Introduction
Independent of what college you attended (if you went to one), what you studied, where you first worked, your current organization, how long you’ve been in project management, the size of your budget, the number of people on your staff, and so forth, it’s likely that you fall into one of three groups of people who are attracted to learning about Everyday Project Management. Where do you fit?
1. Newbies
This group consists of people who are new to project management and probably not familiar with the basic concepts. They lack on-the-job experience; thus, they need to gear up quickly. Perhaps they come from an engineering discipline or the military. First-time project managers tend to be younger, but not necessarily!
If from engineering, your expertise could be in physical projects such as civil, mechanical, or structural engineering, or even in software engineering. Engineers often are good at implementing plans, but eventually they seek to coordinate larger projects, not simply dwell on their own tasks. Maybe you bought Everyday Project Management because you view project management as a stepping stone in your overall career progression.
Coming from an engineering background, you might not have had opportunities to hone your social and interpersonal skills. It sounds stereotypical, but you might be effective with quantitative tools yet lack the background or the balance to be an effective project manager. Working with others, as you’ll learn throughout this book, is the primary key to being effective.
If you have a military background, especially the army, you might have gravitated toward project management because your command unit offered vocational training. Indeed, project management is highly relevant to army work. Military officers know that, in addition to their combat knowledge, being effective as a project manager helps them land a good job after they leave the service.
2. Unschooled Veteran
Perhaps you have been in project management for years and didn’t learn the industry jargon. Possibly you had to dive headlong into your first project management assignment. Your “course of study” was 100% on-the-job training, and because you found yourself in a sink-or-swim situation, you learned to swim!
Maybe you now have an incentive to shore up your knowledge and to more fully embrace your role as project manager. Perhaps you have been told by higher-ups to take a course, read a book, or learn more about the profession, so you can develop some kind of structured approach to project management.
If you learned on the fly, you might be resistant to standard ways in which projects are managed. Combining your years of experience with a little “book learning,” however, could work wonders. At first you might think,“I’m not going to proceed this way, but it is useful to consider.” Still, you’ll likely do well with this book, and hereafter.
3. On the Cusp
Are you among those who don’t consider themselves to be project management professionals at all, yet you find yourself having to manage a project? Nearly everyone manages a project of some sort—even planning and hosting a party is, in a manner of speaking, “managing a project.”
Perhaps you adopted the mindset that says, “There’s a whole discipline of thought around managing projects, and I’d like to learn more.” You sense that it would be beneficial, both now and for the future, to immerse yourself and gain a better grasp of what project management is all about.
You’ve been reading books on business management, progressing in your career, perhaps even taking a leadership position, and you find yourself curious about project management. You might be reading Everyday Project Management on a plane as you travel for business—you’re my kind of reader! You take notes on what you read, discuss the concepts with others, and recommend books to peers when you think it would benefit them. Thanks for all you do!
Pass-Along Power
Considering all the above, whether you’re a project manager or soon to be one, you represent this book’s primary audience. If you have “pass-along power”—that is, you can assign reading to your staff—my hat’s off to you. Project staff members are the secondary audience for Everyday Project Management but actually the primary assets to the success of your project. Why? When all project members understand the concepts, terms, basic tools, and importance of cooperation, then group cohesiveness and effective teamwork generally increase, to everyone’s benefit.
Committed team members seek to finish projects on time and on budget, with the desired level of quality, and they receive kudos for their accomplishments, much as you probably do. Some project team members will want to read this book to establish a firm foundation. They’ll know what other team members know. And they’ll want you to see they’re taking this proactive step.
Whatever type of reader you might be, it’s likely that you’re someone who has been in the battle. You’ve also been exposed to projects that sometimes did not turn out well. You know that feeling, when something is spinning out of bounds. You’ve seen project team members besieged by requests, and people impacting the group who have different needs and contrasting agendas.
If you’ve been a project manager and inherited a noncohesive staff, your work can be worse than attempting to herd cats. When a project spirals out of control, it’s easy to feel hopeless about it. Still, you don’t want to let cynicism overlie your outlook about the potential success of a current project.
Flexibility Is Everything
You’re someone who cares about getting things right, and doing things well, both in a world and in an environment where things do not always turn out right. Perhaps your organization unwittingly undermines your efforts, making sudden changes in your staff or budget or project deliverables. Maybe you’re asked to do more with less. So, you continually strive to derive new ways to be productive, but, when you’ve finally got some solutions, someone might pull the rug out from under you again.
One benefit of learning project management fundamentals is that you can employ some of the tools to meet with your boss and, if necessary, deliver hard truths, for example: “If you need me to finish this project a month earlier, it’s going to impact quality.” To emphasize your point, you could embrace project management tools such as a flowchart or a critical path chart to emphasize to your boss the bottlenecks and impediments to generating the desired results, given the new change in direction or level of resources.
As a project manager, the continuing dilemma that you likely face will be one of changing priorities, budget and resource constraints, the whims of others, or multiple players having an impact. Despite it all, you can succeed. Be encouraged that you can handle the vicissitudes of change, and that with the guidance of this book project management won’t be so scary. Everyday Project Management focuses on what you need to know without overwhelming you, because your job and your life might well be overwhelming already!