Experience still proves to be best teacher

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Why don't IT professionals use their day-to-day personal life experience to influence the way they manage their business lives? The idea makes a lot of sense if you explore it.

This summer, I decided it was time to build a deck at my cottage. I had all the ingredients of a good project: a definite start date, a well-defined enddate (the end of my vacation), a user who knew what she wanted (my wife), a competent architect (my brother-inlaw) and the best available project manager (yours truly).

You might remember in my last column I talked about the benefits of creative tension among the three major players in a project organization. A word of warning: this creative tension must be managed carefully when one of the players is your spouse. In that case (contrary to a business project), give in unless the integrity of the structure is at risk.

Let's get back to the deck. Before I drove the first nail, I wanted to take advantage of the experience of people who had built decks before me so I looked for deck plans at Home Depot, I bought three books on deck building, I asked neighbours who already had good-looking decks for pointers and I spent time with my friendly hardware store owner to discuss the benefits of cedar versus pressuretreated wood, cement blocks versus cement posts and staining versus natural finish. The time I invested in this pre-planning exercise helped me learn from other people's mistakes and improve on their good ideas.

Let's now apply the same concept in a project at the workplace. You have just been assigned as the project manager on a mission critical project. One of your first tasks should be to put your big project manager ego aside and find out more about the people you will be working with. By the way, the following applies whether you are a consultant assigned to a client's project or an employee assigned to an internal project. Here are some of the questions to be asked:

* What is the nature of the client? Easy going? Demanding?

* What are his/her hot buttons?

* Who are the players involved and what are their personalities?

* How successful were other similar projects?

* What made them successful?

* What problems were encountered?

This will give you some of the information required to help define the approach you want to take with your project. It is not a guarantee for success and you will most likely encounter new problems in your own project, but you want to avoid mistakes that have already been made.

Something else you should do is find out more information about the type of project at hand, especially if it is the first time you are involved with that type of project. For example, if you are going to manage a Web design project, you should talk to people who have managed similar projects. You should also read about Web design to become familiar with the techniques involved. As the project manager, you are not expected to be the content expert, but knowing enough about it will be useful in discussions with your users, architect and other members of your team.

Once you have a successful project under your belt, you have to help other project managers by documenting your own lessons in a formal project completion report. This deliverable contains both a history of the project and a final evaluation of its performance and effectiveness. It highlights what worked well and offers explanations and possible alternatives to problems that were encountered. A convenient way to structure this report is to assess your project by providing an evaluation of the lessons learned in each of the PMBOK (the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge) nine knowledge areas.

When you start a project, do not rely solely on your skills and on your own previous experience. Never hesitate to consult your peers. Everyone makes mistakes but there are no excuses for repeating a mistake that has already been made.

Jean Labelle, PMP, is the director of the Project Mangement Core Competency Centre for OMR Consulting group Inc. in Montreal. Jean can be reached at 613-2286832 or [email protected].

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Oct 2000
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