Managing Padding in Time Estimates
Estimating time is one of the most difficult and most unsure activities during the planning phase of the project management process. We had a discussion recently with some colleagues of mine about the extra time that sometimes the developers or the project managers add to their estimates, called padding.
There are two extremes about this approach. On the one side is the management’s urge to shorten the project’s duration leading to unrealistically short schedules. Sometimes the developers (usually younger and inexperienced ones) get infected by the flowing optimism and make unrealistic estimates, which you know are impossible to meet. Then, when you make the final schedule you add some percentage of time (usually between 10% and 20%) to make sure that even after the management shortens your schedule you will still have the necessary time to complete the project on time.
Filed Under Project Management, Teamwork | 4 Comments
Project Management and Hiking
Glen Alleman wrote a great post in his blog Herding Cats entitled Agile Planning. There he makes an interesting comparison between the hiking “projects” and software ones and asks serious questions to the adherents of the Agile methodologies.
He says:
Hiking requires Planning and Scheduling and Execution. Alternative plans are needed, alternative schedules always happen and alternative execution choices are always there. So what’s all the noise about Planning and Scheduling in agile software development?
And more:
Preparation is the key to a successful hike
Why wouldn’t…
Preparation be the key to success for a project?To argue otherwise – that planning, preparation, sequencing, and execution performance management – is not needed is dangerous in the hiking paradigm. Why do we think these activities are not important in the project management paradigm?
Good questions to ask ourselves and especially those religious fanatics who claim that their extreme approach with no planning is always a better solution than the traditional management methodologies.
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The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management
I will try to establish a new series on my blog – The Recommended Weekly Readings. It will be a list of links around some topic that I find interesting for you. This week they’ll be on the topic of Project Management.
One of the richest and most valuable resources in the subject of Project Management is GanttHead. I highly recommend you to become members of this site and to subscribe to their newsletter. In relation to my recent posts about leadership (How a PM Can Become a Real Leader and The 20 Qualities of the Inspirational Leader) I found Andy Jordan’s article Project Manager vs. Project Leader where he argues that no matter how qualified in the area of task management a PM is they must have leadership skills. “PMs have a responsibility to manage their teams – even in a matrix organization – and that means being a leader”. Later on he describes the different sides of the leadership, the easy and the hard parts of being a project leader.
Another great article you can find on GanttHead is Tom L. Barnett’s Leadership-Powered Project Management. He says that all the leaders we know from history, no matter whether they were political, military, or business leaders, no matter their different styles, they all shared some similar leadership qualities. Mentioning Washington and Lincoln, Gates and Welch, Churchill and Eisenhower, Tom Barnett gives us the similar traits that are common among the great leaders. The traits that will set us apart as leaders and distinguish us from everyone else.
Although leadership skills are necessary quality for every project manager, there are techniques of the craft which are a mandatory part of the PM’s skillset. The PM Hut blog published recently Thomas Cutting’s post How to Really Fix a Failing Project where he focuses on the most important things a project manager should do when his or her project is in trouble. If you can stay calm and follow his advices there is a great chance you will get your project back on track.
PM Hut is a great source of useful information for the project managers. It is some kind of aggregator where they publish articles from many experienced and interestingly writing bloggers in the field of project management (including me, too 
).
Writing the project documents is probably the most hated obligation of the project manager. I know a lot of PMs who don’t understand very well the purpose of each document and this is the main reason for their frustration when it comes to writing it. PM Hut has published an article by Sam Elbeik to help in this matter. While his article is pompously entitled The Secret of Successful Project Management it is a simple and understandable explanation of the purpose and the value of the key project documents like the Project Charter, the Plan, and the Progress Report.
At the end I am giving you a very serious article by the PM guru Tom Mochal in the TechRepublic’s PM blog devoted to one of the first things that happen in a project – the kickoff meeting. Why it is important and how you should conduct it – read it here (note: it may require a free registration!)
P.S. This series is inspired by Liz Strauss’ post on thematic link posts, which is a follow-up to Joanna Young’s post on the same subject. Many thanks to both of them for the idea!
Filed Under Leadership, Links, Project Management | 4 Comments
Project Management 3.0
It seems it became a fashion these days to put version numbers to everything. When I saw Bas de Baar‘s post with the title Project Management 3.0 I was first shocked. Wow, how could I miss the all those versions?
But in a while, after reading his post and the article he cites I started to realize that there is nothing new under the sun – it’s just a new, fashion name for the thing we already know.
Obviously, the version numbers 1.0 and 2.0 were created by the agilists. To put it roughly, PM 1.0 refers to the classic or heavy methodologies in project management. They focus on large projects, large budgets and big teams. Ugly Gantt charts, many stakeholders, horizon and beyond timelines and (note!) expected failure! PM2.0 respectively has only positive characteristics: small teams, made of smart and motivated people (does it mean that the large projects are performed by dumb people?), fast pace, feedback, responsiveness, etc.
It smells like a religious war from very far and isn’t worth mentioning. As Glen Alleman says in his blog Herding Cats, if you want to show the advantages of the agile methodologies you shouldn’t compare it to Waterfall because “Waterfall is dead, dead, dead“. The modern version of the “classic” PM approaches like PMBOK and Prince2 also embrace change and calling them “heavy” or “rusty” is not relevant anymore.
What caught Bas’s (and mine) attention is the idea of “Social Project Management”. As he states:
The Project Management style, and the supporting tools have to be “social”, and now more then ever. The project landscape is turning mobile, multi-cultural, 24×7, highly distributed and in ever flux.
But this situation will increase the risk of getting into some social “booby” traps and he points out the three most important ones:
- Communication trap: proper understanding of what the other stakeholders need in the project;
- Trust trap: letting go of control and hoping people still do what they are supposed to do;
- Isolation trap: no sense of belonging to the project through geographical, cultural and timezone differences.
This is the Project Management 3.0 and the real challenge for it will be a social one. According to Bas, this is the place were social software can help a lot. Not only in collaboration but more in building a sense of community, enhance trust and stimulate open communication.
You can read his entire post here.
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How Do People Become Project Managers?
The Projects@Work site performs a monthly survey and the July’s questions were very interesting for me because they brought very interesting answers.
Question No. 1: Did you pursue a position in project management or did you “fall into it”?
Answers:
- By choice: 30%
- By accident: 70%
What does it mean? It means that the upper managers still don’t appreciate the role of the project manager. They don’t raise and don’t educate people to be ones. The position of the project manager is still filled “on the fly”, most often by technical persons (in the case of the software development – by senior programmers). I have such observation among some Bulgarian software companies but the results of this survey show that the situation is not much better in the United States either.
I’ve seen another example, too. A guy asks to be a project manager and the upper manager says: “Oh, you’re too ambitious. I can’t allow you to take this position. Tomorrow you may ask to sit in my chair. No way!”
Question No. 2: Did you have formal project management training before your first assignment?
Answers:
- Yes: 15%
- No: 85%
The answers to this question explicitly confirm my opinion that the company management totally neglects the profession of the project manager. They don’t understand the importance of this role and they don’t develop their human resources for that. It seems that the management considers the role of the PM as the “necessary evil” and they have PM’s just because it’s a common notion.
If you pay a closer attention to the numbers you’ll see that the people with a formal training are twice less than the people who intended to be project managers. It means that even among the people who really want to develop themselves into our profession only half of them have the chance to get a formal professional training. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is some data showing that a significant part of the people who had formal training have paid for it by themselves.
Question No. 3: Do you consider project management a long-term career or a “stepping-stone” in your professional aspirations?
Answers:
- Career: 60%
- Stepping-stone: 40%
At the end, the answers to the last question show me that the most of the project managers like their job and they consider it to be their future career too. No matter how unappreciated the profession is, we still like it; it gives us the feeling of doing something important, of significantly contributing to the project’s (and respectively – the company’s) success, of creating something useful for the customer, something that makes their life better.
As I said before, I have some observations among the software companies in Bulgaria but I would like to gather some information “from the source”. That’s why I am asking you – my readers – the same questions (a little modified only to take less space) in order to see if the results are the same in other places in the world. I believe most of you are from Bulgaria but there are also people from all over the world and everyone’s opinion will be useful.
Is it the same in your company? Or in your country? How can we prove that the profession of the project manager is important and that one of the sure ways to increase the probability of a project’s success is to have better trained and motivated project managers?
If you are a project manager or you are somehow involved in project management practices or in software development, or you just have an opinion on the subject, please, answer the questions on the sidebar or send me your comments. I would greatly appreciate that.
Full Time Pay for Half Time Work, Part 2
Since I posted my comments on Steven M. Smith’s article Full Time Pay for Half Time Work? I received some arguable comments and also Pawel Brodzinski published his very interesting point of view on the topic at his blog. So I decided to put some more “food for thought”.
First of all, there is no such thing like “full time salary”. Each employee’s salary is negotiated individually. At least this is the common practice in Bulgaria but I believe that the same method is applied all over the world. The times of the “developed socialism” when all the people had the same salaries are far behind in the past. Currently in the most software companies in Bulgaria the ratio between the lowest and the biggest salary for a software developer is between 2:1 and 3:1. Which means that for a full working day and for 40-hour week one person gets 500 Euro and another gets 1000 Euro (for example).
Why is that? Simply, because one person is considered more qualified and more productive than the other. We know from Steve McConnell’s books that there is a difference of 10:1 in software developers’ productivity and we accept a difference of 2:1 or 3:1 in salary (which I think is not so fair if the productivity is bigger). So why is it so impossible to accept a situation where one person’s salary is equal to another person’s salary but the working time is twice shorter? In my opinion this is quite normal if the first employee is twice (or more) more productive than the second one.
Another point that is not taken in consideration (especially by Pawel): It is not said anywhere that the person is a software developer. The original case is about an employee of unknown specialty. But even in the software development there are several roles that do not require the person to be full time at the office: sales agents, business analysts, deployment and user training specialists, etc. By definition, these people are required to spend a lot of time at customer’s site so they usually don’t stay at the office regularly and their absence will not hurt the team spirit. An employee like Albert in the given example may very well fit one of these roles and be hired on a half time if he is able to do his tasks.
I still believe that if we are flexible enough in our thinking we can achieve better results. We should not obey all the traditions just because they are traditions. We should use them selectively and to pick only those which can help us achieve our goals.
The Project Management Theories According to Bas de Baar
Bas de Baar posted a very interesting analysis of the structure of the project management. He claims that “there is not one theory that explains project management; it is a collection of several fundamental ideas, the theory of project, and theories of management“.
Later on he describes in a slightly humorous way the theory of the project and the three theories of management: management-as-planning, the dispatching model and the thermostat model making this way a dissection of the main principles of the project management, which, however, come from an ideal, theoretical world and sometimes are too far away from the reality.
Great reading! Enjoy it!
Full Time Pay for Half Time Work?
Steven M. Smith in his blog posted a very interesting article called Full Time Pay for Half Time Work? where he shares the case of an employee called Albert who guarantees he can produce the same results as the other colleagues (even 105% of the quote), he is liked by the colleagues and adored by the clients but he wants to work no more than 20 hours a week and doesn’t want to waste his time.
The author asked several managers whether they would hire Albert but all the answers were “No”. No one appreciated the fact that Albert is 100% more productive than the others. All the managers asked felt insulted by Albert’s requirement for 20-hour work and required that he worked for 40-60 hours. In fact they didn’t like the fact that he insisted on his freedom, they wanted to have a tighter control on him no matter how productive he was.
If I had to make such decision I would hire Albert if I have the guarantee that he will produce the promised results. But the answers the interviewed managers gave are frightening me. They confirmed my fears that the most middle managers nowadays don’t have the entrepreneurship spirit at all. They consider their employees not like partners (heading for the same goal) but more like property, resources, or even like slaves. The majority of managers value the most not the productivity of an employee but the ability to obey orders.
I feel we are back in the 18th-19th century…
Read the second part of this posting here.
Software Project Management Again
I started a blog long time ago although I didn’t know what to write in it. So I’ve been ignoring it for a while but now I am determined to continue blogging. I hope it would be interesting for the people who work in the software development field.
I had several meetings with former colleagues recently where I heard different comments regarding the role of the project manager and I got the impression that most of the developers consider every task they don’t like or don’t understand as a responsibility of the project manager. Which made me think that although there are a lot of books on the topic of project management and the role of the project manager, still many people don’t know what exactly this is and have their own idea about it.
Many people think that the project manager is like a parent and should take care of them as they were children. Many people think that project management is for project managers only and the project managers are strange species we shouldn’t care about because we are developers and the only think we need to think of is coding.
I think that all the people in the software industry should be taught what project management is and what it has to do with us. The success of a project depends of everybody’s effort so everyone should care about the project management and everyone should perform project management to some extent.
Filed Under Project Management, The Role of the Project Manager | Leave a Comment
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