Project management

This article or section is a stub. Stubs are articles that have not yet received substantial attention from the authors. They are short or insufficient pieces of information and require additions to further increase the article's usefulness. The project values stubs as useful first steps toward complete articles. See Wiki workflow and Wikipedia:Stub for more details on this process. See all the stubs in Category:Stubs

Projects fail for two reasons.

• Poor scope (which leads to unmet expectations)
• Poor execution.

Let us figure out how we are going to avoid them.

Objectives and Goals - Don't Start Without Them

Before you start, have a purpose. Before a bid is created for project, you need to be absolute regarding Goals and Objectives of the project. The Goals are the mission statement for the project and indicate the general business purpose for the project.

Sample Goal - Here at Widgets-R-Us we would like to improve our customer service by better addressomg the complaints of customers.

The objectives are more tangible directives for the project that corellate directly to the specification for the design and development cycles. There should always be a meet-exceed metric for these objectives.

Sample Objective - We need to develop a tool for service reps to log Customer name and address information and the nature of the complaint. Another Sample Objective - We want to require classification of the complaint so the complaint can be routed properly.

Specifications - Defining Done

I know I have had too much experience in projects from hell that for some reason don't appear to have an end. This is almost always due to poor scope or scope creep. The statement of objectives and sign off on specification define the endpoint and thus no scope creep. need to explain a good spec here.

Tasks

Every task that is performed during the design and development stages of a project should directly correlate back to one of the original objective set forth during the Specification stage of a project
Diagram 1 - The Decomp of Objectives to Task
http://www.sequoiais.com/pm/pm_molecule_execution.gif

Contributors - Who Gets to Play

Explaing the staffing model of project. Determining who is going to assume what role. Distributed players
http://www.sequoiais.com/pm/pm_molecule_participants.gif

Project Management Tools
There are ample tools out there for a project manager to chose from. The major problem have seen with all the tools I have used or reviewed is that they are generally geared towards micromanagement and they don't scale well for smaller projects.

A good project management tool should be the product of a sucessful Functional Decomposition where the independant functions can scale dependending upon the complexity of each PM component. explain that a project may be heavy on goals and objective definition(thus much consulting) and easy on execution. other project easy on scope and spec but difficult on task execution.

For instance, If you are planing on going to lunch with a freind to talk about PM, the PM tool should allow you to simply schedule the time and person(s) participating. If that lunch date grows into a working meeting, you may need to record materials you need to bring to the table. If that lunch meeting grows into a departmental presentation, you may need to chose and select a caterer, reserve a room, rent a projector, log expenses and send out invitations. And now that you are a 'Relative Expert' on PM your lunch meetings have become full blown seminars, you need a means to log the contact info of the members or your road show, create a task list, asssign reponsibilities, establish a budget, collect quotes, track various statuses..etc.

Project Management Checklist as initially designed for the Project Molecule:
http://www.sequoiais.com/pm/pm.gif

Project Stages Checklist as initially designed for the Project Molecule:
http://www.sequoiais.com/pm/project.gif
This diagram is obviously geared towards the development of software/websites. We should consider creating one that is more focused on delivering a combo of Business Process and Software.

Projects also follow the ETVX model:

Using the ETVX Model can be extended or simplified(depending on the perspective)to include the following:

• (WHO) - equate to Contributors to the Project
• (WHAT) - equate to Scope of the Project Proposal
• (WHEN) - equate to Timeline Commitments during Assessment and Delivery
• (WHERE) - may equate to the location of the PM Toolset or Development Location
• (WHY) - equate to Objectives and Goals
• (HOW) - equate to either Rule of Engagement or the Method of Delivery

I don't know how we should discuss this. Mainly because I think with the visual that can be created to explain PM, most anybody should be able to grasp it with out translating to the above. Aregularjoe 06:27, 5 Oct 2006 (NZST)

See also

• Wikipedia:Project management
• Wikipedia:List of project management topics