Scott The Irreverent Guide to Project Management

An Agile Approach to Enterprise Project Management, Version 5.0
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0109-3
Verlag: Lioncrest Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

The stress of being a project leader can be enormous, having to deal with time and budget constraints, unforeseen obstacles, uneasy executive stakeholders, and a thousand other concerns. You need a tested and proven toolkit to ensure that every job in your portfolio is done absolutely right. The Irreverent Guide to Project Management offers comprehensive, step-by-step instruction and best practice techniques to help you move your project forward aggressively and achieve optimum results. J. Scott covers all the bases with engaging wit and mind-blowing expertise, from kickoff meeting to final review, offering straight-to-the-point direction for creating a viable work plan, control log, and job status documentation; establishing a baseline budget; prioritizing and managing impediments; and so much more. Both practical and flexible, with guidelines and procedures that are appropriate for any project, large or small, The Irreverent Guide to Project Management will lead you to a consistently successful outcome every time.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scott, Jason

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1:
Getting Started
The 120VC Project Management Guidebook was originally written as a training curriculum for our professional Project Managers and as the standard by which our Program Managers manage and quality assure the projects in their programs. As such, it is completely unchanged and provided to you as a way of sharing our proven approach to completing Enterprise Projects successfully. In addition, the Project Management Standard contained in the Guidebook applies to every project, regardless of environment, subject matter, or client methodology. And we have proven over time that if you follow each step, it will ensure a consistent, successful outcome on every project. While we have created the 120VC Project Management  Guidebook, it doesn’t contain anything not currently considered a best practice by the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) community at large. In fact, most of our innovation comes from actively managing projects for the Fortune 100. When we encounter a client that employs a technique that creates great project management return on investment, it goes into the next version of the Guidebook. Therefore, the 120VC Project Management Standard is simply a compendium of instructions to execute the most current best practices in Project Management today. We define Enterprise Projects as those that require multiple-matrix, cross-disciplined teams, and sometimes external vendors, to complete. Enterprise Projects require communication and cross-organization dependencies to be managed tightly to ensure that team members on one team are ready to start work as soon as the dependent work is completed by a member of another team. Enterprise Projects cannot be completed by a single, fully dedicated, multifunctional group. When 120VC engages on smaller projects, we decide at the beginning of each which of the tools and techniques in the Guidebook are necessary and which are not. However, to consistently enable Project Manager success and to support the success of the program and Portfolio Management layers, we don’t ever change the tools or techniques that we choose to use. Lastly, we are not academics, but real heads-down, hands-dirty Project Portfolio Management professionals. We recognize that no one starts a project because they want their organization to be the same when the project is over. Over the years, we have learned three things that have proven to be universally true: 1. Leaders change things—they take organizations on a journey 2. Change is about people 3. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
(Peter Drucker) So, if you are the leader who gets excited about driving change by helping your team members reach for their potential—the kind of leader who wants to succeed by helping your team members self-actuate their own path to a shared goal—this Guidebook is for you. If you are the kind of person who wants to win despite the impact it has on your team, pass this copy of the Guidebook on to someone who is committed to leadership. Because leadership isn’t about you. If you are still reading, expect some good-natured profanity, some sarcasm, and some straight-to-the-point direction. More importantly, expect to learn how to plan and manage a project instead of a bunch of theories that “enlighten” you but don’t provide any instruction on how to apply them to your current projects. As you read, you will encounter specific instruction that you can begin applying as you complete each page. There is no need to wait until you have completed the book and understand the steps as they apply to the entire project lifecycle to begin applying them. Methodology vs. Project Management Standards
If you are looking for a project management methodology, you have come to the wrong place. Methodologies are company-specific and are used to: • Control portfolio pipeline • Support financial allocation • Support project team-member staffing/allocation • Provide data to facilitate executive stakeholder decisions Because every company’s culture is unique, their approach to decision-making, project team members, and financial allocation will vary dramatically. More specifically, a methodology is something that serves the company—a set of required project deliverables executed by the PMs on every project. Methodologies are not intended as tools that the Project Manager can use to plan and successfully complete a project; they are a set of standard deliverables that provide value to the company. The 120VC Project Management Guidebook is a standard set of techniques, criteria, calculations, and tools that enable a Project Manager to plan and manage a project successfully and realize the benefits intended from our clients’ methodology! Project Managers and regular “run-of-the-mill” managers can both complete projects successfully. The difference is that today’s Project Manager should be able to do more than: Use a Work Plan like a checklist of items necessary to complete the project  Kick off the work, cross their fingers, and go for it Today’s Project Manager needs to have the skill to: Thoroughly define a project Perform a sanity check on the tasks and durations provided by the subject matter experts Defend the defined approach, each task, and the schedule to Executive Stakeholders Once the work is kicked-off, the Project Manager should have the tools and discipline to: Lead project Executives Help Executive Stakeholders, Functional Manager(s), and team members stay accountable Use the Work Plan to forecast how impediments that arise during the course of the project will impact the project end date and cost Identify impediments, determine how long they can go unsolved before they begin impacting the project end date and cost, prioritize them, and develop appropriate responses to ensure any potential downstream impact to the project end date and to mitigate the cost fully In this fashion, the Project Manager makes data-driven decisions today that control the outcome tomorrow and move the project forward as aggressively as possible, leaving no time or money on the table. Project Portfolio Management:
Consistency & The Big Picture
Organizations launch Portfolio Management Offices (PMOs) because the CEO and the CFO want to be able to make data-driven decisions about how to allocate funds and team members across their portfolios, to achieve the greatest return for their investment, and to complete as many of the projects in their portfolio each year for the amount of money that has been allocated. Essentially, a project portfolio is no different to them than a financial portfolio, with one major exception: a CFO delegates the responsibility of delivering the results of their investment to others and keeps them accountable for the results by closely assessing the financial results over time. When one of these delegates is a Chief Portfolio Officer or Portfolio Manager, they are responsible for both the investment dollars and delivering the projects that will realize the return on investment that the CEO desires. Ideally, both the CEO and CFO would receive a weekly or monthly fact-based report from the PMO that lists each project in the portfolio, along with a summary of their health in relation to the project end date and cost. The executives would use this information to make decisions for the reallocation of funds and team members from projects with a surplus to projects in need. This is not unlike an investor making buy-sell decisions based on the report provided by their finance manager to maximize their return on the funds they have available. Organizations committed to realizing the benefits of Portfolio Management then began implementing PPM systems at significant cost and impact on their organization in an effort to automate the collection of data, to perform demand management, and to report across their portfolio. The obstacle they often face after implementation is that the consumers of these reports can’t make confident decisions with subjective data! This is evidenced by the weekly or monthly status meetings that every Project Manager must attend to talk about their projects with executives who have already received the report. This meeting takes place because the executives are attempting to validate the data in the report before making any decisions because they don’t trust that their definition of Red, Yellow, and Green is the same as the Project Manager’s definition when reporting on the project. This is largely because the criteria used to determine project health, assess impediment, and report status varies from Project Manager to Project Manager. Due to this lack of consistency and the ability to effectively use the reports produced by the PPM tool to improve their Portfolio success rate, PMO leaders spend most of their time implementing or refining their methodologies. Each new change or refinement made by the PMO requires training and adoption, during which most Project Managers are not consistently adhering to any set standard. This cycle of constant change is the number one contributor, to the lack of consistent application of an organization’s methodology across their portfolio. The second major to a lack of consistency in Project Management approach across projects is that Project Managers do not need to: Follow a standard or adhere to a methodology to get a project done or to succeed in the eyes of project beneficiaries. ...