Essential Competencies of a Successful Project Manager Partnership

1. Project Management Planning Minder Chen, Ph.D. CSU Channel Islands Minder.chen@csuci.edu

2. Project Manager is a Single Point of Contact

3. Identifying Key Players and Their Roles Players Roles

4. Players Roles

5. Key Competencies of a Successful Project Manager • Long-range perspective: An individual's tendency to consider long-term implications and possibilities when acting or making decisions • Risk-taking, venturesomeness: An individual's tendency to try new ideas and take action in the face of potential risks • Clarification of goals: An individual's ability to define and clarify project and individual goals • Innovation and creativity: An individual's ability to apply imaginative thinking and generate original ideas and thoughts regarding business issues • Participative problem solving: The extent to which an individual solicits and applies the ideas and knowledge of others in solving problems • Systematic thinking and planning: An individual's ability to apply a systematic approach to thinking through issues and planning team and individual activities

6. Key Competencies of a Successful Project Manager • Strategic inquiry: An individual's tendency to sort through and handle complex or conflicting information and to prioritize issues and alternatives • Political awareness: An individual's ability to develop and maintain a sensitivity to personal and organizational relationships and to their ramifications for a project • Team member facilitation: An individual's demonstrated ability to coach and develop project team members • Team development: An individual's ability to develop teamwork and improve the coordinated functioning of project team members • Assertiveness: An individual's tendency to assert himself or herself and hold to a direction he or she sets • Feedback to team members: An individual's demonstrated ability to provide timely, appropriate, and accurate feedback to team members

7. Key Competencies of a Successful Project Manager • Relations with functional managers: An assessment of the individual's ability to establish and maintain positive, constructive relationships with functional managers • Standards of performance: The extent to which the individual clearly sets, maintains, and pursues high standards of performance • Drive: The level of urgency expressed by the individual in pursuing work efforts • Goal pressure: The extent to which an individual exerts pressure toward achieving goals; note that excessive goal pressure can also be a negative trait • Delegation (permissiveness): An individual's ability to assign work appropriately to subordinates or team members, within the context of providing a consistent amount of task direction and guidance; note that too much delegation without an appropriate amount of structure can be negative (permissiveness) • Recognizing performance: An individual's demonstrated tendency to recognize the performance of team members in an appropriate manner

8. Project Boundaries

9. Planning Process Group • The Planning Process Group consists of those processes performed to establish the total scope of the effort, define and refine the objectives, and develop the course of action required to attain those objectives. • The Planning processes develop the project management plan and the project documents that will be used to carry out the project. • The complex nature of project management may require the use of repeated feedback loops for additional analysis. As more project information or characteristics are gathered and understood, additional planning will likely be required.

10. Planning Process Group • Significant changes occurring throughout the project life cycle trigger a need to revisit one or more of the planning processes and possibly some of the initiating processes. This progressive detailing of the project management plan is called progressive elaboration, indicating that planning and documentation are iterative and ongoing activities. • The project management plan and project documents developed as outputs from the Planning Process Group will explore all aspects of the scope, time, cost, quality, communications, human resources, risks, procurements, and stakeholder engagement.

11. Project Planning Elements

12. Planning Process Group

13. Project Constraints/Parameters Balancing the competing project constraints including, but not limited to: • Scope, • Quality, • Schedule, • Budget, • Resources, and • Risk.

14. Scope, Time, and Cost • Scope Management: Identifying what needs to be done • Time Management: Identifying how long it will take to do everything • Cost Management: Identifying how much it costs to get things done

15. Project Triangle Quality  Customer Satisfaction Customer Expectation Features/Functionality/ Requirements/Performance • Resources/Money/Budget • People/Talents • Materials • Facilities Schedule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_triangle

16. “Fast - cheap - good: you can have any two.” • The first 90% of a project takes 10% of the time. The last 10% takes the other 90%. • The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job.

17. Project Trade-off • Scope, quality, time and cost as the four core target functions of project management (as viewed by a project sponsor) or constraints (as viewed by the project manager).

18. The Project Management Process http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/framework/pmbok.htm

19. Combination of Aspects Doing the wrong thing right is never a success, but doing the right thing even half right could still be a winner. http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/framework/success.htm

20. Project Life Cycle Variables http://www.maxwideman.com/papers/framework/variables.htm

21. Approaches to Managing a Project

22. Project Planning

23. Project Lifecycle (link)

24. Legend

25. Project Initiation

26. Project Planning

27. Project Execute & Control

28. Project Close

29. Planning the Project under Triple Constraints

30. PBS vs. WBS • Product Breakdown Structure (PBS): what is the project result or product, and how should it look like, what are its parts? • We then extend the PBS into the work breakdown structure or WBS. Following the principle "verb plus object", each individual work package consists at least of a detailed description of the desired result (the "object") and what we have to do in order to achieve it (the "verb")

31. Object Oriented WBS vs. Phase Oriented WBS

32. Potential problems with a project can relate to the following • Customer expectations • Customer capabilities • Mutual understanding of requirements • Scope change • Risk management • Quality • Inaccurate estimates • Ongoing support needs • Resource availability • Project startup • Clear roles and responsibilities • Management involvement • Change control • Loss of key personnel The best solution to problems is prevention.