Picking A Project Management Method

Jun 14, 2009
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Why Another Talk on Project Management

I’m happy to be presenting at CFUnited in August. This is my first time presenting there and I’ve been asked to tell people why they should come to my session (besides the free candy I’ll be passing out). My session is called Getting More Done: Effective Project and Team Management.

But before I tell you what it is about, let me tell you what the presentation is NOT.

It is not a demo of our project management software. It is not a talk about agile project management versus waterfall or other formal methodologies. It is not a description of the ideal personality type you have to be to be successful or the latest fad in management styles. There is a lot of that around already

This is different.

This is a collection of practical tips to getting more done. It is based on the Vertabase approach to project management that says

the role of project management is to provide accurate and meaningful information between the people who want the project done (the client) and the people doing the work (the team).

It has real-world examples, good developer specific stories and tons of tips you can implement immediately to make your life easier.

You may not have project management set aside in your workflow -it might even be just you and the client. But, by definition, there is a project management role that is filled by you every time you communicate with the client. You are giving them information, collecting information and setting expectations. This presentation will help you do that better (and with less effort).

If there is project management already in your organization, it can help you better understand the information you can provide (making you more valuable) and how you can get the information you need (so you can get on with your work).

Like so many of the presentations being given at CFUnited, it should give attendees tools and ideas to be more productive, to keep their shops at the edge of innovation and to raise the overall level of their skills.

It is a great investment.

On a behind the scenes note, the organizers and presenters of this conference together put a tremendous amount of themselves into it. It is truly a labor of love and a testament to the passion of the community involved. This passion can’t help but rub off and keep people excited about what they do for months after the conference.

May 12, 2009
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Finding Talent in an Organization

Great skills can get lost in a large organization. A good project manager can help find them.

I was at a usability conference recently looking over books on human-computer interaction. Standing next to me was a usability expert who worked for a government agency. Each of the many departments in that agency had their own website. I’d been to one of those website and found it very hard to use. (It wasn’t her department’s site.) We started chatting about it and she totally agreed.

I asked her why she, as a usability expert, couldn’t do anything to improve that website. She told me that she was siloed into her own department. I asked why the user interface (UI) expert in that other department didn’t do anything to improve the website. She said that the other department doesn’t have a usability expert on their team. She is the only UI specialist in the whole agency.

She has a unique skill amongst hundreds of employees -but her skills are trapped in one department.

This struck me as being an unproductive, though not uncommon, situation. And this is the type of situation where a good, get more done, project manager can come in.

A good project manager has access to information that other team members don’t. Specifically, the project manager knows where specialized knowledge and skills are within an organization. The PM can be the eyes and ears across project teams for talent.

This is a unique position that a project manager can use to expand their role as a value-added member of an organization. In this role, resource allocation becomes more than simply finding who has time to do what. It goes beyond traditional project management methodology. Resource allocation becomes about placing the right resource on a project. The one that can help get the job done better, faster or more cost effectively.

Mar 20, 2009
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Picking a Project Management Methodology

We were having an internal meeting to pick a project management methodology for a web project we are working on for a new client. As developers of commercial software, our instinct was to lean towards an agile based approach where our process would be:

Make an initial feature list
Get time estimates on each feature
Prioritize the list
Time box the development effort
Build and test as much as possible in that time
Launch
Get user feedback

This works great for a tightly defined set of deliverables and a client who has done software before. However, that’s not what this project is nor the profile of this client.

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