Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
My fellow blogger Krishna Kumar from Thought Clusters asked me a few questions about the situation of the software industry in Bulgaria and my blogging inspirations.
His blog is devoted to project management and he has original ideas about how to manage people. I think he believes that we lack some thinking and understanding for the others and this is why I feel his blog so close to my blogs PM Stories and Stop and Think!. And probably this is the reason why I like his blog so much.
Read the interview here. You may find some food for thought.
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Filed Under Links, Project Management, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Top-down Planning – Good or Bad?
I read recently an article in PM Hut blog by Keith Mathis where he categorizes top-down planning approach as a project management mistake. I didn’t agree with the author and I will try to put my arguments here hoping to start a discussion.
First point of the author is that top-down planning is old style. He says:
Top-down planning makes the assumption that upper management has the best processes and ideas to run a project smoothly.
I think the author confuses planning with management. Top-down planning means dividing the project’s work into several big parts, then each parts is divided into smaller parts and so on until we reach small enough tasks that we can estimate and assign to somebody. Nobody said that it has to be done by the upper management although I believe that the first steps in dividing the work should be made by the project manager not because she has the best ideas but because she has the best view of “the big picture”.
Filed Under Project Management | 6 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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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!
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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