Secrets of Successful Project Management

Posted on Sep 7, 2024 in Other subjects

Tip #1: Define Project Success Criteria

At the beginning of the project, make sure the stakeholders share a common understanding of how they will determine whether this project is successful.

Tip #2: Identify Project Drivers, Constraints, and Degrees of Freedom

Every project needs to balance its functionality, staffing, budget, schedule, and quality objectives. Define each of these five project dimensions as either a constraint within which you must operate, a driver aligned

Tip #3: Define Product Release Criteria

Early in the project, decide what criteria will determine whether or not the product is ready for release. You might base release criteria on the number of high-priority defects still open, performance measurements, specific functionality being fully operational, or other indicators that the project has met its goals.

Tip #4: Negotiate Commitments

Despite pressure to promise the impossible, never make a commitment you know you can’t keep. Engage in good-faith negotiations with customers and managers about what is realistically achievable.

Tip #5: Write a Plan

The hard part is actually doing the planning—thinking, negotiating, balancing, talking, asking, and listening. The time you spend analyzing what it will take to solve the problem will reduce the number of surprises you have to cope with later in the project.

Tip #6: Decompose Tasks to Inch-Pebble Granularity

Inch-pebbles are miniature milestones.

Tip #7: Develop Planning Worksheets for Common Large Tasks

If your team frequently undertakes certain common tasks, such as implementing a new object class, develop activity checklists and planning worksheets for these tasks.

Tip #8: Plan to Do Rework After a Quality Control Activity

Almost all quality control activities, such as testing and technical reviews, find defects or other improvement opportunities

Tip #9: Plan Time for Process Improvement

Your team members are already swamped with their current project assignments, but if you want the group to rise to a higher plane of software engineering capability, you’ll have to invest some time in process improvement.

Tip #10: Manage Project Risks

If you don’t identify and control risks, they will control you. Spend some time during project planning to brainstorm possible risk factors, evaluate their potential threat, and decide how you can mitigate or prevent them.

Tip #11: Estimate Based on Effort, Not Calendar Time

People generally provide estimates in units of calendar time, but I prefer to estimate the amount of effort (in labor-hours) associated with a task, then translate the effort into a calendar-time estimate.

Tip #12: Don’t Schedule People for More Than 80% of Their Time

Tracking the average weekly hours that your team members actually spend working on their project assignments is a real eyeopener. The task-switching overhead associated with the many activities we are all asked to do reduces our effectiveness significantly.

Tip #13: Build Training Time into the Schedule

Determine how much time your team members typically spend on training activities annually, and subtract that from the time available for them to be assigned to project tasks.

Tip #14: Record Estimates and How You Derived Them

When you prepare estimates for your work, write down those estimates and document how you arrived at each of them.

Tip #15: Use Estimation Tools

Many commercial tools are available to help you estimate entire projects. With their large databases of actual project experience, these tools can give you a spectrum of possible schedule and staff allocation options.

Tip #16: Respect the Learning Curve

If you’re trying new processes, tools, or technologies for the first time on this project, recognize that you will pay a price in terms of a short-term productivity loss.

Tip #17: Plan Contingency Buffers

Things never go precisely as you plan on a project, so your budget and schedule should include some contingency buffers at the end of major phases to accommodate the unforeseen.

Tip #18: Record Actuals and Estimates

If you don’t record the actual effort or time spent on each task and compare them to your estimates, you’ll never improve your estimating approach. Your estimates will forever remain guesses.

Tip #19: Count Tasks as Complete Only When They’re 100% Complete

One benefit of using inch-pebbles for task planning is that you can classify each small task as either done or not done, which is more realistic than trying to estimate what percent of a large task is complete at any time. Don’t let people “round up” their task completion status; use explicit criteria to tell whether a step truly is completed.

Tip #20: Track Project Status Openly and Honestly

Create a climate in which team members feel safe reporting project status accurately. These tips won’t guarantee success, but they will help you get a solid handle on your project and ensure that you’re doing all you can to make it succeed in a crazy world.

Definition – Integration of Processes

A business process or business method is a collection of interrelated tasks, which solve a particular issue. There are three types of business processes:

Management processes: The processes that govern the operation of a system. Typical management processes include “Corporate Governance” and “Strategic Management.”
Operational processes: Processes that constitute the core business and create the primary value stream. Typical operational processes are purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, and sales.
Supporting processes: Which support the core processes.

A business process can be decomposed into several sub-processes, which have their own attributes, but also contribute to achieving the goal of the super-process. The analysis of business processes typically includes the mapping of processes and sub-processes down to activity level. A key characteristic of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the focus on business processes. Davenport defines a (business) process as “a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action. Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.”

This definition contains certain characteristics a process must possess. These characteristics are achieved by a focus on the business logic of the process (how work is done), instead of taking a product perspective (what is done). Following Davenport’s definition of a process we can conclude that a process must have clearly defined boundaries, input and output, that it consists of smaller parts, activities, which are ordered in time and space, that there must be a receiver of the process outcome – a customer – and that the transformation taking place within the process must add customer value. Hammer & Champy’s definition can be considered as a subset of Davenport’s. They define a process as “a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer.” As we can note, Hammer & Champy have a more transformation oriented perception, and put less emphasis on the structural component–process boundaries and the order of activities in time and space.

Rummler & Brache use a definition that clearly encompasses a focus on the organization’s external customers, when stating that “a business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or service. Most processes are cross-functional, spanning the ‘white space’ between the boxes on the organization chart. Some processes result in a product or service that is received by an organization’s external customer. According to Rummler and Brache, a typical characteristic of a successful process-based organization is the absence of secondary activities in the primary value flow that is created in the customer oriented primary processes. The characteristic of processes as spanning the white space on the organization chart indicates that processes are embedded in some form of organizational structure.

Finally, let us consider the process definition of Johansson et al. They define a process as “a set of linked activities that take an input and transform it to create an outputThis definition also emphasizes the constitution of links between activities and the transformation that takes place within the process. Johansson et.al. also include the upstream part of the value chain as a possible recipient of the process output.

Summarizing the four definitions above, we can compile the following list of characteristics for a business process.

Definability: It must have clearly defined boundaries, input and output.
Order: It must consist of activities that are ordered according to their position in time and space.
Customer: There must be a recipient of the process’ outcome, a customer.
Value-adding: The transformation taking place within the process must add value to the recipient, either upstream or downstream

BPR

Business Process Redesign is “the analysis and design of workflows and processes within and between organizations”. Teng et al. define BPR as “the critical analysis and radical redesign of existing business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in performance measures.” Davenport & Short define business process as “a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome.” A process is “a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization”. In their view processes have two important characteristics: (i) They have customers (internal or external), (ii) They cross organizational boundaries, i.e., they occur across or between organizational subunits. One technique for identifying business processes in an organization is the value chain method proposed by Porter and Millar. Processes are generally identified in terms of beginning and end points, interfaces, and organization units involved, particularly the customer unit. High Impact processes should have process owners. Examples of processes include: developing a new product; ordering goods from a supplier; creating a marketing plan; processing and paying an insurance claim; etc. Processes may be defined based on three dimensions: Entities: Processes take place between organizational entities. They could be Interorganizational (e.g. EDI, i.e., Electronic Data Interchange), Interfunctional or Interpersonal (e.g. CSCW, i.e., Computer Supported Cooperative Work). Objects: Processes result in manipulation of objects. These objects could be Physical or Informational. Activities: Processes could involve two types of activities: Managerial (e.g. develop a budget) and Operational (e.g. fill a customer order).

7 Myths

The Myth of Reengineering Novelty: Reengineering, although about familiar concepts, is new in that these concepts are combined in a new synthesis. These key components have never been together before.
The Myth of the Clean Slate: Regardless of Hammer’s (1990) exhortation: “Don’t automate, obliterate!” clean slate change is rarely found in practice. Or, as Davenport and Stoddard (1994) state: A “blank sheet of paper” used in design usually requires a “blank check” for implementation. Hence, a more affordable approach for most companies is to use Clean Slate Design which entails a detailed vision for a process without concern for the existing environment. However, the implementation is done over several phased projects. Also supported by preliminary findings of Stoddard & Jarvenpaa 1995: their findings ran contrary to Hammer (1990): “although reengineering can deliver radical designs, it does not necessarily promise a revolutionary approach to change. Moreover, a revolutionary change process might not be feasible given the risk and cost of revolutionary tactics.”
The Myth of Information Systems Leadership: In contrast to the much touted leadership role, Information Systems (IS) is generally viewed as a partner within a cross-functional team that is generally headed by a non-IS project leader and a non-IS business sponsor who have better control over the processes that are being redesigned.
The Myth of Reengineering vs. Quality: Unlike Hammer & Champy’s (1993) call for all out “radical change,” most companies have a portfolio of approaches to organizational change including reengineering, continuous improvement, incremental approaches, and restructuring techniques.
The Myth of Top-Down Design: The implementation and execution of the redesigned processes depends upon those who do the work. Hence, the participation, and more importantly, acceptance and ownership, at the grass roots level is essential for successful BPR.
The Myth of Reengineering vs. Transformation: BPR is a process that contributes to organizational transformation (OT), however it is not synonymous with transformation. OT is defined as, “Profound, fundamental changes in thought and actions, which create an irreversible discontinuity in the experience of a system” (Adams 1984). OT is generally about the emergence of a new belief system and necessarily involves reframing, which is a discontinuous change in the organization’s or group’s shared meaning or culture. It also involves broad changes in other organizational dimensions besides the work processes: such as organizational structure, strategy, and business capabilities.
The Myth of Reengineering’s Permanence: Davenport & Stoddard (1994) speculate that reengineering has peaked in the US in 1994 and would probably become integrated with much broader organizational phenomena: such as another synthesis of ideas that includes the precepts of reengineering;

Responsibility

Meaning of responsibility.
Responsibility is taking care of your duties. Responsibility is answering for your actions. Responsibility is accountability. Responsibility is trustworthiness.

Why is being responsible important
Responsibility is a core value for living honorably. Responsibility is being accountable for your behavior. Responsibility is being dependable when you have things to do.

Examples:
You complete your chores at home without being constantly reminded. You take good care of your personal possessions. You come home on time. You call your parents if you are late. You eat healthy food, get plenty of exercise, and take good care of yourself. You take care of your lunch money and don’t lose it on the playground. You keep a promise. You put part of your allowance into a savings account instead of spending it all. You complete your school assignments on time and to the best of your ability. You take care of your pet.

Heroes and heroines
Eddie Akau – was a well-known surfer with great strength of character and a willingness to sacrifice for others. As president, he tried to reorganize the courts of law, establish a system of public education, and guarantee religious freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt – modeled civic and national responsibility as a social activist.

Proverbs and maxims
Ideas don’t work unless we do. He who is not ready today will be even less so tomorrow. If everyone sweeps in front of his own front door, all the world would be clean. What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular.

Many Types of Responsibilities

MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to other people, animals, and the earth. This means caring, defending, helping, building, protecting, preserving, and sustaining. You’re accountable for treating other people justly and fairly, for honoring other living things, and for being environmentally aware.
LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY to the laws and ordinances of your community, state, and country. If there’s a law you believe is outdated, discriminatory, or unfair, you can work to change, improve, or eliminate it. You can’t simply decide to disobey it.
FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY means treating your parents, siblings, and other relatives with love and respect, following your parents’ rules, and doing chores and duties at home.
COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY. As a part of the community, you’re responsible for treating others as you want to be treated, for participating in community activities and decisions, and for being an active, contributing citizen. Pick up trash to keep the community clean. Read local and community newspapers to stay informed. Vote in elections when you’re old enough.
RESPONSIBILITY TO CUSTOMS, TRADITIONS, BELIEFS, AND RULES. These might come from your family, your community, your heritage, or your faith. Learn what they are and do your best to respect and follow them.

Interpersonal Skills:

“Interpersonal skills” refers to mental and communicative algorithms applied during social communications and interactions in order to reach certain effects or results

Leadership

The process of successfully influencing the activities of a group towards the achievement of a common goal

Networking

The ability to actively seek, identify and create effective contacts with others, and to maintain those contacts for mutual benefit. In addition to strong Communication Skills and Personal Skills, Networking uses the Background skills of network building and motivating others.

Background Skills

Mentoring is:
Being a trusted advisor and helper with experience in a particular field. Actively supporting and guiding someone to develop knowledge and experience, or to achieve career or personal goals (for example, a third-year student mentoring a first year student, helping to adjust to the university experience). A mentoring relationship may be formal or informal, but must involve trust, mutual respect, and commitment as both parties work together to achieve a goal (for example, mentoring a younger member of a team to achieve better performance in the lead-up to a sporting event).

Group work is:
Identifying appropriate evidence and weighing up that evidence to make a choice (for example, gathering and assessing information to find the best way to perform an experiment).

Delegation is:
Taking responsibility for determining when to ask someone else to make a decision or carry out a task (for example, figuring out what is a fair distribution of the workload in a group project, and sharing responsibility with others). Distributing responsibility and authority in a group by giving someone else the discretion to make decisions that you have the authority to make (for example, as the chosen leader of a lab experiment team, you could assign tasks and decisions to different group members)

Collaboration is:
Working cooperatively and productively with other team members to contribute to the outcomes of the team’s work (for example, dividing the workload and sharing the results of your own work with others in the group, or assisting members of the group who are having difficulty completing their tasks).

Network building is:
Creating contacts with other people and maintaining those contacts (for example, meeting someone at a seminar with similar interests, and swapping email addresses with them). Acquiring and maintaining information about people who might be useful contacts for specific purposes (for example, seeking out people established in an industry you hope to work with one day). Using a contact in an ethical manner to help each of you meet specific goals, (for example, collaborating on projects of importance to both of you).

Motivating others is:
any activity in which students work together; any activity which has been specifically designed so that students work in pairs or groups, and may be assessed as a group (referred to as formal group work); or when students come together naturally to help each other with their work (referred to as informal group work). peer group activity in lab classes, tutorials etc

4-P Model:

The 4-P Model, describes ideal behavior not just of doctors and lawyers and clerics, but of all the true professionals of this era and eras past. It embraces nurses and therapists, carpenters and farmers and bricklayers. It makes room for the Knights of Malta, the Engineers who built the Roman viaducts, Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Bernini, and the Egyptian doctors who invented the first science of medicine. They were all professionals to the extent that they passed the four P-tests: they were proficient at what they did, they were permanent in their involvement, they professed their dedication and they had a code of promises arbitrated by a permanent ethical sense. Professionalism need not be limited to those who practice some sophisticated or highly respectable trade. Consider a man at bottom of any conceivable hierarchy: P.G. Wodehouse’s marvelous character, Jeeves. He too passes the four P-tests. His permanence is legendary (unthinkable that he might take up a position in retailing, for example), he is deft at each of the tasks he undertakes, he has a code of conduct that is his constant concern, and he has solemnly declared his dedication to his calling. The man even belongs to a professional society, the Ganymede Club. Many managers can’t bring themselves to profess to be managers. One who manages a group of engineers, tends to think of himself or herself as an engineer; one who manages a group of physicians tends to think of himself or herself as a physician

Model Zero:

A pejorative sense to this name is intended, since the attitude represented by Model Zero is retrograde and offensive . . . but nonetheless common. In this model, the word ‘professionalism’ is a simple surrogate for compliant uniformity. In Model Zero organizations, you may be considered unprofessional because of the way you dress, or wear your hair (either longer than God intended for males, or shorter than God intended for females), or because of what you post on your walls. You can definitely be thought unprofessional for questioning authority or contradicting Revealed Truth. Popping popcorn in the microwave is unprofessional in Model Zero companies, presumably because it gives the workplace an unprofessional odor. Professionalism seems to have to do with almost anything except getting quality work done. The Model Zero manager is demonstrating a compulsive need for uniformity, something that we encounter from time to time in gardeners. Here we refer to that meticulous kind of gardener who would pluck and throw away a perfect carrot (perhaps the healthiest one in the garden) just because it is growing an inch or two outside the row. Or perhaps he/she has a variant purpose for the garden: to be a living demonstration of the Gardener’s dominion over the land. So too the Model Zero manager.

Bio-Informatics and Medical Applications:

Bioinformatics and computational biology involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry, and biochemistry to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level. Research in computational biology often overlaps with systems biology. Major research efforts in the field include sequence alignment, gene finding, genome assembly, protein structure alignment, protein structure prediction, prediction of gene expression and protein-protein interactions, and the modeling of evolution. The terms bioinformatics and computational biology are often used interchangeably. However bioinformatics more properly refers to the creation and advancement of algorithms, computational and statistical techniques, and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data. Computational biology, on the other hand, refers to hypothesis-driven investigation of a specific biological problem using computers, carried out with experimental or simulated data, with the primary goal of discovery and the advancement of biological knowledge. Put more simply, bioinformatics is concerned with the information while computational biology is concerned with the hypotheses. A representative problem in bioinformatics is the assembly of high-quality genome sequences from fragmentary “shotgun” DNA sequencing. Other common problems include the study of gene regulation to perform expression profiling using data from microarrays or mass spectrometry. Health informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, computer science and health care. It deals with the resources, devices and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems.

Law Enforcement:

The Cyber Law Enforcement Organization is a network of law enforcement officers, who specialize in cybercrime investigation, training other law enforcement officers and who assist cybercrime victims online. Their tipline handles child pornography, cyberstalking and missing children tips, as well as tips for cyberscams and fraud online.

The Cyber Law Enforcement Organization also includes the Legal Eagles group of prosecutors, defense counsel and legal experts in the field of cybercrime, to help educate and guide the Internet community on crime prevention and reporting of cybercrimes.

The Cyberlaw Enforcement Organization (CLEO) has four main goals:

To unite police officers worldwide and educate them on cybercrime, cyberlaw, investigative techniques and how they interact.
To provide investigative assistance to police departments when requested.
To provide online help and education for victims of cyberstalking, cyberharassment, pedophiles, hacking, and virus attacks, as well as access to support groups and online counseling.
To standardize relations and communications between police departments, Internet Service Providers, Legal system contacts and victim advocacy groups worldwide.

Law Enforcement Goes High Tech

Law enforcement officers used to wear a gun and a badge. Now some even wear a laser gun to catch speeders. In the present era, the tools they wear and carry will be even more technical.

The patrol cars are all equipped with computers now. In an instant, an officer can check for stolen cars or property. In the future, everything will be done from cars electronically flashing data to records officers, Yurchuck said. “Very little will be done on paper,” he said. There are video cameras that will take pictures if someone runs a red light. It will enter the pictures into the system, and the vehicle owner can be issued a citation. “Officers will deal with the owners, whether they are the primary operators of the cars or not. They are responsible,” Yurchuck said.

IT in Political Processes:

IT enables the delivery of government services as it caters to a large base of people across different segments and geographical locations. The effective use of IT services in government administration can greatly enhance existing efficiencies, drive down communication costs, and increase transparency in the functioning of various departments. It also gives citizens easy access to tangible benefits, be it through simple applications such as online form filling, bill sourcing and payments, or complex applications like distance education and tele-medicine. E-governance approach will, leverage the power of IT to streamline administrative functions and increase transparency. IT has a vital role to play in all transactions that the government undertakes. It helps the government cut red-tapism, avoid corruption, and reach citizens directly. E-governance initiative will help citizens learn about the various policies, processes and help-lines that the government offers. The governments of Singapore, Canada and Switzerland have implemented such portals, and set the benchmarks in this regard. With the help of IT, the government can process citizen to government transactions such as the filing of tax returns, death and birth registration, land records, etc. A strong technology infrastructure can help central and state governments deliver a comprehensive set of services to citizens.

Agriculture, power and education are fields where the government makes use of IT to provide services to citizens. The revenue collection department is in the process of using information technology for applications such as income tax. Some notable examples:

In Gujarat there are websites where citizens log on and get access to the concerned government department on issues such as land, water and taxes.
In Hyderabad, through e-Seva, citizens can view and pay bills for water, electricity and telephones, besides municipal taxes. They can also avail of birth / death registration certificates, passport applications, permits / licences, transport department services, reservations, Internet and B2C services, among other things.
eChoupal, ITC’s unique web-based initiative, offers farmers the information, products and services they need to enhance productivity, improve farm-gate price realisation, and cut transaction costs. Farmers can access the latest local and global information on weather, scientific farming practices, as well as market prices at the village itself through this web portal – all in Hindi. eChoupal also facilitates the supply of high quality farm inputs as well as the purchase of commodities at the farm.