Project Management… and I used to wonder.

For a while after I grad­u­ate col­lege and would get together with my friends from col­lege I would ask…

What are you doing now?

They would answer with some­thing like the following…

I’m a project man­ager for an insur­ance com­pany where I manage…

I had a hard time fig­ur­ing out what it was they actu­ally did.  But now, as we are try­ing to do more and more at our school, I find that I am com­ing to under­stand the thing that had once con­fused me. My role as Direc­tor of Tech­nol­ogy has less to do with actu­ally “doing” things; instead, I am called to man­age all of the pieces involved in get­ting things done.  Unfor­tu­nately, the shift means I am no longer able to be as hands-on as I once was.

I recently saw a car­toon from ProjectCartoon.com that really put things into per­spec­tive for me and gave me a good under­stand­ing of what all of this meant.

The series of car­toons out­line the step taken in man­ag­ing a project and what every­one hears through­out the process… it’s like the old tele­phone game you used to play as a kid where you said one thing to some­one and they said it to the next per­son and by the end the mes­sage has changed sig­nif­i­cantly (and often hilariously).

The ideas, the thoughts and most impor­tantly the EXPECTATIONS change by the time you reach the end.

This point — that of man­ag­ing expec­ta­tions — is now the key to my job.

As I move from step to step in my projects, hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions and meet­ings, I have found that keep­ing expec­ta­tions in line and real­is­tic is cru­cial to the out­comes of the projects.  And I’m not say­ing this expec­ta­tion man­age­ment is easy.

What is said and men­tioned in pass­ing or dur­ing a casual con­ver­sa­tion can turn into a deliv­er­able and when the developer(s) or project engi­neers aren’t aware of that deliv­er­able, prob­lems ensue.

Most chal­leng­ing is that no one is really at fault.  Much like in the tele­phone game, each per­son believes that he/she heard and/or said the right thing, so how could he/she be wrong?

If you write things down, whether that be in a func­tional spec­i­fi­ca­tion or some­thing in an email just be sure t0 get it doc­u­mented.  This will be you best course of action if you have any ques­tions or prob­lem.  It won’t get the job done any sooner, but it will give you some­thing to ref­er­ence down the line.

There are a num­ber of good project man­age­ment pieces of soft­ware out there to help you man­age all of this.  I have used both 5pmWeb and Base­Camp and while these will both help you keep track of projects and man­age them as well, they are only as good as the pieces that go into them.

In the end this job which once seemed very vague to me is now becom­ing clearer.  As I come to grips with the fact that I can’t be as hands-on as I once was and actu­ally need to man­age the resources involved in any given project, I have also real­ized that it’s more about get­ting the job done well than being the one actu­ally doing it.  it’s the man­age­ment of these projects that means to most and mak­ing sure that all of the peo­ple involve, from those doing the work to those the work is for clearly under­stand what is needed and required throughout.