Here is the second part of things I knew before about project management. Here is pure wisdom after failing....
If you didn't read the first part, here it is. HERE
- The only permanent thing in the project world is change. At the beginning of a project, you will plan, estimate, and wait for things to happen just the way you thought. But you have some news; that won't happen. Everything changes; prepare for that. It doesn't mean that you don't have to plan. It means that you will have to rethink things and plan over and over again, and finally, be ok with that.
- Some dependencies are out of your control. On every project, there will be things that are out of your control. Plan for those. Stakeholders that will come to you with decisions you didn't even imagine. Providers that will not fulfill what they promised or when they promised they would. And you need those things to happen. You will need someone to provide servers for you to install; you need other projects to be completed in order to use their environments or to count with the people you need. Most of the time you won't be able to plan those things, but be prepared to adapt and to provide explanations on what is going on.
- Master your decision-making process. Managing projects is all about taking decisions. Deciding on the best approach to face things, deciding what will be done first and by whom. Who will be involved? Who will communicate things with? Whom will you ask for opinions or authorization on things? Sometimes those things are predefined, but several times they won't be. Some times you will have a lot of time to take a position on something, or you might have just seconds. What will be your process to take decisions? What will be your "mantra" or "motto" to guide your decisions?
- Communicate your progress or delays. Communicate your status at least once a week to all the people that are involved in the project. Why? If you do, that means that you will communicate things when the project is healthy and not only when you have problems or deviations from the initial plan. If you share when the deviations begin, once you will be really deviated, it will be easier to explain how you got there. If you communicate the stopper or problems you have, it's more probable that someone will do something to help. Also, we want to avoid hearing "why you didn't mention this earlier?." If so, you can answer, "Well, I did. Its in my weekly report."
- Projects are like a marathon; if you reach the goal, consider it a success. During the path, you will have a lot of problems and deviations from the initial plan. You must keep moving forward. If you succeed, nobody will remember small problems you had on the way to the end. But if you dont complete your project, all the problems that you had during the project, will remain till the end of time.? Dont worry if you trip on the way, focus on the completion of the whole project.
There are a lot of other things i can mention here, but i think that this list summarizes the most important or the ones that have more impact on my daily work.
What about you?? Do you have some that you can share?
