Projectrecovery

Project Manager Week 1 on the Job

You got a new project management job!

Excitement is high as well as energy level and you are eager to start and learn about absolutely anything that can help you to success and establish your reputation within the team!

If this is your only goal you will use your project management IPECC (I-Initiate, P- Plan, E- Execute, C-Control, C- Close) techniques. You also need to be systematic and use your PMBOK knowledge areas to collect information about your project and start running.

The following are tips that will help you feel good and demonstrate progress:

Organize calls with main stakeholders with the objective to identify driving factors and success criteria for your project
Create or obtain project governance chart and identify names and understand roles of the people that you will have to interact with
Identify and document existing project management communication elements (meetings and reporting structure, governance)
Request and obtain access to all tools and repositories used
Understand your project basics: funding, health, open issues, risks


Remember at the end of week one and definitely week two people who hired you will want to see some results. You definitely don’t want to get a title of a lazy project manager!

You may have some other goals as well

First few weeks on the job you are allowed to ask many questions. If you want not only to be successful as a project manager but you also want to make a difference in the company by establishing your visibility and leadership you need to look at the project management environment as an ecosystem. Using your experience and knowledge identify area where you can contribute the most! Good reference for this would be to become familiar with Organizational Project Management Maturity Models and see if there are best practices that can be further enhanced in your company. More information can be found here:

Current PMI Standards and Guides Projects We continue to expand and update our library of standards to meet the evolving needs of the project management profession. Find out about current projects.

When you should feel fortunate as a PM
Let’s look at the following situation. The project is in ex*****on phase, funding approved, scope defined, teams in place including a few vendors, schedule defined and it should be a quit nice PM job!

You as a PM are monitoring weekly progress including milestones, deliverables and resource spending.

One of the teams is reporting green issuing a regular weekly status report for a few weeks now (3 to 4), but it is hard to see the evidence of the work being completed.

In the weekly team meetings you ask all the right questions: Are you on track, are there any issues, will delivery be on time as agreed on, and no indication that there is any problem.

As something feel wrong you reach out the responsible manager or account manager in case of the vendor engagement and you get some hint and indications that the work is stalling and it will be schedule impact. The next day you receive an official email indicating the teams is far behind the schedule and need more time and money to deliver.

After an initial shock what can you do to remedy this situation and get the project back on track?

Meet the responsible team manger to find out the root cause immediately next 4 hours – this is a situation for a panic button!
Once you have all required information and impacts identify a plan to remedy a problem – next 24 hours
Share the issue with your sponsor and obtain the agreement to execute the recovery plan
Establish new governance to resolve the issue including accountable Sponsor, Business Executive, Technology Executive, if Vendor include Vendor Management Account Manager and Vendor executive
Schedule frequent checkpoint to get new agreement in place, this should be done within a few weeks
Provide regular update and note decisions required
After the agreement is in place and agreed on milestones completed return to your BAU project model
If you have Sponsor that will support you all the way to recover the project you will probably feel humble and very LUCKY!

What to do if Project Change is Identified

An easy way for a project to get in trouble is NOT to communicate change identified by different teams in any phase of the project. The change we discuss here is more on the technology side rather than business process change.

We all know that the change is inevitable and can be identified in any phase of the project.

In the organization that has well established project management as a discipline you will find that there are already in place a template to describe the change and a process to approve the change.

The problem and an opportunity to get our project into trouble are the following:

Change was not presented to anyone, human error
Change was not communicated to all stakeholders and impacted teams and the team is on the way to deliver the solution that does not work. This situation usually gets identified during the testing or even in production when it is more costly and too late
Change was not described at the details required and it was misunderstood by some teams
Assumptions , risks and constraints were not identified at the time when the change was assessed
Cost and funding source were not identified during the change impact process
Interdependencies were not identified at the time change impact is conducted
Impact to the ongoing cost was not discussed
Impact to steady state processes was not identified but t is required
Impact to a a different line of business or segment area was not identified
Timeline of the change proposed was not aligned to steady state activities already identified, or marketing strategies already planned for
If not taken into account any of the activities listed above may delay your project change to be approved or even stop your project.

I reached the end of the project. Created Etsy sale page and activated it, updated page, created Instagram page, launched ãa product by creating and event in Toronto and the second show was just completed in Tellaro, Italy. All pictures were posted on the MBSilk FB page. Happy silk day!

One year into retirement with a new focus on getting the silk scarves painting project going.

It is a new development and of course requires a lot of time, investigation, communication, networking and project obstacles resolution. Budget is limited so I have to think what makes sense and will provide long term benefits to the idea.

Living on 2 continents does not help with getting the distribution process going. The benefit is that I meet new people and have ability to expend my network and my skills by attending different venues and courses.

Something that is different with your personal project is that in order to create a piece of art your mind needs to be in a state to create a piece of art.

I love it anyway and for sure priorities need to be clear at all times. Family and then work!!!!!!!!!!!!