Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  CRM   Risk Management   Scope Management   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management  

The general assumption among IT people is that if you’re an IT person, you’re probably pretty intelligent. And from what I’ve experienced during my 25 years of IT development and management work, that’s been the case most of the time (there are always a few exceptions, of course). IT people are analytical, thinkers, doers, initiators, creative and usually high achievers.

That doesn’t mean that everything that they encounter needs to be complex though, right? After all, IT project managers have to manage IT personnel on projects. So it logically follows that complexity on the project makes it not only complex for the IT project team members, but also for the project manager. And as an IT project manager who is usually managing multiple projects at once, I can say that I will not try to make things more complex just to appear important or create unnecessary “challenges”.

So how do we move from complexity to simplicity on the project? As project managers, how do we make it easier not only for us but for our project team members and our customer? What steps can we take to get there? In general, I see four ways:

• Use past experiences
• Simplify tasks
• Focus all efforts on the end goal
• Remove biases from the plan

Let’s discuss each of these in more detail…

Use past experiences to gain …

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