A Project Manager's First Day

If you're a fresh faced PM girl or boy, you've just been born, so young you can still see the 'legs', here are the kind of things you can expect:

-You will feel like a tool - a spare tool to begin with. This is common in most new workplaces.
-Someone will be walking you round introducing you to key people in your area and perhaps in the wider business.
-That person will also be getting your vitals together - like your laptop, your mobile phone....e.g....and showing you where all the documentation is held.
-If you're a graduate, you may be assigned a mentor to begin with. This person will show you where to start, where to hang your bag, show you where to collect your milk at play time (joke)....and things like these.

It is daunting on the first day. You wont know what to do. You will want to ask questions - but you may not be sure of the right ones to ask. Here's a run down of a few you could shoot at your mentor or person showing you the ropes:

-What is the priority of the business?
-How many PMs are there?
-What projects are you currently working on?
-What projects are around the corner?
-What is the average lifetime of a project here?
-Is development encouraged?

Be open minded, have a sense of humour and listen. It helps to take a few notes also.

Pause.........Play

Back to work tommorow so the posts will be coming thick (not in the intellectual sense but more in the way of quantity) and fast. Had a bit of a break but i'm back now.

I'm a Control Freak!!

When you start a new project, you can simply start the project, don't have a care in the world.....whistle your favourite tune....and get on with the project. When things go wrong, when your clients gather all the data they should have done, when a few users are still logged on to that server you're decommisioning, or when you've spent too much....you can simply.....just...continue....

OR.....

You can monitor and control what's happening. Your controls are the documents you use to track whats happening in the project. A simple control would be a project plan. Most people including moi, use a gantt chart for this. If you want to be extra proper....you could go out and by super expensive copy of Microsoft Project. To be honest though....its a waste of time. Just use Excel or if you havent got that use google docs and use the spreadsheet program. Using this, have one column as your task name column and another as your start and end date columns. Dead simple. No messing about.

In addition to that you could have another column called 'duration' and then another column called 'actual duration'. Using that everyday, you can easily and quickly see how long something should have taken and how long it has taken.....allowing you to make decisions.....and 'CONTROL' what happens next in the project.....

i.e do you need to spend more time on a certain task? Have you underestimated the time it will take to do a task? and so on....

It really is beneficial to have some sort of control mechanism. It just depends how in depth you want to make it. At the same time, management may want to see a really high level of control so the example mentioned above may not suffice. You'll need something more.

Management are ALWAYS interested in the money side. They want to know how much money you've got - which they should no anyway.....And how much money you have spent so far.

Watch, monitor and let management know if 1/2 way through the project you are getting close to budget. Dont wait and then let them know. You dont want to get 3/4 of the way through and you have no money left....AND THEN YOU APPROACH MANAGEMENT. Thats not cool.

Comms again?

On occasions, its been my experience that I've wanted a large group of users to do something to fulfill the needs of the project....And they don't! It would be so gratifying if a TPM could be like the guy who owns the canine (do they call them shepherds anymore) from the BBC show 'One man and his dog'.

...Just imagine, you want your last 1000 users to log on to the new domain RETAIL-1.
.....so...you simply raise your hand to your mouth and blow the whistle...in a really weird but 'i know what I'm doing' kind of way.....

...all of sudden 4 dogs start running round the UK rounding users up(1 dog = 250 users)....from wherever they are, start goading them into sites which are closest to them...

...and start coaxing these users to log on to the system to invoke the migration process.

oh yes.....that would be just priceless!

ah well....dreams!

To get a big message out, a big commanding message which people will sit up and take notice of, will have to come out from a higher source, so its good sometimes to get messages of this nature....out through senior management, or even the directorship (depending on the size and the importance of the project).

It can be a bit daunting approaching these managers, but if they appreciate what the project is about, the impact it will have on the business, the savings which can be achieved(that is if there is a financial incentive - if there is, THAT'S A GOOD THING!), and the consequences of the project not reaching completion - the risks, then they'll be agreeable to backing your activity.

The Right Message - Can y'all here me in da back?

Comms to your users
One of things you'll need to do as a TPM is communicate messages out to people. This could be a large group of people, it could be a really small group of people. In either case you will need to do it at some point. For example, you're about to do a hardware refresh on an old system that is mission critical, has about 3000 users logged on in office hours as well as external users who log on at the weekend aswell.



What are you going to do? Obviously for you to do the refresh, you need an outage, how are you going to get all users to stay off the system while you're doing this?

Well, you can either:
-Communicate to each user individually
OR
-You can appoint or establish liaisons within the different business communities.

The first suggestion is ok, but a bit awkward because as a TPM, the users may not know you, they'll probably just see you as IT - and the fact is - they dont like IT peeps - That is the truth. They look at us like.................like how alot of people look at 'Big Issue' sellers in your local market place - full of hate and stink (One of these days when i walk into an office i'm going to shout 'Big Issue!').

The second suggestion is a much better approach. Try and get someone on board who will represent that area of users. Usually a Team Leader/Manager or some kind of Change Manager is good for functions like this.

Better still if you have a comms team, get them on board to do your comms for you....BUT BEWARE.....THEY WALK A DIFFERENT PATH...

Before your internal comms people send out anything on your behalf...CHECK IT! Make sure your thoughts have been captured fully and accurately. Dont put your ideas into the comms sausage machine and expect your thoughts to come out accurately at the other end. It WONT! Check it, then get them to send it.

Often time, people will want to respond to comms that have gone out. If you're sending comms out to lots of people (i'd say more than 30) use a seperate mailbox. That way you can keep a track of where you are and not get lost amongst all your other tasks or projects. If this isnt possible, use a seperate folder within your current mailbox and setup a rule to filter on the subject line to that newly created folder.

Whenever someone mails you for info, if you dont have the answer straight away, just send them a really snappy mail anyway to say, "hey, i got your mail, i'm looking into, back to you shortly". There is nothing more annoying than sending a mail off to someone and............................................................................................

...............then a response. That annoys the nut allergy out of me!

What is the choice vehicle of the TPM?

A little daftness.
I'm a Technical Project Manager - but i don't look like one when I'm in my car. I drive a Fiat Punto. For that reason, i look like a PPM - Pitiful Project Manager.
So, what should a TPM drive? Is there a TPM car? Sales reps drive round in Mondeos and Vectras.

I think that question should be split for two groups, experienced and newbie TPMs. An experienced TPM has 2 or more years experience. He should drive:

A 6 series BMW


This car shows the experience and the wisdom of the TPM after 2 years or more.

On the other hand a newbie TPM should drive:


This again shows the level the TPM is at before 2 years has elapsed. He's still at the stage where he cant do en dos properly or other tricks and he's still learning. He's still a spotty teenager. Still in TPM puberty. Turning from a TPM boy to a man. After he's mastered all the tricks, he can leave the bike behind.

My bike should be delivered tommorow!

"I'm a Technical Project Manager"

People sometimes ask, as people do after they see my evil Fiat Punto (which is actually poisonous!!) "Mate what do you do for a living then?"

There are a selection of things i reply with:

There are the, what i like to refer to as the 'well thought out answers:

- "I eat".
- "I sleep".
- "Through a special manafacturing process, I turn children into wine glasses".
- "I work at a wildlife sanctuary with colourful hungry hippos".
- "I'm Tony the Tiger's PA".

and then the other answers:
- "I'm a Technical Project Manager"
- "I look after IT projects"
- "I manage IT Projects".

The first set of responses never lead to anything else. The second set of responses often lead to a quizzical (if its not a fellow IT brethren) "oh right?". At which point i say:

"See me as the conductor in the orchestra, there are lots of instruments that need to be played, but not at the same time, they have to be played at the right time, so that everything sounds beautiful. If they are played at the wrong times, it doesn't sound that great, even terrible. If the saxophonist doesn't get to do his solo....well....that's just totally uncool. So my job is to bring everyone in, all instruments at the right time. Not instruments - But different pieces of technology which come together to solve a business problem.

What do you say? I'd love to hear if you have any good lines.