Anyone with experience in Cloud-related projects (AWS ideally), can you let me know what these projects usually entail? I'm looking to move industries, and many technology project management roles are focusing heavily on cloud and although they offer training I want to ensure this is something I can see myself doing (I've only worked on more front-end projects, UX/UI, e-commerce, CRM so don't have exposure to Cloud as much although I have done the Cloud Practitioner course to try and learn a bit).
I was curious what makes these projects different than others? Is cloud your main focus in a project or does it tie into other goals? Can you give some examples of the types of projects involving it and what were your major challenges? And if you have any advice for a good resource for more research please let me know! I'm specifically curious as to what the Project Manager's role is like in cloud focused projects! Saving Changes...
Hi. I have been leading cloud projects for more than 6 years now. There is not much difference with other IT projects. I also see you mentioned that you are taking a course already. That is very good because I really do recommend this as it helps to understand technology terms. Secondly, the project duration is shorter, depending on the scope. But a simple build of a cloud environment and deployment could be 6 months or less.
Thirdly, agile methodology are preferred than waterfall.
My major challenge was understanding the solution /service and this I had to study and ask the experts to give basic 101 sessions to PMs. It helped.
Your role as PM won’t change but you may not need to apply all skills and PMI knowledge areas in a cloud project. I hope this helps Saving Changes...
Other considerations with projects involving migration of processes from in house to cloud are:
- integration with in house systems
- ownership of data and where the data lives
- ease of portability or extractiom of the data if you wish to switch providers
- authentication models supported
Kiron Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Hello,
In the title of the thread it says "digital transformation" but mostly what is discussed here is "digitalization".
These are two different terms and moving your business processes to cloud environments etc. are digitalization.
On the other hand, digital transformation is basically transformation of business models (a whole different concept). I just wanted to draw your attention to the difference becasue misusage can lead to misunderstandings and that can lead you in the wrong direction.
There is a free amazon cloud basic course that maybe help to understand a little.
I did one of those when I participated in a ERP migration to AWS. It helped me to understand what we were doing w/o going to the weeds and helped me to participate in conversations with the team and help them to eliminate roadblocks Saving Changes...
I see it as an IT project, period. If the main concern is the underlying jargon and the various moving parts, I would definitely look at getting some knowledge via free courses which are available in plenty. Otherwise, the principle of managing the project as a PM would be the same. A few things to note -
1) If this is the first time a client/organization is adopting a cloud medium, have an evolving FAQ and watertight documentation
2) Is this being done by in-house teams? Or is the underlying client/organization hiring external consultants?
3) How will the client/organization incrementally build comfort/knowledge about the end state architecture?
Nothing beats understanding of the cloud platform and I see you've already done the cloud practitioner course and if you have time, dig further to understand common roadblocks, budget-shakers (issues but I call them that!) and most importantly implementation failure cases.
I wish you all the best and if possible keep posting what you've learnt or are doing differently so it helps the community too and we all learn together. Saving Changes...
Carlos LawNorth Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
you may consider public cloud as an outsourced datacenter infrastructure. it is not much different than traditional IT.
the focus of these projects is usually on the deployment of software applications or the migration of those applications to or from the public cloud.
software development tends to use an agile approach for project management. Saving Changes...
