Project Management 101

I have read my good set of books regarding project management in college and at work to know most of the text books are just that. Oscar Soto a Microsoft Professional that owns his own company (ActiveTainer) that I work with on special projects gave me the idea to write a book. I am not sure if this book material but at least it might help resolve the Project Management dilemma.

So what I propose is to in several posts touch each important subject that covers Project Management and most important, using real life examples.

Step 1. - Form a Team: No mater how many people are in the development side of your IT department, you must have a team well defined. It is very important that you define your team, you need to know who to talk to on your side, and your internal customers need to know who to talk to and your own people need to what their role is in the project. This may seem obvious, but it is not. If your internal customer doesn't understand the structure of the team, the will start talking to everybody, and that will cause confusion, changes to the specs without proper documentation, and at the end this will put and jeopardy the project.

As an example of this, when my Development team was working on a project some time ago, it was clear for me that one of the developers was the team leader but the internal customer would every so often talk to the other developer. This would create problems in the team it self, things that where not in the original specs would get in the project and therefore the timeline got bumped without an official acceptance by the customer and at the end I would get the heat from upper management for the delays, delays that up to some point I was not total clear why they had happened.

So, if the team that will be working on the project has more than one member it must be very clear to everyone what their roles in the project are.

George.
The Captain.