Karmona Pragmatic Blog

“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jerry Madden retired from NASA in 1995 as Associate Director of Flight Projects at Goddard Space Flight Center.
During his distinguished 37-year career, he have collected more than 100 observations about project management

IMHO, these are the best three:

(#14) Never ask management to make a decision that you can make. Assume you have the authority to make decisions unless you know there is a document that states unequivocally that you cannot.

// I have deleted the last part since I really think that people should strive to make decisions even if there is a document that states that you can’t…

(#16) Never make excuses; instead, present plans of actions to be taken

// IMHO, NO Results with a GOOD excuse will never even resemble Results

(#59) Running does not take the place of thinking. For yourself, you must take time to smell the roses. For your work, you must take time to understand the consequences of your actions.

//You better THINK!

To my humble opinion they are very much alike but Scrum do take project management to the extreme (like everything else) so the bottom line for me is that:

Scrum Master = Extreme Project Manager

…

(short post and without internal references this time but I couldn’t resist the bold stuff ;-)

A project manager is a professional* in the field of project management.

A project manager’s main duty is to ensure the success of a project by minimizing risk throughout the lifetime of the project.
This is done through a variety of methods, both formal and informal**. A project manager will usually have to ask penetrating** questions, detect unstated** assumptions, and resolve interpersonal conflicts**, as well as use more systematic management skills.

According to Wikipedia statistics: 69% of project failures*** are due to lack and/or improper implementation of project management methodologies.

I didn’t have the pleasure of being a project manager but I did see some good project manager implementations and this is my recommendation:

Risk Management – Identifying, managing and mitigating project risk

Issues Management – Identifying, tracking managing and resolving project issues

Reporting – Proactively disseminating project information to all stakeholder s(a good web based project dashboard will do the trick)

Quality Management

Scope Management – Proactively managing scope to ensure that only what was agreed to is delivered, unless changes are approved through scope management

Forecasting project trends – Defining and collecting metrics to give a sense for how the project is progressing and whether the deliverables produced are acceptable

Tracking – Managing the overall work-plan to ensure work is assigned and completed on time and within budget

Monitor resources (e.g. allocation, movement, skill matrix, roles and responsibilities)

Define Development Methodology

Managing integrations & dependencies (documentation, shared infrastructure etc.)

Configuration Management

Standardization, rationalization and training of processes & procedures (e.g. customer escalations & patches, customer enhancement request, beta or EA plans etc.)

Manage projects postmortem reviews

There are many things to be said on the project manger role and I know god is in the details Kalish but I was told that my blog posts should be much shorter so I will end it here and I reserve the right to post about it again if needed… (e.g. Scrum-Master vs. PMO post will come real soon)

Good Luck Yonit! ;-)

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* The term “Professional” should imply that this role isn’t trivial or intuitive as it might sounds or implemented in many organizations

** All the ‘bold**’ words should have “rang the complexity bell” – it will never be easy (or straight forward) and will require a bundle of emotional intelligence

*** When according to the same statistics 90% of projects do not meet time/cost/quality targets.