Graham Nick - Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

The small icons in the left margins of the book are to alert you to special information in the text. Here’s what they mean:

Get in front of your project. We use this icon to point out project-centric terms, issues and situations.

This icon points out important information you want to keep in mind as you apply the techniques and approaches.

The Tip icon highlights something you can use to improve your project management practices.

This icon highlights potential pitfalls and dangers.

You can read this book in many ways, depending on your own project management knowledge and experience, and your current needs. However, it’s worth starting out by taking a minute to scan the table of contents and thumb through the chapters to get a feeling for the topics.

No matter how you make your way through this book, plan on reading all the chapters more than once – the more you read a chapter, the more sense its approaches and techniques will make. And who knows? A change in your job responsibilities may create a need for certain techniques you’ve never used before. Have fun!

Five Tips for Managing Projects

✓ Embrace the role of Project Manager.Whether the project is small or large, a great Project Manager is always proactive. You need to be like the captain of a ship: Oversee the project’s direction and day-to-day tasks and keep information flowing to everyone involved.

✓ Manage the four control areas.Because you want your project to be a success, you need to define and manage those areas that are cornerstones to the project meeting its objectives – the scope (what the project will deliver), time (by when), quality (standard of work) and resources (money, people and equipment).

✓ Grasp the four stages.A project goes through four phases, and each one is distinct with separate processes that you must address with detailed planning. These four stages encompass starting the project, organising and preparing, carrying out the work and then closing the project.

✓ Coordinate teams and specialists.Projects usually involve working with people with different skill sets. You need to assign roles that emphasise function and not status, then encourage people to give their best and keep their commitment to the project.

✓ Track progress and minimise risks.Project control is essential to keep the project on track and heading towards successful delivery. You need to monitor progress and deal with change when it occurs so that you can bring the project to an orderly close.

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In This Chapter

Avoiding the common pitfalls that lead to project failure

Working out if you’re dealing with a ‘job’ or a ‘project’

Coming to grips with the Project Manager’s role

Knowing what to do at each stage in the project

R unning projects well is fast becoming an essential management skill. Many organisations, private and public sector, now recognise that they are losing money and business opportunities unnecessarily because they are failing to plan and control their projects effectively. Companies, charities and public sector organisations are constantly changing, and ever faster, as they adapt to new market conditions, business practices, regulatory requirements and technology. Running projects often creates the change, and as a result businesses are increasingly driven to find individuals who can excel in this project-oriented environment.

So, hang on tight – you’re going to need an effective set of skills and techniques to steer your projects to successful completion. This chapter gets you off to a great start by showing you what project management involves and offers some insight on why projects succeed or fail.

This chapter also gets you into the project management mindset by outlining the Project Manager’s role and covers the lifespan of the project, from the initial idea, right through to closure.

Because you’re reading this book, chances are you’ve been asked to manage a project for the first time or you’re already involved in projects and looking for easier and better ways of doing things. If the project is indeed your first one, that’s a challenge that gives you an opportunity to excel in something you haven’t done before; for many, managing a project even opens a door to a new career.

The really good news here, whether you’re completely new or have some experience, is that project management has been around for a long while. In that time, Project Managers have come up with highly effective strategies and a range of very practical techniques. You can benefit from all that experience, and this book takes you through what you need to know.

By following a sound approach to the project, you avoid many pitfalls that continue to contribute to, or cause, project failure on a mind-boggling scale. You may ask why, if good ways of doing things are out there, people ignore them and then see their projects fail. Good question. People make the same project mistakes repeatedly, and they’re largely avoidable.

The following list looks at the main causes of project failure. The list makes for depressing reading, but gives a good background against which to contrast successful project management and the approach in this book.

✓ Lack of clear objectives:Nobody’s really sure what the project is about, and even fewer agreed with it.

✓ Lack of risk management:Things go wrong that someone could easily have foreseen and then controlled to some degree or even prevented.

✓ No senior management ‘buy in’:Senior managers were never convinced and so never supported the project, leading to problems such as lack of resources. Neither did those managers exercise normal management supervision as they routinely do in their other areas of responsibility.

✓ Poor planning:Actually, that’s being kind, because often the problem is that no planning was done at all. It’s not surprising, then, that things run out of control.

✓ No clear progress milestones:The lack of milestones means nobody sees when things are off track, and problems go unnoticed for a long time.

✓ Understated scope:The scope and the Project Plan are superficial and understate both what the project needs to deliver and the resources needed to deliver it. The additional work that is necessary then takes the project out of control, causing delay to the original schedule and overspending against the original budget.