Quick 20 on Project Management
Quick 20 on project management:
1. You are being assigned a new project. Remember – nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.
2. Your Manager can con you into committing to an impossible deadline, but he cannot con you into meeting it.
3. The real strategy behind every project is always known by reading between the lines. At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.
4. Your project team and potential users of the project will tell you anything you ask about, but nothing more.
5. In establishing project plans, procedures and communications with your project team, what you don’t know will always invariably hurt you.
6. There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again. So do not pester your manager to do it right the first time, for he is seeing only the calendar in his dreams. About rest; he is oblivious.
7. The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of keeping a commitment is forgotten. Hence plan your mix of bitter and sweet pills accordingly.
8. In any communication within the project team, pls clarify to your colleagues: “I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”. Now even I am confused!
9. Memories are always short and a legal stance is what is always used in times of chaos and termination. So ‘What is not on paper has not been said’. Get your inputs right – in writing!
10. In any project, if you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan. So please shed your ego and get recharged with correct information – in writing.
11. You are the team leader? Well, here is how you safeguard your brand identity. If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried. You would not like to be seen as a ’struggling’ idiot!
12. Organizations having executed large projects firmly believe that there are no good project managers – only lucky ones. The more you plan the luckier you get. It is not a bad idea to give statistics favoring your sun sign in your CV!
13. If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong. Pls check the plan in the first place. My previous employer came up with a novel idea of an incentive scheme to drill the best hole in the project plan – the Project Manager did not know this!
14. A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager. Therefore for him; overruns are as certain as death and taxes.
15. For a newbie, good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when and understanding that ‘overtime’ is just a concept and figment of imagination.
16. Quantitative project management is for predicting cost and schedule overruns well in advance. Metrics are just excuses. The equation is simple: Fast – cheap – good – you can have any two.
17. A two year project will take three years, a three year project will never finish. But some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.
18. Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be. A project gets a year late one day at a time.
19. The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale. So if you have sold this project as ‘viable’ and if you’re 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you’re a damn good project manager.
20. Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything. No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirement – yours won’t be the first to. The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.
You identify with all these? You sure are a pro!
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Tags: chaos, impossible deadline, project management, reading between the lines
