Some IT Project Management Advice

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hey guys,

So I have been thrown a cool opportunity/challenging situation; I was hired as a “Junior Project Manager,” but the position is far from being structured as to slowly integrate me or anything. I work for a small (40 employee) web development company, and I manage projects that involve around 4 developers and two graphic artists.

When I came in they had very little workflow-they would all work on things at once and change-order the hell out of clients. While I am certainly not a seasoned Project Manager, I am learning (and going back to graduate school to brush up), and I am creating workflows, and just process in general.

Here is what I have learned so far:

I noticed they were developing based on what proposals said, instead of a Project Manager writing out a PRD (Project Requirements Document), so I changed that-I now write out how a site or application should function/user-experience, so the team has scope defined (confirmed by client/team/business development), and a clear framework. I then have identified the following flow:

1.Proposal Signoff
2. Scope Definition/Project Requirements
3. Client signoff on scope
3. Setting up project/resource definition (who will work on it, etc)
4. Design composition if it is a website or screenshots if it is an application
5. Client signoff on composition/screens
6. Development
7. Design cut up/formatting
8. QA
9 Launch

I know that’s general, but it’s just a typical workflow that I am basically thinking is how we should tackle things. I am going to start learning how to use some PM software and integrate projects into these controlled steps.

I have also learned that the Lead Developer is better suited to detail specific tasks to the development team, and I am more suited to define the project, monitor scope/status/budget of the overall task (development, design, QA, etc) by meeting with the Dev Lead/Graphic Lead/etc. (am I wrong here?)-I feel like I should give a project plan, define the budget/etc and then give the team a bucket of hours to complete everything to get that plan done (so long as they signed off on it)-rather than micro-manage very small tasks within each part of a project.-I create high level tasks and a project definition in other words.
Here’s where I am having trouble:

I have a hard time sorting out priority and timing. I am new at this still, and I do not have a system to determine a) how long a project will take based on what we have (i.e. this project will take roughly 3 weeks because while it would only be a week if we just did that one project, we have 2 others going on).

I also cannot seem to figure out how to shift priorities. I am thinking if I rely on the Project Management software we have in place but that nobody uses, I might be able to use a workflow system where I can specify priorities, etc.

I am also meeting at the start and end of the week with the leads of each team (development/graphic/business development-to run through status. I start the week by advising people what I think we need to push on, and I end the week by confirming with the teams everything we did, and giving them a budget update so they can see where they are.

I’ve also been very focused on making sure all conflicts are resolved-if my team needs to talk to someone/get something I have been trying to make sure I am taking care of all of that stuff to keep it all moving.

Am I on the right track so far? Does anyone have any “must use templattes, etc” that would help me organize all of this? I am using “Microsoft OneNote” to keep notebooks on all of my projects for notes, etc.

2

some thoughts from an interested amateur.

For the time expectation aspect, it sounds like the company has done a number of prior projects. It can’t hurt to go over the prior project records to see how long the different aspects of the projects took. Even if nothing there matches one to one with the current project you may get an idea of general time frames. You might also get an idea of where/when problems start to show up in the development schedule.

If you’re going to delegate authority to the leads to decide how things get done, I’d also make sure it’s clear that you are also delegating responsibility.

Something like this:

Project 1 has dev steps A and B and Graphics piece a, Project 2 has dev steps C,D and E and graphics pieces b and c. Get a time estimate from the dev team for A,B,C,D and E, and a time estimate from the graphics team for a,b and c.

Some, perhaps most, of the project pieces may be new to the team in which case no real estimate can be made until you’re actually doing it.
Heh, looking this over I can see my science education coming through, first step research past performance, second step define knowns and unknowns, third step reduce unknowns. Hope some of this is helpful.

3

Another interested amateur, suggesting The Mythical Man-Month, if you haven’t read the essays already. It’s old, but I find it relevant - in spirit and principle, if not current practice.

4

yeah, I am actually reading that :slight_smile:

5

…on reviewing this, I just realised that I replied to a previous thread on PM from you plato :slight_smile:

Project Management Software is not Project Management, do not fall into that trap.

I’ve mentioned before that I have no experience with web development projects but just a few thoughts;

  • do you have a Project Charter?
  • have you developed your Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)?
  • have you started work on your project management plan? “How” you will manage the project?

I realise that these are only relatively short projects (three weeks) so maybe you will be able to set up these documents and use them again with only minor adjustments in the future.

The WBS is vital for project work and will let you see “what” you have to do. If you get the team to create it then you will get more buy in from them on what they have to do, you also have the advantage that’s it’s a very good step to make sure you aren’t missing work that needs to be done. You can then dig down into what the activities involve, who has to do them and how long they take (which it sounds like you are doing but prehaps not as an output of this).

The WBS can then be used to create a network diagram and even at a simple level this will allow you to order the activities in the order in which you are going to do them and what your critical path is (or if you have more than one!).

The network diagram will help solve the quesiton you asked in;

You have your activites, you sequence them into the order they will be done with dependencies, you have the duration of the activities on the activites so you can see the critical paths. Then you can play around with schedule analysis to see what you can do with the network diagram to compress your schedule, if required.

Do not underestimate the WBS, it really is a vital tool in project management. It can be used internally to show management and your team and external for the customer (is there anything on the WBS the customer has to complete?). It also leads onto the development of the network diagram, again, very useful.

The project management plan deals with “how” are you going to manage your project. How will I manage the scope? How will I manage costs? How will I communicate? How will I identify and manage risks? How do I manage quality? How to I manage changes? …and so on.

Again, I think for the size of projects that you are managing (short term) this might be something you can use repeatedly on a regular basis for projects. The above sections might only be a page or less long and so your project management plan could just be a ten page document.

I may be preaching to the choir here a little since you didn’t go into details on how you are doing some of the steps you mentioned but I didn’t see them mentioned either so I’m just throwing them out there.

Just out of curiosity, you mentioned;

Do you also have technical input to the project or is this just consolidating input you have been given by other people? I know in smaller projects sometimes the PM’s role overlaps a little but if you are just PM’ing, shouldn’t someone else be coming up with the quality definitions?

Just a few thoughts, I don’t know if they will be helpful to you but I hope so.

6

Agreed, agreed and agreed some more. Historical records are very useful if your company keeps them, too many don’t. If they don’t right now, start doing lessons learned, archiving them and using them in the future.

I don’t agree with this, although this is from my persepective and may differ if the PM is also a technical expert. Who can give the best esimates on what work needs to be done, by whom, how long it will take and what are the risks involved than the subject experts? By getting them involved in the process you are getting the advantage of their knowledge and experience and also getting them to buy into the project.

7

Our projects can range. Typically they are 1-3 months, but can be shorter or way longer, based on the type of client/project.

Cool, I am really excited about learning how to do this. Do you have any suggested places to see what this looks like? Is there a better resource than just searching? Should I do this in Microsoft Project?

Thank you for expanding; Can you give me some examples of this in action? “How Do I manage quality, etc” would you define it as-site QA every friday or what? I might do this already, as you have suggested, but I think it’s more random and less defined. I’d like to get there :slight_smile:

Typically I turn the proposal into a project requirements document, which just explains user-function, layout, etc. It is the plan for maintaining scope/look and feel/functionality/timeline as defined and confirmed by the client.

The tech lead would then take this Project Requirements Document and Correlate it with the “This is how I am going to get these requirements done on a technical level” in a Technical document or flow document. Is that the right thing to do?

Thank you so much for all of your input guys, this is really helpful so far-I am trying to find a mentor in our other division (there is a senior project manager), but I need all of the help I can get.

8

I’m currently in training on a project management methodology called PRINCE2. There’s rather a lot of it, but it mostly seems to focus on absolutely clearly defining the project (in terms of responsibilities, goals, end product, budget, timescale etc) in advance of starting, plus setting up monitoring procedures, defining tolerances and exception plans.

The methodology itself is in the public domain. It’s worth taking a look at -

I haven’t found anything I can fault so far - I guess you could say it’s a bit heavy on procedure and planning, possibly at the expense of action and results, but I’ve seen elements of the monitoring and control being implemented in real-world situations (although I don’t think they were explicitly implemented as PRINCE2 objects).

9

I don’t know where I got the 3 to 4 weeks from then, sorry about that.

First comment, stay away from the software until you understand the concepts…if you can. There are too many people who think that Project Management is just a Gannt chart. It’s better to understand how to do this manually first before you start throwing things into MS Project.

It was actually harder than I thought to find some examples of WBS to network diagram but I managed to find this;

http://www.uic.edu/sph/prepare/courses/ph450/mods/453case2.htm

  • there are a few things I would change on that, for example a network diagram should have a “start” and “finish” on it and there are better ways of showing early start etc, but it seems to be a reasonable starter.

And an interesting explanation of the WBS;

Unfortunately my theoretical knowledge of it comes from courses and books and can’t be reposted. Practical knowledge is a little harder to put across on this subject on a message board.

Think a little higher level to start with. How do you define quality on your project? So a few possibilities;

  • do we have standard (quality) processes we have to follow to get x piece of work done?
  • do we have a standard (a quality) to which we measure customer webpages to?
  • does the customer have a quality that they want us to achieve on this project?
  • out of scope, cost, time, quality - how do these balance out? If time is a bigger constraint, is our internal organisation or the customer willing to reduce the quality demands.

Then you have the questions of, how do we measure that? What do we do if quality starts to deviate from the limits we have set?

Some of this may be too much for your project or not, I’m just throwing a few ideas around.

Even the PMBoK says that you can trim the plans you produce to the level required by your project, you don’t have to use everything if it doesn’t fit to your project. But you should use their framework to manage projects. Don’t go too overboard on this for your first projects though or you’ll drive yourself nuts! It would be lovely to say that you have followed the PMBoK guidelines and methodology perfectly from the start, but I doubt it’s achievable. Improve yourself as you go along. See if you can get the mentor you were talking about, it should help you a lot.

I’m currently studying for my PMP exam and I’ve been project managing for about 4 or 5 years now, I think even after 20 years of doing this I will still be learning new things and new tips and tricks. Some of this can seem a little daunting but it looks like you are very enthusiastic about learning. It can be hard to push project management into an organisation that isn’t used to it, but the benefits can be huge if you can show them what an asset it is.

10

If you think Prince2 is bad…don’t look at PMI :smiley: The PMBoK weighes in at around 400 pages, but I think it covers a lot more than Prince2 (from pre contracting to contract closure).

The processes can seem a bit heavy to start with…and they are if you’re new to it. But if you are working on similar projects a lot of the management plans can be created from a template and tweaked to the project you are working on.

One of the words that started floating around a while back and is now a definition of a project is “progressively elaborated”, in that you don’t know everything at the start of the project, as you progress it becomes better understood.

11

Cool,

We do a breakdown of tasks in proposals (i.e. cut up design and format 32-40 hours, create contact form 5-8 hours, etc), and I typically create a to do list with an order (typically development comes before any graphic/formatting work is done.

I also am thinking of using our workflow system in our project management software to automate this step-based process.

I guess my question would be how detailed do the tasks have to be? I have been defining what each task item means and what the pages should look like from a function level, and then I assign an overall category, based on the contained task times, an overall time (Development has 200 hours)-and they can manage to that number with my input/status checks.

While I will specify the tasks (i.e. create content management system (then I give it hours and define what will be in it from a user’s perspective, I do not highlight every development task that must be done to achieve this (create database tables, etc)-I simply do not know all of the micro tasks-do I need to-so long as I give the proper hours for the general task?

Think a little higher level to start with. How do you define quality on your project? So a few possibilities;

  • do we have standard (quality) processes we have to follow to get x piece of work done?
  • do we have a standard (a quality) to which we measure customer webpages to?
  • does the customer have a quality that they want us to achieve on this project?
  • out of scope, cost, time, quality - how do these balance out? If time is a bigger constraint, is our internal organisation or the customer willing to reduce the quality demands.

Then you have the questions of, how do we measure that? What do we do if quality starts to deviate from the limits we have set?

Some of this may be too much for your project or not, I’m just throwing a few ideas around.

Even the PMBoK says that you can trim the plans you produce to the level required by your project, you don’t have to use everything if it doesn’t fit to your project. But you should use their framework to manage projects. Don’t go too overboard on this for your first projects though or you’ll drive yourself nuts! It would be lovely to say that you have followed the PMBoK guidelines and methodology perfectly from the start, but I doubt it’s achievable. Improve yourself as you go along. See if you can get the mentor you were talking about, it should help you a lot.

I’m currently studying for my PMP exam and I’ve been project managing for about 4 or 5 years now, I think even after 20 years of doing this I will still be learning new things and new tips and tricks. Some of this can seem a little daunting but it looks like you are very enthusiastic about learning. It can be hard to push project management into an organisation that isn’t used to it, but the benefits can be huge if you can show them what an asset it is.
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12

hey grey_ideas,

thanks for all of your input :slight_smile: it’s greatly appreciated. My post was submitted before I was done.

I meant to reply to your post, highlighting the need for a wbs, by saying:
We do a breakdown of tasks in proposals (i.e. cut up design and format 32-40 hours, create contact form 5-8 hours, etc), and I typically create a to do list with an order (typically development comes before any graphic/formatting work is done.

I also am thinking of using our workflow system in our project management software to automate this step-based process.

I guess my question would be how detailed do the tasks have to be? I have been defining what each task item means and what the pages should look like from a function level, and then I assign an overall category, based on the contained task times, an overall time (Development has 200 hours)-and they can manage to that number with my input/status checks.

While I will specify the tasks (i.e. create content management system (then I give it hours and define what will be in it from a user’s perspective, I do not highlight every development task that must be done to achieve this (create database tables, etc)-I simply do not know all of the micro tasks-do I need to-so long as I give the proper hours for the general task?
If you are ever able to keep in touch via email to exchange ideas please let me know-I really need all of the once in a while advice I can get :slight_smile:

13

One more question:

After the project, plan, workflow, etc is defined should I have to micromanage the project? I am thinking I can work with the lead developer/graphic lead to achieve the goals that are planned out, budgeted, etc-by giving them the list of high level tasks, the plan, the definition documents, and reviewing status with them weekly-to see if they are hitting the marks. Does it have to be more than this?