Project Management 101

WHAT IS PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

Project management is a broad topic which warrants deep understanding, but at a high level it is the coordination of people, capital, and resources in order to accomplish a task or design/build/operate a system. 

This page is not intended to be a full course on project management, but is intended to introduce some high-level aspects and provide tools for success.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A GREAT PROJECT MANAGER

Collected from practicing engineers.

• Capable of using multiple modes of communication effectively and clearly

  • Can articulate objectives, issues, and procedures in a clear manner that evokes a successful response from their team mates. 

  • Able to ask the right questions to gather information. Think through their own questions to avoid wasting time.

  • Able to create clear schedule/plan with milestones that can easily be identified as complete or incomplete, and promote individual ownership and accountability to team members.

    • By providing clear objectives, timelines, and owners for work, a team creates clear accountability for a portion of the project. 

    • Work without a clear owner rarely gets done. Work without a clear end-objective is incredibly difficult to approach. Work without a clear delivery date gets procrastinated until it's past due.

• Have respect and understand that their team mates have skills and capabilities different and often exceeding their own.

  • A project manager doesn't need to be a master of everything they manage, but the must respect and have at least a first-principles understanding of what they manage.

  • Steve Jobs spoke on building a team and insuring that you listen to them in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg 

  • Understands the unique characteristics of each team member. Not everyone can do everything, so creating an mosaic from your team to not only put people in their well-suited environments, but to pushing them grow into new environments is critical.

  • Knows how to get out of the way. Often a project manager should stand back and simply take notes if a project is on a roll; only stepping in if they foresee an issue or a place they can contribute. 

• Understands how to sub-divide work

  • • Overloading a team mate or group is a sure way to risk delays and failures. 

    • Underloading a team mate can risk procrastination. 

    • Only effective if the manager knows their team mates.

• Regularly striving to simplify.

  • Willing to say "no" even when it is hard. Excessive scope creep has ruined more projects than lack technical prowess. 

  • A good example of this simplification/distillation approach is Elon Musk's algorithm: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/elon-musks-algorithm-a-5-step-process-to-dramatically-improve-nearly-everything-is-both-simple-brilliant.html 

• Understands that their job is to address a distillation of the difficult problems and that they are there to serve and support those around them. 

  • Not self-righteous in their position should never put themselves in an ivory tower. The meritocracy should drive the project. 

SCOPE CREEP AND PROCRASTINATION

Teams that dive into their projects early, remain wary of delays, and take appropriate caution with respect to scope-creep throughout the project are likely to find themselves much more successful in senior design and their future careers.

Scope-creep is a phenomena where a project is expanded by adding additional features, functions, requirements, or capabilities to a project that go beyond the initial objectives of a project. Some scope-creep is inherent to most projects as more details are determined and a team more-or-less realizes that they need to make adjustments to be successful. Scope-creep can easily get out of control, however, and crush a project. It is valuable to regularly challenge a project's current requirements and objectives in order to simplify them. Many teams will learn about the tools and techniques for how to hold both the team and the customer to an appropriate scope.

Procrastination is a phenomena by which teams or individuals will delay tasks until as late as possible. Senior design projects are far too large of a scope and involve too many people to delay until late in the game. While there are occasionally legitimate strategies where it makes sense to delay a decision until as late as possible in order to collect information, it is more common that it is simply a psychological behavior of humans. Students should use senior design to develop project management skills to recognize and avoid such pitfalls.