The Three Ws of Project Management

I was reminded today that I am a project manager at heart. I guess I always will be…

A friend of mine paid me a great compliment by requesting that I provide an overview of what I know within the realm of project management, for her and two colleagues. Fortunately, I have been working an approach out in my head to simplify the PMI methodology for practical application. So I was able to throw something together on the fly. I think that the PMP Certification is great and have been a Project Management Professional since 2006, but people really just need to learn how to organize their thoughts around tasks and sub-tasks to be effective.

If I had to break it down, I would say that project management is probably 50% preparation and 50% perspiration … You have to hustle to be a good PM, but you have to be organized first or else put yourself at risk of being ineffective.

What’s in a Name?

I’m calling my little practical methodology The Three Ws of Project Management. Pretty catchy, huh? And I will contest that this is all you really need to know, when managing projects. So feel free to throw out the rest and to point out any holes in my thought process in the comments below:

WHAT Before you can do anything, you need to understand what it is that you would like to do… Ask yourself what needs to be accomplished, and then get busy writing it all down. Try to organize your thoughts into buckets, but don’t risk missing something for the sake of organization at this point. The goal is to get everything that needs to be accomplished out of your head and onto a sheet of paper or digital equivalent. Once you have all the whats, you can begin to group them by project phase: Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closure. You want to be thinking sequentially: What tasks come before others? While also thinking about decision points: What do we need to move forward from one phase to the next?

WHEN Now that you know what needs to be done, you can add in your estimates on how long things are going to take. I realize that it is not an accepted practice to start from an end date and work backgrounds. I would never publicly admit that I have ever worked backwards, but that is usually how things work at work. The boss comes in and says I need X done by Friday… And you figure out all the steps that need to happen to get X done by Friday. As far as tools go, I prefer to use Microsoft Project because it makes it a snap to change things up when schedules start to vary. Not that that ever happens to anybody. One note: If you’re using Microsoft Project, you should not be altering the dates at all. I repeat, it is not a best practice to change dates within a Microsoft Project Plan. A great way to manage projects in Project is to set up all of your dependencies, i.e. this what needs to be done before this what can be started, and then change the duration of the individual whats as you go.

WHO You’d be surprised at how many people skip over this step. Actually, you’d be surprised at how many people skip over this step and the last one. It’s mind boggling sometimes how everyone wants to pat themselves on the back when all they’ve done is figure out what needs to be done. That is an essential task, but you really need to know when things need to be done, and who is going to be doing them just as much. Finding out who is going to do something, among a group of people, is great if you relish in uncomfortable silences. The trick to this part is to ask who is going to do it, and just shut-up. The key is to wait for somebody else to break the silence. This person then becomes your resource to get the task done. It’s probably a good idea to confirm with the individual, in front of the group, that they are able to complete the task in the allotted time frame, but you’ll figure that one out.

Easy Peesy

That’s all there is to it, really. I personally think that project management is a lot more about knowing what’s going on at all times than it is about always being at or below cost budgets and schedule time frames. Now that you know, you should be able to What, When, and Who your way to Project Management fame and glory.