Project Management

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In the past, projects tended to be sequential: a rigorous requirement analysis was undertaken; a specification or detailed plan drawn up and signed off on before work commenced. On completion of the work, if the project resulted in a product or service, it would enter a limited testing period before release. The project itself would be tightly managed to a fixed budget and fixed ship date. Both of which were rarely met! Or if they were - it was at the cost of quality.

Today it is rarely like that. Projects are not rigorously analysed up front. Implementation and review are an incremental, iterative process. Continual refinement of the business requirements and the solution (increasingly a technology-based one) is essential. Deadlines and budgets are not so sacrosanct. Shipping a basic high quality solution early, learning from it and then frequently revving it - is the norm.

Not only is the nature of projects changing. Not only are people involved in more than one project. But the numbers of projects themselves are proliferating. Driving and managing anything within an organisation is done with a project mindset.

Projects today are fast and fluid. In the past Pert charts and Gantt charts were the project manager's prime tools. Tight control was the name of the game. Today more flexible collaborative knowledge sharing tools are needed as the project deliverables and time scales frequently change. What is now important – if not essential - is the management of the project knowledge; to incorporate learning into every stage of the project; to build in frequent reviews; to involve all stakeholders, to communicate more broadly. It is more about knowledge management than traditional project management – especially when products are increasingly intangible “knowledge products” anyway.

We need new mindsets, new tools and new methodologies to cope with the change. Here are some resources that introduce you to some of these new ways of thinking and working and to provoke you to re-asses how you run projects in your organisation.

Article

  Building Learning into Everyday Work by David Gurteen

Blog Post

  Extreme programming, early learning, project management and KM!
Gurteen Knowledge-Log, David Gurteen, 1 August 2002

Book

  Management of Knowledge in Project Environments (Jan 2005) by Patrick Fong , Peter Love , Zahir Irani 

  Peopleware by Tom Demarco , Timothy Lister 
Productive Projects and Teams

  The Mythical Man-Month (1975) by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. 
Essays on Software Engineering

  The Professional Service Firm 50 (1999) by Tom Peters
Fifty Ways to Transform your "Department" into a Professional Service Firm whose Trademarks are Passion and Innovation!

  The Project 50 (1999) by Tom Peters
Fifty Ways to Transform every "Task" into a Project that Matters!

Category

  Project Management [15 items]

Download

  Collaborative Work Presentation
A presenation I gave at Online Information 2002 Conference & Exhibition, London

Link

  Prototype Culture by Michael Schrage 
Article in Marketing Computers magazine

  The Atlantic Systems Guild
US based software development consulting organization

Past Event

  Knowledge and Project Management Symposium
KPM Symposium
12 - 13 Aug 2009, Knowledge and Information Professionals Association 
University of Oklahoma - Tulsa Campus, Tulsa, United States

Quotation

  On executing a plan by George S. Patton 

  On WOW! projects by Tom Peters Consultant & Author