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.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

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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”.

The second point is that top-down planning could reinforce the “Peter Principle”

The “Peter Principle” says that individuals are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, at which time the promotions cease. As the author explains it, people are promoted until they start doing a bad job, and then they are left in that position until retirement or until they quit.

First, this “principle” is kind of corporate humor so it doesn’t happen all the time in reality. Second, before they are promoted to the level of their incompetence, the skillful project managers are at their best position and they do their job the right way. And third, even if the PM is incompetent, they have a team of trusted people on which they can rely to make the plan together.

The same argument stays about the third point of the author: top-down planning limits buy-in from the team because the project manager wouldn’t allow them to participate in the plannig process. I will repeat: planning is not managing and it is not necessary that the project manager makes the plan by herself. Top-down planning is about how to make a plan, not about who makes it.

I am not saying that top-down approach in planning is the best way to do it but definitely it is not a wrong approach by definition. Whether it is right or wrong depends mainly on the team expertise, the technical experience they have and the knowledge about the business area.

If you like the posts in this blog or you are interested in the discussed topics, please, subscribe to the RSS feed to guarantee yourself that you won’t miss an interesting post. You can do it in an RSS reader or by Email.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
• Project Management and Hiking
• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management
• Project Management 3.0
• The Project Management Theories According to Bas de Baar

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.

Read the whole article here.

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• Project Management 3.0

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!

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• The 15 Commandments of the True Leader

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:

1. Communication trap: proper understanding of what the other stakeholders need in the project;
2. Trust trap: letting go of control and hoping people still do what they are supposed to do;
3. 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.

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
• Top-down Planning – Good or Bad?
• The Pros and Cons of Distributed Teams
• Project Management and Hiking
• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project 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!

You may also find these posts interesting:

• Krishna Kumar Did An Interview With Me On Software Development
• Top-down Planning – Good or Bad?
• Project Management and Hiking
• The Recommended Weekly Readings (2007-08-18). Project Management
• Project Management 3.0

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.

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