Archive for March, 2011

Project stakeholders

Author: admin

Mar 30

A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the outcome of your project. Contributors, customers, managers, and financial staff are all stakeholders; they are the people who will judge the success or failure of the project. To help you identify all the stakeholders in a project, consider what functions or people might be affected by the project’s activities or outcomes. Also ask who contributes resources—people, space, time, tools, and money—to the project.

Once you have identified the stakeholders, ask them to spell out what success on the project means for them. Because stakeholders’ interests vary, their definitions of success are likely to differ. One of your critical tasks in the defining and organizing phase is to meld stakeholders’ expectations into a coherent and manageable set of project objectives.

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Project team leader

Author: admin

Mar 29

Many large projects have a project team leader. This individual reports directly to the project manager and takes responsibility for one or more aspects of the work. In small projects, the project manager also acts as the project team leader.

An effective project team leader plays six roles:

  • Initiator: Identifies actions needed to meet project goals. Encourages team members to take those actions.
  • Model: Demonstrates behavior that supports the project’s success. For example, if team members need to interact with customers to complete the project, the team leader regularly travels to customer locations, creates customer focus groups, and so forth. These behaviors encourage other team members to follow suit.
  • Negotiator: Uses negotiating skills to obtain resources needed for the project.
  • Listener: Spends as much time listening as talking. Gathers signals from the environment—about impending trouble, employee discontent, and opportunities for gain. Makes decisions informed by the experiences and knowledge of many people.
  • Coach: Uses coaching to help team members excel; identifies coaching opportunities in the course of everyday business.
  • Working member of the team: Does a share of the work, particularly in areas where he or she has special competence. Acts as a member of the team.

The tasks of a project team leader include:

  • Regularly communicating progress and problems with the project manager.
  • Periodically assessing team progress and the outlook of members.
  • Making sure that everyone contributes and everyone’s voice is heard.

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Project team members

Author: admin

Mar 24

Project team members perform most of the work. They should be selected on the basis of their skills and ability to collaborate with others. The primary tasks of project team members are to:

  • Complete all assigned tasks on time.
  • Communicate dissatisfactions and concerns with the leader and other members.
  • Support the leader and other members.
  • Help others when they ask, and ask for help when they need it.

The optimal size for a project team depends on the project’s goals and tasks. Have just enough people to do the job and no more. Having too few people will slow you down and deprive you of needed skills. Having too many will also slow you down by diverting valuable time and energy into communication and coordination efforts.

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Project manager

Author: admin

Mar 20

The project manager plans and schedules project tasks and oversees day-to-day project execution. He or she has the greatest accountability for the endeavor’s success. This person receives authority from the sponsor and plays a central role in each phase of the project’s life cycle.

In many respects, a project manager’s tasks resemble those of any manager leading a team. Both individuals:

  • Identify needed resources
  • Recruit effective participants
  • Coordinate activities
  • Negotiate with higher-level management, especially the sponsor
  • Mediate conflicts
  • Set milestones
  • Manage the budget
  • Keep work on track
  • Ensure that project deliverables are provided on time and on budget

Like team leaders, project managers do not always have formal authority over the people participating in the project work.

For example, the project manager of a new IT initiative may be the IT manager, but the project team members may come from marketing, finance, customer service, and so forth.

Thus project managers must rely on leadership skills to influence team members’ behavior and performance.

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Balance competing demands

Author: admin

Mar 6

Every project has three competing demands:

  • Quality: Satisfaction of the project’s requirements.
  • Time: The amount of time needed to produce the project’s deliverables.
  • Cost: The number/amount of money, people, and other resources needed to complete the project.

You can think of these three competing demands as variables in an equation:

Quality = Time + Cost

Change any one of these variables, and you change the other two as well.

For example, suppose you decide to complete a database project in half the time than you originally estimated. In this case, one of two things would happen: Your costs would go up, or the quality of the final product would go down. That’s because you will need to employ more people to get the job done faster, or you’ll have to accept a system that has more bugs than originally planned because you didn’t have enough time or personnel to double-check its functionality.

Deciding whether and how to make tradeoffs among quality, time, and cost is a major aspect of project management. It is crucial that you keep all stakeholders informed of any changes in your project’s objectives—and that you explain the consequences of those changes in terms of quality, time, and cost. If you neglect to do this, your stakeholders may end up surprised—and dissatisfied—by the final outcome of the project.

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