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A movie is the ideal project work environment.
Once finished, the people move onto a different project, and often their demand is decided by the success and quality of their work.

Project-work is the future of work.
- Tom Peters

You have no future unless you add value and create projects.
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter

If anything can wrong, it will.
- Anonymous

Involve people in meaningful projects.
-Stephen Covey

The great trouble with a Harvard-type program is the arrogance it breeds. Students do not learn how difficult it is to accomplish anything.
– Peter Drucker

The Ideal Project is one where people don’t have meetings, they’ve lunch. The size of the team should be the size of a lunch table.
- Bill Joy

Planned Economy: When everything is included in the plans except economy.
- Carey McWilliams

TYPICAL DEVELOPMENT PHASES OF A PROJECT
* Project initiation stage;
* Project planning or design stage;
* Project execution or production stage;
* Project monitoring and controlling systems;
* Project completion stage.

TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT SKILLS THAT COME HANDY DURING PROJECTS
1. The ability to lead and work with others
2. The ability to converse with technical experts in their applied field
3. The ability to interface with operations, finance, and human resources personnel
4. The ability to participate in strategic and operational planning
5. The ability to mentor, negotiate, and make decisions
- Harvey A. Levine

Peter’s law: The unexpected always happens.
- Lawrence J. Peter

A QUICK REFRESHER GUIDE TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT

What are you going to do
- What is the goal of the project? Produce a written project definition statement.
- Create a precise specification for the project - Goals, Time, Team, Activities, Resources, Financials

Template for a project specification:
Describe purpose, aims and deliverables.
State parameters (timescales, budgets, range, scope, territory, authority).
State people involved and the way the team will work (frequency of meetings, decision-making process).
Establish 'break-points' at which to review and check progress, and how progress and results will be measured.

Complex projects will require a feasibility stage before the completion of a detailed plan.

Contingency planning - Build some slippage or leeway into each phase of the project. Err on the side of caution where you can.

Who is going to do it
Use the SMART acronym to help you delegate tasks properly. Don't delegate anything unless it passes the SMART test.

- Think ‘Team Selection’ – give some thought to who should be in your team. Analyze whether they have the skills required to enable them to carry out their role? If not, ensure they receive the right training. Check they are available for the period of the project.
- Identify who has responsibility for what in the project
- Monitor and communicate with team members constantly. Use one-on-one meetings if anyone has issues. Otherwise, daily project briefing/updates will do.

The Responsibility Chart: It is a visible record of who is taking on what responsibilities in the project. This chart defines who will,
- carry out what work.
- take decisions alone.
- take decisions jointly.
- manage progress.
- have to be consulted before a decision or action.
- have to be informed before a decision or action.
- be available for advice and coaching
- provide detailed help with a task.
- Individual tasks should be broken down into small enough divisions to enable people to have a weekly set of activities.

Nowadays, many project managers use a spreadsheet to track people and their tasks, timelines and progress.

How are you going to do it
- Create a work breakdown structure (WBS) for the project.
- Group tasks under different headings once you have a list. Update the task list whenever something news comes up.
- Identify dependencies (or predecessors) of all activities.
- Estimate how long each activity will take.
- Identify the critical path for the project. The critical path identifies those activities, which have to be completed by the due date in order to complete the project on time.
- Draw up a milestone plan. These are stages in the project. You can use the milestone dates to check the project is where it should be. Review whether activities have been delivered against the milestone dates and look forward at what needs to be achieved to deliver the next milestone.

Manage, motivate, inform, encourage, enable the project team

'Praise loudly; blame softly.'

- Catherine the Great

Manage the team and activities by meeting, communicating, supporting, and helping with decisions (but not making them for people who can make them for themselves).. One of the big challenges for a project manager is deciding how much freedom to give for each delegated activity. Look out for differences in personality and working styles in your team. Face to face meetings, when you can bring team members together, are generally the best way to avoid issues and relationships becoming personalized and emotional

Check, measure, review project progress; adjust project plans, and inform the project team and others
Analyze causes and learn from mistakes. Identify reliable advisors and experts in the team and use them. Keep talking to people, and make yourself available to all.

Record your work
- Keep accurate records of your project not only for audit purposes but also to ensure you have documents, which enable you to monitor changes.
- Produce one-page reports frequently highlighting key issues.
- Use a series of templates to support the monitoring process, e.g. milestone reporting, change control, log, planned v. actual.

When the project is over, thank the team, do a post-mortem.
How else will you know how to do better next time? Write a review report, and make observations and recommendations about follow up issues and priorities - there will be plenty.

- Adapted from ProjectAgency.com

A QUICK REFRESHER COURSE FOR PROJECT MANAGERS
1. The secret to getting people to do more and do it faster: Ask them what they think is reasonable to produce by when. Asked, people will often come up with a tighter deadline and offer to do more than you would have asked for.
2. Plan for everything - reviews, changes, dependencies, etc. Never freak out.
3. The Project Manager's motto: "What have you done, and what can I do for you?"
4. Remember the old saying, "There's good, fast and cheap - pick two."
5. The saying "on time, on budget, and to spec (specifications)" is hard to follow so don't sweat on it, especially on the specifications part.
6. Remember, adding more people to a late project makes it later.
7. The best Project Managers are dedicated to understanding what was being built (for building-things-type-projects), from as many angles as possible -- technical, design, marketing, users, internal and external politics, etc. They don't tend to know any of it in as much depth as the specialists but they often end up being the only folks who know a little of *all* of the aspects.
- Adapted from Metafilter.com

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