IT Project Manager - What are the ingredients?

Well....Here goes....
1. Well Organised.
2. Logical Thinker.
3. Medium to sharp thinker.
4. Creative.
5. Good Negotiator
6. Assertive

Well Organised.
The very nature of an IT PMs work is organisation. So it stands to reason that he or she (lets be PC) needs to be well organised. You sit and agree with a customer that you will move all of his shared data from a legacy server to a brand new ‘hyper fighting – bar edition’ bad boy on the 8Th of September. You don’t write this information down though. You then go to one of your techie boys and ask them to move the data on the 10Th. The data is moved on the 10Th, right in the middle of the day while 1000 users are trying to get at the said data at its old location.

a. Agree dates with customers and have them in writing.

b. Communicate your plans to customers and all who will be involved OR ensure that all concerned know ONE WAY OR THE OTHER exactly what is taking place and when.

c. Always have an escape route – What if all goes bad? Following a famous phrase from an 80s film, “Who ya gonna call?” For an IT PM that should sound more like “Wotcha gonna do” to get these users back up and running with no data loss. HAVE A BACK OUT PLAN READY!

I use the example of migrating a large amount of data because its actually a real life example. I'm running a massive project to reorganise and migrate 3 TBs(Yep...Terrabytes) of data from one server to another! Oh it hurts...But its nearly done and it will be....ohhhhh so good at the end!!!!!
Next time i'll tell you about the need for logical thinking...! Scattered thinking...Or "A....G.......1........B" thinking makes been an IT PM tricky!!! Logical is the way to go....Like i said I'll tell you tommorow.