It seems many novice project managers think they can have it all, but of course it isn’t so. You do need to mange and care for your project for it to become a success. A basic and easy tool every project manager should know is the project manager’s triangle. The triangle looks linke this:
It’s a navigation tool.
It tells you, that when managing your project, there are the areas you can use to change course – time, resources and contents.
Generally speaking moving from Windows to OS X has been a far lesser challenge than excepted. So far I’m only missing a few applications from the Windows world and most daily tasks on the Mac has been surprisingly easy to figure out. Here are some of the challenges I’ve had most difficulty with.
The keyboard layout (at least on Danish keyboards) are slightly different from the keyboards on Windows and Linux - the $ sign, the @ sign and several other keys are placed on different locations, and it certainly slows down the typing when you can’t find the keys you need.
It should be a surprise, but most companies moving into the internet space doesn’t seem to get the fact that less is more. 37Signals just announced they cut 66% of the features of their next product giving them:
It’s really no surprise - right? Yet so many product managers seem to insist that the 100+ pages specification is the product they need in order to bring the product to the market.
It seems any one can become a self proclaimed internet project manager. It really isn’t so, but if you choose to try your lucky anyway here’s a bunch of tips and insights, which may help you along.
Being a project manager requires some domain knowledge. Not always deep insights, but a basic understanding of the elements you encounter - what’s a web browser, what’s DNS, how does HTML look like (raw, unrendered) and so on. To be a capable project manager you must be able to “speak the language”.
Now usually spam is evil, annoying and a bloody pain. It does however have rare moments of actual usefulness. On an average day my mailbox seems to be stormed by more than two hundred spam mails from just about every where on the planet. Thanks to server-side filters combined with mozillas learning filters, they all seem to disappear into a consolidated spambox. I can check the box (too look for any false positives), and if the box hasn’t gotten any new mail for more than an hour, something is most likely wrong in my mail setup.
Microsoft Office has gotten a lot of nice and helpful features in the latest version. One of the nice features is virtually unlimited undo capabilities. Unfortunately this feature can also leave some tracks for recipients of your documents – a new tool from Microsoft lets you clean your office documents before further distribution. In contracts, business proposals, press releases and other business documents the trails left by the “usability features” may reveal information which wasn’t meant for public distribution.
While project management often focuses on management of the processes, information management and other work issues, one of the most important areas often overlooked IMHO is the physical environment and how it may improve efficiency of the project workers.
Joel Spolsky just moved is company to a new office and spent some time to figure out how to improve “developer workspaces”.
It quite an interesting read.
I don’t know how many (Internet development) projects I’ve been on, but it’s quite a lot through the years. One thing happening over and over again is that all the ambitious goals of the project isn’t quite reached before the launch – and something is either cut short or not quite as polished as it should have been. Lately I’ve been wondering weather this is the right approach. Many of the things you leave out when the deadline starts getting closer is “the finishing touch” – this is especially true for back-ends and other invisible details everywhere. Last time I changed this site, I didn’t get to write a back-end for “site maintenance” where all those things driven by databases – figuring I could do it later – and loaded the initially needed data into the database. I did never get on to write the backend – instead I got used to maintaining the database contents from a mysql client and moved on to doing other little projects.
I’m sure the concept of pointless meetings is familiar - too many people gathered to discuss some issue but after spending hours together no decision has been reached - only the next meeting with a few more people. Here’s one tool which might help a little.
I should begin by noticing that the idea is not my own - it has been as far as I know been used before. I came across it at the Copenhagen Business School where one of the teachers in Organization told about it (and credited it to Søren T. Lyngsøe A/S). The idea is called the meeting clock and it’s quite simple (just as so many excellent ideas are). The clock doesn’t tell time, it shows how much the meeting cost.