So You're The New Project Manager
Having been a PM and progressing through the management chain, and now in a professional services career I've made numerous placements and hired many Project Managers, Program Managers, Directors and other "C" level processionals.
What follows is a brief personal overview of what a new manager needs the first day, the first week and the first month on a new assignment. And certainly this is not a handbook on Project Management101. It's not even close. It's some observations.
Initially some points:
- Determine project use
- Determine scope of the project and risk status
- Determine how project fits the company scope
- Establish base-point: Items completed and user sign-off
- Determination status of existing specifications: On target or not?
Another needed step is to review status reporting. Managers new on the job can easily give daily status. This assists involvement with the user community.
I am a believer each step depicted by a green arrow / yellow arrow / red arrow to show on-target / potential problem / major problems. The nice thing about arrows is the new manager can use up or down arrows to indicate progress, showing improvement or lack-of-improvement. Graphics are a requirement.
I also suggest spending hours and days with the user group. Find the real decision maker in the group and become good friends.
Enforce user sign-offs. Establish criteria for project scope and how to handle configurations to scope. Scope crawl is a slippery slope since since the new person running a project, you will get false direction. Be careful.
Turn to PMBOK. Get the PDU's necessary to complete your PMP. Not only is that a strong sell point for your credentials, PMBOK has industry wide approval on management of projects. Use SDLC, even if you have to search the term, but have a specific tool to run a project and follow it.
When building project timing, you best use a 2x factor to conduct User Testing. If you mess-up testing and produce a turkey, you're toast.
In 500 words or less, I tried to put together notes on Project Management. 1,000's of books / articles / etc have been written on the topic. If there is even a small gain of a small nugget of information, the article has been worth it.
Critical items:
- Determine project status
- Determine critical users
- Establish bench-marks
- Review completeeness of specifications
- Stick to an approved plan
- Post the plan in a room set aside for "project status." That way, everyone can see project status
- Know the user community
- Know your team
- Build enough time for user testing
- Implement in pieces and layers
- Keep effective and timely status to everyone
- Continually seek user approval
- Celebrate small victories with the team
- Utilize a "team effort" that leads to "team success"
- Never lose site of how this project affects the company
This scenario can be used for technology, finance, anything where a manager is brought into a project at a point where the project has been started and needs to be completed.
This again is a slippery slope to conduct business, but you better be ready.
For additional information and expansion of each or all of these points, please call (248) 630 - 5555 or visit www.careers-in-transition.com for further assistance.
