pmStudent

I was recently interviewed by Cesar from pmforthemasses.com about getting started in project management.  I hope you find my responses helpful!

Can you tell us how you got started in Project Management?

In early 2004 I had been laid off from my role as an Operations Manager.  My wife was pregnant with our first child too, and for the first time I decided to really get strategic about my career. I asked myself "what parts of my previous roles have I really enjoyed doing?" The list was fairly long, but here is an example of the items on it:

• figuring out what the business needed
• working on something brand new
• leading people

During my research into going back to school and what companies were hiring for, I found out about something called project management. It was a discipline, with organizations and standards, etc. As I was learning more about it, I was like "Hey, I do that!" quite a bit.  I was shocked and overjoyed!

I had found my calling. I knew this is what I was meant to focus my career on. There were parts I loved and hated about my previous work....nearly all of what I loved was actually this crazy thing called project management that I had been doing all along, but never knew existed as a distinct discipline.

From that point, I looked for organizations who knew about and valued formal project management as a discipline.  I landed a job working on projects in a department where I could easily learn and grow.  Although it was a hefty pay cut from what I was used to, it was worth it.  Shortly afterward, I started going to night school for a degree in Project Management.  

What advice can you give to those planning to start a career in Project Management?

That is a huge question, and I've written hundreds of articles and developed many hours of online training about it.  In general though, I would say the following are key points:

• Take stock of your starting point and career goals first.  Then you can formulate a plan.
• A 4-year degree is required for most project manager positions
• Experience trumps graduate education in most cases for a project management role
• Certifications can be useful, but usually only once you have some experience to back them up.  Otherwise, view them as a learning tool, not a job marketing tool.
• Target organizations first, jobs second.  The organization you work for is more important than a job title at any organization.
• Networking is critical.  The majority of jobs are never posted.  You want to be a referral from someone who knows and trusts you.
• Volunteering internally within your current organization and externally is also critical.  Expect that you should prove by demonstration you can do a job before you earn it. 

What is the most valuable PM concept/technique one can use in their small business?

Do you bring any Project Management concepts/techniques to your personal life? How do you implement them?

Absolutely.   The discipline of project management can be applied to many places in personal life.  In fact I once recorded a video titled "Project Management in Everyday Life" in which I give a few examples.

What tools or resources can you recommend to the Project Manager wannabe?

"Do you know of any material, studies or other which covers agile project management but with geographically disparate participants. I have a couple of projects where this is difficult - design team in Bay Area, coders in Malaysia, China, India and Pakistan, customers/user reps across dozens of countries and project team in Singapore... timezones are killing me!"

In terms of Agile, I don't know of any training specifically for remote teams. 

I do have some personal experience with it though. I currently manage 2 teams of which some members are remotely located. 

I think Kanban does a lot for this scenario, primarily because it enables some self-organization that I think doesn't necessarily happen easily with something like straight forward scrum. The best thing is that you can use the kanban board even while not doing strict Kanban..and use it with any methodology, such as scrum or even waterfall. 

It allows my team to conduct our daily stand-up and update the kanban board - even when I'm not able to be there. And yet I am able to see what updates were made later and still have a good view of what is going on with each project. 

My recommendation to you would be to first learn about kanban if you don't already know much about it, then look into the many hosted electronic kanban boards for use on your teams. I personally love leankitkanban - but agilezen and others are very good too. 

In this video, Josh encourages you to own your project management career. You are your best advocate, and your questions and answers are going to be individual based on your background, goals, and industry.

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Having taken over a project, I find myself in the awesome position of needing to revise requirements with my customers that are pretty obviously in need of some spring cleaning.

Here are some tips for your own situations where you must "scrub the stains" out of a set of requirements, as opposed to dealing with change management on one specific requirement.

Make it Easy

We use DOORS to manage our requirements.  For me, step 1 is to export from DOORS to an excel file.  Getting these requirements into a format people are comfortable with is very important.

Next, I trim away the fields that don't really matter for what I'm trying to do, and then copy/paste the requirements into a blank Word document.  The reason for this will be come clear in a moment.

Track Changes, with Comments

I turn on the "tracking changes" option in Microsoft Word, and go to it.  Whenever a change is made, a comment accompanies it.  I speak to my audience, the customer, so they will easily be able to understand why I am proposing some changes.  In this case, I want to add clarity and also specify some functionality that has become known as a user need over time, but wasn't captured in the original requirements.

Review With The Team

I always like to review any requirement changes with my teams before proposing them to the customer.  This way, I can be sure I'm on the same page as my team members and there aren't any communication gaps about the needed functionality.

Many times, the understanding I've gained about new wants and needs comes directly from my team members, who are interacting with the customer and future users of the system.  It would be very bad if I had a misunderstanding on a particular requirement and ended up making that part of the baseline, when it's really describing the wrong thing.

Meet with Customer

Next I meet with the customer to ensure the changes I'm proposing make sense to them.  The comments I did earlier come in really handy, and the better they were, the easier this process is.  In my environment, I prefer to do this before having it come up at a Change Control Board (CCB) meeting as a change request.  I want the customer to be knowledgeable about the proposed changes and see the value in them before having to make a decision.

Change Control Board

The final step is to "make it official".  If you don't have a change control board in your project environment, you should set one up.  It doesn't have to be complicated, but it does require that everyone on the project understand that changes don't get made to the project baseline unless they are approved by the CCB.  

The customer and sponsor should be voting members, and in my environment the customer is the chair of the CCB.  That means they have the final word on whether a proposal will be approved or not.  If you are in a different contract environment, it may be a CCB internal to your own company/contract you are interacting with.

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If you are a fan of Theory of Constraints (TOC) as I am, you may know of the Evaporating Cloud Diagram.

As I have been using Kanban for some time now, I have found myself going back to my TOC roots and unpacking some of the tools I am somewhat familiar with, but haven't used nearly enough in practice until recently.

The following figure is an example of this tool put to use.

Conflict Resolution Diagram

The Goal

This tool is useful when you have two competing interests that appear to be at odds.  Mapping it out like this helps walk through the assumptions being made.  Each of the arrows carries at least one assumption, perhaps many assumptions.  The 5 sentences below the diagram are the default assumptions being made here.

So in the main, this helps everyone understand the underlying assumptions so they can be analyzed with a skeptical eye.

Let's Walk it Through

The objective here is to have a cost-effective, quality system.  We want to maximize quality and minimize costs at the same time.  

I'm sure this is just a weird example, we've never run into this before, right?

One of these assumptions as I walk through them stands out to me.  Do we really have to sacrifice functionality and scaleability in order to minimize costs?  What about that statement seems like it may not be quite right?

In this example, I discovered that "minimize costs" was a requirement, but put this way, it was being assessed in the narrow and short-term way of project cost.  The life time cost (and from all sources) were not being properly factored into the ROI equation.

Quality was being assessed as a lifetime dimension of the system...but because of accounting practices and separate funding sources, costs were only being assessed in the scope of the project.

Looking at it this way (and using this as a tool to help senior management understand) is a great method to apply systems thinking to conflict resolution on your projects.  It's helped me personally to help sponsors "see the light" when it comes to justifying the expense of licensing software, procuring specific hardware, etc.  It has helped me in many instances.

Give it a shot!

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