuts for the team. This can work particularly well for the more thrifty members of your team. I have also seen projects where latecomers are not allowed into the room. The rule is to either turn up on time or do not turn up at all. That can be rather harsh and may not always prove to be the most productive way to run your meetings, but in some situations, or for specific types of meetings, it may work. I would certainly not recommend that you put this rule in place for your weekly scheduled status meetings!

Your own time management may also be a challenge for you. Being an excellent organizer will not necessarily make it easy for you to manage your time. It can still be difficult. The nature of a project manager’s business is to have more on your plate than you can manage. Prioritizing tasks in order of importance rather than just working on the easy ones first is the most efficient way to manage your time. If you are accomplishing tasks that are critical, those will have the most positive impact on your project. Noncritical tasks may never get accomplished and there may be little, or no, effect on your project from not completing them.

In some project management jobs, you will find that your work is interrupted approximately every 10 to 15 minutes. Consequently, during the course of an hour, you can be dealing with any number of issues. Remembering (and finding time) to get back to your original task can be challenging. As you get more comfortable with working in this way, you risk developing an inability to focus on things for more than 10 or 15 minutes. There will be times when you have to spend hours writing documents and reviews or are in important meetings and you have to focus on one thing for an extended length of time. You need to develop the ability to focus on one thing for a long period of time and also develop the ability to focus on many things at the same time. I never said that this job would be easy! Trying to hide out in meeting rooms or bathrooms or keeping your office door closed won’t protect you from the onslaught! You have to be available at all times for your team members. They need you to be available so that they can continue to be productive. With any major issues that come up, you need to be informed and you need to make sure that your team members know this. You are the nucleus of the project; the team needs to be orbiting around you. You are the force that keeps them on track. When you feel the urge to bury your head in the sand, remember that at the end of the day, you are the one who will be held accountable!

Technical or Specialized Knowledge and Understanding

To manage technical projects, you need some knowledge of technology. You do not necessarily need to understand how to write code to be able to manage software developers. Additionally, you do not need to be able to install a network to be able to manage network engineers, but you need to understand enough about the technology that your teams are using to be able to understand what your team is working on. Without this knowledge, you will be unable to recognize whether your team is developing a high-quality product or not. Having some experience in one or more areas of engineering work will be of