Foundations of Project Management

| 13 minutes

Understanding Project Management

Let’s review general concepts to start understanding more about project management:

Project: A unique endeavor which usually includes a set of unique deliverables; a series of tasks that need to be completed to reach a desired outcome.
- Project Task: An assignment (activity) that needs to be accomplished within a set period of time by the project manager, the project team, or the stakeholder.
Project Life Cycle: The basic structure for a project; consists of four different phases: initiate the project, make a plan, execute/complete tasks, and close the project.
Project Management: The application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.
Project Management Methodology: A set of guiding principles and processes for owning a project throughout its life cycle.
Project Management Office: An internal group at a company that defines and maintains project management standards across the organization.
Project Manager: Individual who leads projects from start to finish and serves as a guide for their team, using their organizational and interpersonal skills every step of the way.
- Project Manager Activities: planning and organizing (gathering requirements, what to accomplish), managing tasks (to team members, key), budgeting, controlling costs and other factors (keep project on track and on within budget).
Stakeholder: People who are interested in and affected by the project’s completion and success.

Becoming an effective project manager

Usually a Project Manager manages the project from start to finish and serves as a guide for their team, using their organizational and interpersonal skills every step of the way. Key values would be the prioritization (effectiveness to prioritize tasks), delegation (matching tasks to best individuals) and effective communication (both with team and stakeholders).

Remembering that Stakeholders are interested people and affected by the project’s completion and success. The leader of the organization could become a stakeholder as well.

Project Manager Responsibilities: Organizing product documentation, making use of productivity tools, creating schedules, managing tasks, budgeting, managing quality, and controlling costs.

● Types of Project Management Responsibilities: planning and organizing (use productivity tools and creating processes, create plans, timelines, schedules, documentation to track project), managing tasks (activity need to be accomplished in time by manager, team or stakeholders, keeps track of the team's workload, ensures that things are getting done within a set period of time, and demonstrates progress to people outside the immediate team, like stakeholders), budgeting and controlling costs / other factors (monitor and manage budget, track issues and risks, manage quality, remove barriers).

Project Manager Skills:

● Interpersonal Skills: behaviors used to interact with others, such as communication, active listening and leadership.
● Leadership and Team Dynamics (interpersonal): communication, negotiation, conflict mediation, understanding motivations. To help influence people without authority.
● Negotiation: A project manager has to know how to balance the needs of the teammates with the needs of the project. For example, if a teammate says they can’t complete their work on time, the project manager may need to compromise on a deadline.
● Conflict Mediation: Resolving tension and conflict within a team is an important skill. This may involve setting up a meeting with two teammates that are struggling to agree upon the best way to handle a shared task.
● Understanding Motivations: Getting to know teammates and figuring out what pushes them to their best work is an effective skill to have. Understanding motivations also involves understanding how teammates prefer to receive feedback.
● Core Skills of Project Manager: enabling decision making, communication and escalating, flexibility, strong organizational skills.
● Enabling Decision Making: The ability to enable decision making on the team, or gather decisions from the appropriate leader is crucial to keep projects on task and achieve their goals. A project manager will need to enable decisions frequently.
● Communicating and Escalating: A project manager will use communication skills in just about everything, especially when it is appropriate to escalate, so that critical issues are raised and addressed as soon as possible to reduce negative impact on a project.
● Flexibility: flexible planning (assess external constraints, plan for risks and challenges, calculate float; handle ambiguity: keep calm, express empathy, communicate what you know clearly, make decisions and stick to them, trust the expertise of the team).
● Remaining Flexible: A project manager knows how to be flexible when changes are needed. Plans will change — even with careful, upfront planning. As a project manager being flexible is critical to be able to course correct and adapt when the unexpected happens.
● Organizational Skills: Having strong organizational skills means having the ability to organize the core elements of a project and ensure nothing gets lost or overlooked. A project manager needs to be organized so that they can manage a project and all of its moving parts.
● Strong Organizational Skills: tools available (planning and scheduling software: templates, workflows, calendars; collaboration tools: email, collaboration software, dashboards; documentation: files, plans, spreadsheets; quality assurance tools: evaluations, productivity trackers, reports).

Project Life Cycle and Methodologies

Phases in the Project Life Cycle refers to:

1. Phase 1: initiating (project charter)
2. Phase 2: planning (project plan)
3. Phase 3: executing (managing tasks)
4. Phase 4: closing (evaluate and improve)

All these phases are part of any project in general, independent of the applied methodology.

Types of the Project Management Methodology that are mostly used in projects are linear and iterative:

● Linear: previous tasks (or even phases) must be completed before the next assignments can start. One of the most popular linear approaches is Waterfall .
● Iterative: some of the phases and tasks will overlap or happen at the same time that other tasks are worked on. Similarly, when referring to popular iterative approaches, Agile is one of the most used here.

Popular Project Management Approaches: currently most of the popular methodologies are waterfall and agile. However, there is a list of other project management methodologies that would be used depending on the nature of the project, project management knowledge, etc.:

● Lean
● Six Sigma
● Lean Six Sigma
● Waterfall
● Agile
● Scrum*
● Kanban*
Note: *not explained in this document

In AdvaCare, currently we are applying an Agile (and even Scrum) approach across company projects. We also utilize elements of the Waterfall methodology.

1. Lean methodology is often referred to as Lean Manufacturing because it originated in the manufacturing world. The main principle in Lean methodology is the removal of waste within an operation. The 8 types of waste within an operation: defects, excess processing, overproduction, waiting, inventory, transportation, motion, and non-utilized talent are important in this approach.

Usually, the best time to implement Lean project management is when you want to use limited resources, reduce waste, and streamline processes to gain maximum benefits. Some scenarios where it would be required to reduce waste are: lack of proper documentation, lack of process standards, not understanding the customers’ needs, lack of effective communication, lack of process control, inefficient process design, failures of management, etc.

It can be achieved by using the pillars of the Lean 5S quality tool. The term 5S refers to the 5 pillars that are required for good housekeeping: sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. The 5S method. Lean uses Kanban, a scheduling system to manage production. It enables to optimize the flow of team’s work, visual display to identify what needs to be done and when. Kanban and 5S are core principles of Lean Methodology.

● Here in Lean is where a PDCA (Plan > Do > Check > Act) cycle is being handled as well.
2. Six Sigma is a methodology used to reduce variations by ensuring that quality processes are followed every time. The term “Six Sigma” originates from statistics and generally means that items or processes should have 99.9996% quality. The 7 key principles: always focus on the customer, identify and understand how the work gets done, make processes flow smoothly, reduce waste and concentrate on value, stop defects by removing variation, involve and collaborate with the team, and approach improvement activity in a systematic way.

Usually, the best time to implement Six Sigma is to find aspects of the product or process that are measurable like time, cost, or quantity. Then inspect that measurable item and reject any products that do not meet the Six Sigma standard. Any process that created unacceptable products has to be improved upon.

● Here in Six Sigma is where a DMAIC cycle is being handled as well.
3. Lean Six Sigma includes the tools used in Lean, such as Kanban boards and 5S, builds quality in processes from the beginning. Products developed using Lean methods are then inspected or tested using Six Sigma standards. The products that do not meet these standards are rejected. Some differences: Lean streamlines processes while Six Sigma reduces variation in products by building in quality from the beginning and inspecting products to ensure quality standards are met.

Two methodologies Lean + Six Sigma. The 5 phases on The Lean Six Sigma approach: define: project goal, similar to initiation phase, measure: focus on data, set a plan to how to get data and how to measure it, analyze: identify gaps and issues, improve: present your finding and get ready to start making improvements, control: learning from the work you did up front to put new processes and documentation in place (DMAIC). It's a strategy for process improvement, identifying where problems are in the current process and fixing them.

4. Waterfall, invented in the 1970’s, it’s a sequence and order of phases, has a linear approach (e.g manufacturing, construction, software, app design, planning and retail). When to use a waterfall? When phases of the project are clearly defined or when there are tasks to complete before another can begin. The changes of the project are expensive.
5. Agile, invented in the 1990’s; able to move quickly and easily, willing to change and adapt, done in pieces, iterative approach, as a response for faster delivery of products, mainly software applications. Agile project phases overlap and tasks are completed in iterations. Agile is more of a mindset than a serie of steps and phases (e.g Customers having an idea what they want but not a concrete picture in mind, they have set a quality for the result but not concerned what they will look like, projects with high uncertainty and risk involved)
● SCRUM is a form of Agile, where the iterations are called sprints. Sprints are short chunks of time 1~4 weeks (preferably).

Examples:

➡ Agile approach can be used for developing a website in sprints, releasing functional components in short periods of time.
➡ Similarly, Waterfall methodology also can be applied for building a website, it would plan for and require the whole website to be complete before it can launch. But they're by no means the only or the best ones.
➡ Lean Six Sigma another way to approach projects: an Engineering Team can use Product Creating (Agile), Planning and Documentation (Waterfall). Customer Service Team can use Lean Six Sigma to improve an experience for users like offering new features based on recent analysis.

Waterfall and Agile Comparison

Waterfall

Agile

Project Manager's Role

Project manager serves as an active leader by prioritizing and assigning tasks to team members.

Agile project manager (or Scrum Master) acts primarily as a facilitator, removing any barriers the team faces.


Team shares more responsibility in managing their own work.

Scope

Project deliverables and plans are well-established and documented in the early stages of initiating and planning.


Changes go through a formal change request process.

Planning happens in shorter iterations and focuses on delivering value quickly.


Subsequent iterations are adjusted in response to feedback or unforeseen issues.

Schedule

Follows a mostly linear path through the initiating, planning, executing, and closing phases of the project.

Time is organized into phases called Sprints. Each Sprint has a defined duration, with a set list of deliverables planned at the start of the Sprint.

Cost

Costs are kept under control by careful estimation up front and close monitoring throughout the life cycle of the project.

Costs and schedules could change with each iteration.

Quality

Project manager makes plans and clearly defines criteria to measure quality at the beginning of the project.

Team solicits ongoing stakeholder input and user feedback by testing products in the field and regularly implementing improvements.

Communication

Project manager continually communicates progress toward milestones and other key indicators to stakeholders, ensuring that the project is on track to meet the customer’s expectations.

Team is customer-focused, with consistent communication between users and the project team.

Stakeholders

Project manager continually manages and monitors stakeholder engagement to ensure the project is on track.

Team frequently provides deliverables to stakeholders throughout the project. Progress toward milestones is dependent upon stakeholder feedback.

Organizational Structure and Culture

Organizational Structures: refers to the way a company or organization is arranged or structured. Who reports to Who.
Hierarchies of Organizations: reporting chart or organizational chart, people and departments. Two popular ones: classic and matrix.
● Classic functional or top-down structures, also known as functional organizations (e.g CEO and follow down the other roles of organization).

● Matrix has people above but also adjacent departments who expect to hear updates on other people's work progress (e.g. at Google major functions Sales, Marketing, etc. but also has Programs for Products like Google Search, where there are program managers, engineers, UX designers, etc).

How Organization’s Structure Impacts PM: one way organizational structure impacts PM is by the amount of authority (ability to make decisions for the project to impact organization), another way is the resources availability (knowing how to access the people, equipment and budget for the project).
PMO: Project Management Office, a group within an organization that defines, sets and helps maintain project management standards and processes throughout the organization. Functions of PMO: strategic planning and governance, best practices, common project culture, resource management, creation of project documentation, archives and tools.

PMO is a team of project managers, coordinates different parts of a project. Critical thing is that a Project manager must have a bird’s eye view of everything that’s happening in a project. Biggest benefit is that we need to share a lot of best practices with each other.

Organizational Cultures: provides context and guide how to operate on a daily basis.The values employees share, as well as organization’s values, mission and history. Company's Personality, e.g. company values stability and user’s feedback then make decisions based on testing results, if values innovation and revenue growth result faster and get new ideas. How do people communicate? How are decisions made? How are projects typically run? What kind of practices and values are reflected by people in an organization?
Importance of Organizational Culture: identity, people, processes.
How Organization’s Culture Impacts PM: communication, decision-making, rituals, previous management styles and values.To learn more about company’s culture you can: ask questions (atmosphere, policies, processes, values), listen people’s stories, take note of company rituals, understand your impact (change agent because you;re project manager), sharpen your communication skills.
Change Management: the process of delivering your completed project and getting people to adopt it. Core concepts of change management: create sense of ownership and urgency, figure out the right combination of skills and personalities, and effective communication.
Best Practices to Approach Change Management on Projects: be proactive, communicate about upcoming changes, follow a consistent process, practice empathy, use tools (e.g feedback mechanisms, flowcharts, culture mapping).
Governance: in simple words, it can be understood as who is in charge?
Corporate Governance: it’s the framework by which an organization achieves its goals and objectives. Roles and responsibilities during change, to understand who makes the decisions. Creation and use of steering committees.
Project Governance: it’s the framework for how project decisions are made. It helps keep projects running smoothly, on time and within budget. Involves policies, regulations, functions, processes, procedures and responsibilities.

By considering the long-term and short-term interests of the organization. By making thoughtful decisions about which projects to take on and avoiding projects if they don’t have sufficient resources. By providing stakeholders with timely, relevant, and reliable information.

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