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Wednesday, May 25, 2011

My Project Management Rules (revisited, reworked, repost)

Remove people from your team that don’t ask questions, don’t talk with other team members, won’t provide documentation, or won’t do analysis

Only people that aren’t competent won’t show off their work

Question authority or live with the result

A sense of humor can help get teams through tough times

A working meeting should have no more than five people. Meetings with more than five should be reserved for providing updates or relaying information

Project failure is planned at the beginning of the project

Project initiation is the most important project phase

Be honest in all your dealings

Project managers are expected to offer their opinions, but be accountable for their words

When it comes to project scope, what is not in writing has not been said

Have verifiable milestones

End of project surveys must be completed and the results distributed to the team

Bad conclusions lead to more bad conclusions

Documented assumptions are believed to be true for planning purposes

The best lessons learned come from failures

Without data you only have an opinion

Data doesn’t tell the whole story

Bad data leads to bad decisions

Senior management is usually clueless when it comes to what your project is all about

A bad project team will never deliver good project results

If your project sponsor isn’t responsive you should put your project on-hold until such time they can become involved

The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle

A project manager’s main job is to keep the customer happy

At the end of a project if you have met all scope, quality, budget, and schedule objectives, but the customer isn’t satisfied your project is a failure

Documentation doesn’t replace knowledge

Most people want to do good work. Many times they don’t have the tools or information they need to perform well, or they aren’t managed properly

Project managers aren’t successful if their team members aren’t successful

Not all successful project managers are competent and not all unsuccessful project managers are incompetent. Sometimes you just have to be lucky

Good project managers are insecure by nature

An introvert can’t be a (successful) project manager

A project manager with lots of enemies won’t be able to be successful over the long run

You must be a relationship guru and be ready to fall on the sword sometimes

A project manager must be a motivator

If you don’t listen, you can’t plan

Project managers deal with change. You must be the change agent for your project. Your project sponsor is the change salesman

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"An introvert can’t be a (successful) project manager."

Nonsense! You may as well say that introverts cannot be successful managers and leaders. This is simply a misconception. You can have quiet yet effective (successful) project managers. Please do your homework and look no further than your president.

Cristian said...

"An introvert can’t be a (successful) project manager."

Just a note here: if a person is introvert by nature, it still can "act extrovert" (=focus on people) when necessity occurs, which may be the situation at the workplace. It's one of the things professional project managers need to (learn how to) do.

Chris L said...

I also disagree that an introvert can't make a successful project manager. Introverts, in my opinion, tend to be more inward thinking of others. So they'll take the time to analyze a problem and carefully communicate a solution to the client or other team members. Just because extroverts draw energy from socializing doesn't mean they're naturally good at managing things--if anything, an extrovert would be more prone to shooting from the hip instead of thinking first. This would make for an interesting study--I'm sure there's been a few already.

project management said...

all the work there must be rules to implement this needs mental & supported by good behavior in order to work on a project management that produced a nice day & in accordance with what we expect