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Project Management


Notes:

The biggest problem area at the company is project management, and this too is because of historical baggage. With a small team of multi-skilled individuals all of whom know the objectives there is very little need for explicit project management. People know what is needed next and set about making it happen. Because of this the historical “Project Manager” tended to focus on the other part of the role: that of representing the team – in particular, to the customer.

Aspects of project management like resource planning, task scheduling and risk management have not had the same focus. This isn't to say that these skills are absent from the organisation, but that the individuals with these skills have been promoted out of project management.

As projects have grown the need to manage the facilities and skills available on the project grew, but so did the need to liase with the customer. As a consequence projects were routinely slipping into fire fighting mode because of a lack of foresight.

Without planning and with clear demarkation of the deliverables from a task it becomes impossible to know the true status of a project. (Too often a document or program is deemed “complete” because the author has “finished” it – not because it has been checked and “signed off” by a validation process.)

To compound these problems, other projects are competing for the same resources with the effect that frequently the resources needed don't turn up.

The effect has been that the people who could identify the need for these activities are removed from the project by a layer of “project managers” without these skills. Only recently have I managed to convince them that the significance of these activities has grown with the size of the projects, and that these activities (which they find second nature) do not come naturally to the current “project managers”. There has been some restructuring to address these problems, but it is too soon to report results.