Project Management

For you, I don't believe you can be an effective IT leader without being an effective project manager. A vast majority of the work done by IT leaders is planning projects, budgeting projects, and managing projects. From building data centers to migrating systems and data to cloud environments to implementing a new technology, all of this work requires effective project management skills and knowledge of basic concepts.

Throughout my career, I have managed hundreds of projects. While some were small with only 2-3 project team members and lasting a couple days, some were massive projects, involving dozens of project team members, multiple vendors and lasting many months. It is not unusual to have leadership responsibilities for dozens of concurrent projects at any given time.

Effective project management begins with effective and well-defined project governance. The more complex, expensive or mission critical the project the greater need for formal governance.

Key Components of Project Management

Initiation:

• Define the project.
• Identify key stakeholders.
• Set clear objectives and scope.
• Create a project charter.

Planning:

• Develop a detailed project plan.
• Allocate resources and define roles.
• Establish a timeline with milestones.
• Identify potential risks and mitigation strategies.
• Set a budget and allocate costs.

Execution:

• Implement the project plan.
• Monitor and manage project work.
• Communicate with stakeholders.
• Ensure quality control and standards are met.

Monitoring and Controlling:

• Track progress against the plan.
• Manage changes to the project scope, schedule, and cost.
• Identify and address issues promptly.
• Perform quality checks and ensure project deliverables meet requirements.

Closure:

• Finalize all project activities.
• Obtain formal acceptance of project deliverables.
• Document lessons learned.
• Release project resources.
• Conduct a post-project evaluation.

Agile project management is an iterative approach focusing on collaboration, flexibility, and continuous improvement. While Scrum is a subset of Agile, using sprints (short development cycles) to deliver project increments. Agile & Scrum are optimal for software development projects.

Waterfall project management is linear and sequential approach where each phase must be completed before moving to the next. As a more traditional approach to project management, it is better suited for construction and infrastructure projects, like office and data center build outs.

For much of my career, I have had to support, software development, infrastructure and construction projects, all at the same time. In many instances, I had team members assigned tasks to all 3 types of projects concurrently. This is where a hybrid approach works well. The infrastructure projects are planned using the Waterfall methodology while the software development projects had weekly sprints with daily standups. I would often use the sprint planning meetings to plan all project tasks for the duration of the sprint to ensure project team members knew what tasks were due and their associated priorities during the sprint window. This allowed them to effectively work on multiple projects, with different methodologies, at the at the same time.