1. DON’T OVERPLAN
2. Change the plan as needed
3. The more you invest in a plan the less likely you are to want to change it
4. The more you invest in a plan the less likely your team will be to give you accurate information
5. Leave room in your schedule for changes to the plan
6. Don’t try to predict everything that will go wrong
7. Just leave room in your schedule for things to go wrong
8. Not every process can be dissected into easy to monitor steps
9. Let team members update the status of their tasks

10. FEAR SILENCE
11. Keep stakeholders appraised of your progress, always
12. Tell stakeholders ahead of time when the plan looks like it’ll need to change
13. Insist on feedback from your team on their progress
14. Give your team the detailed blueprints they need to develop
15. Don’t ask your client or stakeholders to build that blueprint
16. Don’t even ask your client to sign-off on the blueprint
17. Spend time understanding your client’s needs, in detail
18. Spend time understanding your team’s skills and abilities
19. Trust the feedback you get from your team
21. Relay relevant information to your client
22. Communicate always -especially when things go wrong.

23. TEST EXTENSIVELY
24. Test early and often
25. Test proven techniques a lot
26. Test innovation even more
27. Test functionality to make sure it works
28. Test the implementation of it to make sure the functionality works when put into a workflow
29. Test its deployment to make sure the functionality works in the users’ technology environment
30. Monitor users’ interactions with your solution to make sure it works for the user and that the user gets it
31. The latest greatest techniques are not always the best solution.
32. Users prefer not to learn new habits
33. Find solutions that seem effortless to your users

My presentation on effective project management, entitled GET MORE DONE! is now available for viewing online at http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p78705036/

This is the presentation I gave at CFUnited 09 and is aimed at providing project management tips and techniques for getting more done.

It is a touch over an hour long.

Different project management techniques impact the type of information you can collect on projects and therefore the level of visibility you have on your processes - both for single projects as well as for reports across all projects.

One of the advantages of a more classic, Waterfall approach, is that time is a variable that can shift and be measured.  With this approach you:

• create a task list or work breakdown structure,
• assign resources,
• assign estimated hours,
• enter start dates and due dates for each task.

Then, you can measure how long it takes to actually complete the tasks in several dimensions.

1. First, in terms of calendar dates: when the task was started and when it was completed.
2. Secondly, you can measure in terms of duration: the number of days it took to complete.
3. Thirdly, in terms of actual hours: the amount of people hours worth of effort it took to complete the task.

When measured and kept over time it creates a robust data set that can be used to improve estimates on projects.

If you bill by the hour or by project, this data can help improve your pricing and profitability by providing visibility into the actual time it takes to do the tasks or projects you are charging for.

If you bid on projects, this same data will improve your understanding of the variables you can look at when pricing your bid.

In a more Agile project management approach, time is generally held constant and it is the functionality or amount of work that shifts.  The amount of work that can be accomplish shifts according to the time allocated, the skill set of the team and the complexity of the work involved.

This can provide a benefit for the project manager -they don’t have to worry about schedules and effort estimates in the same way as a Waterfall approach. It also makes it easier to track progress and shut out distractions for the team.

However, it comes at a price of reduced visibility and decreased data for management to use to make strategic decisions. The variables often left to management for decision making then become ones of:

• hiring more people,
• working on the team’s skill set,
• firing people or
• limiting project scope to the constraints of the team’s historic performance over a fixed period of time.

It limits the information that can be generated from projects and therefore the data that can be used for strategic decision making, portfolio management or long term planning.