get it done — managing your projects
Categories: management, philosophy
Written By: todd
In a typical startup, The Management (even if its just you) often wants to do lots of different things at the same time. This is difficult, because you have limited time, people, money, and other resources to carry out all these initiatives. Here are some ways you can get all those projects under control.
Create a charter for each project. This is a simple 1-page document that simply describes why you’re doing this project (the business goals). It also lists the project’s Sponsor, the person you go to for money or resources and whose neck is on the line to get this project done. The charter lets everyone on the team know what the project is all about, and is the guiding force in making decisions. All the work done on the project should support the reasoning in this document. It also includes success criteria, so the team knows what the desired outcome is — whether to lower the amount of time spent waiting for customer support, or increasing revenues by providing a new paid service for your users. This should be quantifiable and measurable, so you know whether the project has achieved success. There is a template with Johanna’s book, but its more of an outline. I’ve created a project charter template based on hers, that uses a fictitious project to illustrate the concept. Feel free to use it.
Projects are about people. Get to know your team. Also get to know your stakeholders, your sponsor, and identify any champions (those cheering for your project’s success) and anti-champions (those who want you to fail!). Spend time understanding what makes these people tick, and what they want. IT projects are different because they involve organizational change, so you need to understand who is affected and how, to smooth the way for your project to be accepted. You may have built a great product of feature, but what if your internal customers don’t want to adopt it?
Create a scope statement. Know (and document) what is in scope for the project, and what is out. Ensure the team delivers what is in scope — no more, no less. In fact, enumerate what is out of scope in your scope statement doc, just to be clear. If you’re building a helpdesk application for instance, mention that it DOES include a web interface, but DOES NOT integrate with the legacy system already in place. It’s very likely that your team will have different ideas about what they expect to be in scope and out.
Monitor the health of your projects. Create a project dashboard, like the one used in the 7 Keys for Project Success. Each week, update it with an objective assessment of your projects on the seven criteria. For the keys that are ‘red’ for your project, create some recommendations to fix the problem. When done right, this dashboard lets you go to your management with solutions, not problems.
Johanna Rothman is a big proponent of these techniques, and I found her book Manage It! to reinforce a lot of what I learned in the Harvard Extension course on IT Project Management. There’s a lot of nuance to successful projects, but if you can at least do these things at a minimum, you’ll better your chances of success.
