a blog about project management...

In a diviation from my typical Project Management stuff, I forgot to mention that it was my birthday last Weds., June 21, the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. We went to Disneyland to celebrate it.

According to the diagram below, I must be old now…

(OK, I wasn’t sure I wanted to link to this and I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt me, but… I was feeling goofy on my birthday…)

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]

I love these guys. A List Apart is a great reference for all things web development related. I found them through reading Zeldman, who I have much respect for, not the least of which is from reading his stories. Anyone who can make me cry from a personal story and then tell me how to make menu roll overs in CSS on the same site has got to be great.

A List Apart: Articles: How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team

It can be tricky to identify the right levels of manpower for a web team. Indeed, many organisations badly underestimate the amount of work required to keep their sites operating smoothly—they perhaps imagine that once a website is put live, it magically looks after itself. As a result, only the barest bones of proper staffing are put in place.

Fortunately, the problem of defining the number of people required on a web team is not insurmountable. A useful device for arriving at a good answer is the concept of “website scale.”

Step onto the scales

Website scale is a means of describing a site in terms of three parameters:

* size
* complexity
* level of activity

Almost any online venture can be represented in this way—from a small intranet to a massive e-commerce site. The reason website scale is so useful is that it provides a practical means for estimating the number of people needed to carry out the activities of site maintenance. This includes content publishing, feedback monitoring, technical maintenance and general quality assurance.

Read the whole thing.

My most annoying clients have been passive-aggressive, not telling me what I need to know until it’s too late. They like to “be nice” so they don’t upset me, until we halfway through the build and THEN they reveal that they really wanted a blue web site instead the the red one that we are building them. We’ll talk about how to deal with passive-agressive people in a later post. I’m not really sure the best way to deal with them, but I think it involves firearms. I’ll take an angry client over a passive-agressive one any day.

Today I want to talk about dealing with the Angry Client. I personally don’t care if they are angry or not. It might be a product of my deeply cynical attitude towards clients, but they can say or do anything they like and I don’t care, as long as they pay me at the end of the day. It frustrates me that it frustrates the people I work with, but the client doesn’t frustrate me. We tend to take things personally. We should not.

One of the core skills of a Project Manager is to be able to not take anything personally.

This should apply to both the good and the bad. This should apply to people that are both internal or external. We need to be able to communicate with developers, designers, QA, managers, accounting, and Sys Admins in their own language. We need to listen to them, give them directions, ask for help, and generally do whatever it takes to get the job done. We need to be able to communicate with external clients to get decisions made, get direction and input and generally do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Sometimes, that means making them mad. Sometimes it means being their best friend. Maybe we need to beg. Maybe we need to be humiliated so they can feel superior. Maybe we need to buy them lunch. Maybe we need to yell at them. If it means that we need to wear red sweaters and bark like a dog, then we need to do that. None of our feelings matter. It also doesn’t matter that someone thinks you are doing a great job and they love you.

It does not matter what anyone thinks or feels.

All that matters to a Project Manager is getting the project complete, on time and under budget. If you can have a few laughs and make a few friends along the way, so much the better.

OK - I can’t resist. In the comments a couple days ago, the words “control” and “chaos” came up in the comments in relation to Project Management. They are the heart of the Project Managers job, trying to control the chaos.

That made me flash back to my youth and the TV show Get Smart. It all came together in my head that Maxwell Smart worked for CONTROL and the bad guys worked for KAOS. It was the epic battle between Chaos and Control. Suddenly, I realized that we are Secret Agents! Project Managers work for Control and scope creep works for KAOS.

If only I could get that Cone of Silence to work on some of the people I deal with…

Get Smart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The series starred Don Adams as bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, Agent 86. Barbara Feldon’s character (Agent 99) had no name; even after Smart married her, he (and everyone else) would always address her as “99″. (In one episode she said that her name was “Susan Hilton” but she later claimed that it was an alias.[1]) Smart and 99 worked for CONTROL, a secret U.S. Government spy agency. Together, the pair investigated and opposed various threats to the world while Smart’s bumbling caused complications. However, at each story’s climax, Smart and 99 never fail to save the day. (In “The Nude Bomb”, Max worked for the PITS ‚Äî Provisional Intelligence Tactical Service, and by this time, his shoe phone was Touch Tone.)

The nemesis of CONTROL was KAOS, and KAOS’ Vice President of Public Relations and Terror, Siegfried (Bernie Kopell), showed up often as Maxwell Smart’s opponent, or would-be assassin. Though on opposite sides, Max and Siegfried clicked personally, and spoke fondly of one another - even when trying to kill each other!

Project Management is more of a state of mind than a job. I don’t know if you can teach it or not. I think there’s definately a level of either “getting it” or not. The basic concepts are transferable across all disciplines in life. The fact that you can get paid for doing it is amazing. All we do is get things done.

Here’s an example of how the skills transfer. I used to work for a video game publisher and I miss the old days. Cool article. Click to read it all.

How To Be Successful in the Gaming Industry
Project Managers, in realworld-speak, know what I’m talking about. I’ve been a PM for over 10 years, and I understand project lifecycles, or distinct phases of a project which build sequentially up to implementation (and beyond, if you include maintenance). You have your Planning phase, where you come up with your core concept of what it is you want to implement; your Analysis phase where you develop your gameplay proof-of-concepts and finalize your design document; your Design phase where you define your functional requirements; Development where you execute the deliverables in previous phases; Testing is obvious; and of course your implementation tasks. Each of these phases has specific criteria (”toll gates”) that must be met in order to proceed. This ensures that not only is the subsequent phase well-prepared, but it could also mean re-evaluation of the project to make sure it is feasible, profitable and worth doing.

Interesting question to ask as a Project Manager. Can you prove your worth? Sometimes I wonder, but then I see what everyone else does when I don’t get after them. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have a job. Until developers can talk directly to clients, clients can make good design decisions, and everyone gets their work done early with no scope creep, I’m safe.

Hat tip to Christian Connent

Project, Process & Business Improvement: Prove it
Prove it

Do you, as a project manager, add value to your project? Do you add value to your company? If you’re a PM, I’m sure the answer is a resounding “YES!” Okay, now prove it.

So you say, “My last project came in on time and under budget.” How do you know it would not have been the same without you? Or maybe even more under budget since your salary would not have been there. How do you know the project would not have been completed sooner without all those meetings? So, unless you can undertake identical projects with and without a PM, you cannot come up with quantitative financial data defining a PM’s value….after the fact.

Here’s a report on the Value of PM from the Center of Business Practices. The only comment I’d make is that the survey is based on 100 responses from PM practitioners, of which 59% were project managers. That’s like asking Congress if politics is a good thing.

If you are in a company without project management initiatives, you may want to measure your financial, productivity, customer, and process metrics for a period of time before implementing PM procedures and processes. Then you may have some comparative data. Otherwise you may only have those “touchy-feely” kind of data, such as personal testimonials, anecdotes and “I just know it’s good.”

I wanted to be a fireman when I was a little boy. I liked the hats and the danger and the excitment. I like big red trucks and spraying water. …asnd sirens. I liked the sirens.

I also wanted to be a construction worker. I loved the way they could take sand and wood and metal and make stuff. They could dig in the ground and build up a huge skyscraper from trucks loads of just “stuff”. Take “stuff” and build a building. I wanted to be able to do that.

Now, I’m a Project Manger. Not many boys want to grow up to be Project Mangers, but they do it anyway. It seems like every job I’ve ever had has always been a balancing act between the long range goal, the correct process, the right way to do things vs. the “ohmygoshwe’reallgonnadie!” tasks. It seems like I turned into a fireman after all, but the sirens sound differently now.

The immediate is always the enemy of the long term.

It seems that the best way to get the “immediate” into shape is to work on the long term goals. Sometimes, the long term goal is too far away and too much work, so it really is better to just take care of it now, but usually, it’s better to work a little bit on the long term all the time, until you get there.

Good managers know this and let you do it. Most managers don’t know this and tell you to get back to work on the ohmygoshwe’reallgoingtodie tasks. Sometimes, you should just nod your head, and then work on the long term goals anyway.

A good Project Manager is able to balance the short term needs against making it easier the next time around. We need process and procedure. (We need to know what the rules are so we can break them appropriately.)

We need to quit being firemen and be construction workers instead.