Kelley NealEnterprise Project Manager| City of NapervilleLisle, Il, United States
After a career as a project manager in the telecom development world, I moved to work in city government to manage IT projects. With minimal resources available, people from the utility or public safety organizations are asked to project manage their own projects. Most of the time, these folks have no background or guidance on what it really means to project manage any project. I'm trying to pull together some guidelines or resources for folks that get anointed project managers to give them very basic tools to help them succeed. If you have any suggestions or ideas on ways to simplify something like a project plan, I'm all ears. Thank you for your help! Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I worked in this domain. My recommendation: do what adds value to this people. Forget the formality and put focus on creating things that minimize the risks related to do not create the solution they are waiting for. For example, perhaps you do not need a project plan (a document) but you need a piece of paper to state needs and translate it into solution requirements, you need a piece of paper with a list of "what if" (risk), etc, etc
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1 reply by Kelley Neal
May 20, 2021 4:20 PM
Kelley Neal
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Thank you for your thoughts!
Saving Changes...
Kelley NealEnterprise Project Manager| City of NapervilleLisle, Il, United States
May 20, 2021 3:36 PM
Replying to Sergio Luis Conte
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I worked in this domain. My recommendation: do what adds value to this people. Forget the formality and put focus on creating things that minimize the risks related to do not create the solution they are waiting for. For example, perhaps you do not need a project plan (a document) but you need a piece of paper to state needs and translate it into solution requirements, you need a piece of paper with a list of "what if" (risk), etc, etc
I agree with Sergio and would add a bit of clarification. Although often misused, the terms "value added" or "non-value added" actually refer to whether the customer would pay more for that activity/feature. In this case your customer is the managers to which the PMs report. Quality control for example certainly provides value in general, but your customers expect you to provide a product without errors, rather than paying more for a working product.
Some PMs (especially new ones) will try to use every tool in their toolbox because they can. You need to focus on "Just Enough PM" as your starting point. Understand what your stakeholders want managed. That's what they're paying you for.
Schedule is usually important (but not always), and many project contributors often don't see how they affect the overall schedule, so it is usually something we must manage. Cost may be outside our view, but man-hours may be used as a proxy or be necessary for planning staffing levels. Providing status may be just presenting data without interpretation, or you may be expected to assess risk levels.
To get to the basics of your organization, understand your sponsors and stakeholders needs, and focus on what would be considered "value added" for PMs to manage from their perspective. Saving Changes...
Kelley NealEnterprise Project Manager| City of NapervilleLisle, Il, United States
Thank you! Helps me frame it better!
Appreciate the continued thoughts and comments! Saving Changes...
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