Project Management_Why Such Things Happen?

Many of you probably handling various projects presently. it could be your work projects or personal (some called it Pet) projects. here i would like to focus on projects that you do at work. Now we have a Project Manager (PM) role (as a professional job) to manage projects in the company. generally PM is around in IT-based company or if your company has an extensive IT initiatives. This PM can either be employed directly by your company or provided by your IT solutions company on project basis.

But what is the exact role of PM? I have met numerous PM from various backgrounds and in various projects. Rarely i found that really have solid big picture on the project. often times PM either choose to be the champion for their own team rather than the client. i found that is depressing and delusional. Let me tell you why and some of my experiences.

I was at one time in a project team for a national IT initiative. The goal is “let people know us globally and come to do business with us”. My team is the solutions vendor and we are working (partnering supposedly) with a brand team that handles all the Above the line and Below the line. My team role is solely on the technology solutions and online marketing.

My PM decided throughout the project to back my own team and take lightly communication with other team members and partners. We faced severe communication breakdown because information flow, there was some potholes where some people know some information and some totally oblivious on what’s happening around them. The technical team also very confuse and lots of time we have to face the client apologetically because we fail to meet certain expectations.

In my another project, which is dealing with a large conglomerate to do an e-commerce portal. My PM decided to focus on himself whereby he only concerns about his timeline and documentation. he decided not to be assertive with the client and other project team members. as a result, we have a lot of delayed deliverables and my PM don’t really rush the client to make decisions. As a result, client think we were late and we on the other hand feels the client were the one that was late. When we check with the PM, “yeah, we all late!!”. That was a joke to me.

My another project where i deal with a PM that only cares about her work. She micro-manage everyone to some extend that i found unnecessary. She also refuse to share documents to support her claims in certain items that she aforementioned deemed late or delayed. She also boss around where many of my team members are overly worried to ask her and present to her some project problems.

So, what exactly project management that would be best? To my opinion, there is no single solution for this ; no silver bullet! The fact that my all my PMs done that way simply because based on their understanding of the projects, that should be the best way to handle the situations.

But one thing as my focus that always works well and able to make both clients and my team happy is to focus on the customers needs. Let say the customers require more features to be done , as PM we need to escalate this to the team and discuss how we can perform this task in given time or less. It’s alll about speed, speed and speed. Customers these days want things to be done speedier, free and unique services. So we face a lot of challenges. Not to mention out of scope requirements where sometime would require additional resources to be deployed i.e. new $$$ is needed!

What’s your take on project management based on your experience and observations? Share it out! Cheers!

Creative Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation

Another great discussion on Innovation to The Next Level

Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system. The effort would have required a huge team of people taking many years. Since Google is a search engine, it most likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run. If you were using X.25, the international networking standard (the Internet equivalent of its time), you would have been charged for each packet of information that you sent or received, in a network in which each network operator had a bilateral agreement with every other network operator. This total project probably would have taken a decade, cost a billion dollars, and not have worked very well.

via Creative Commons: Enabling the next level of innovation.

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Breaking Barriers – The Competitive World Ahead

Today I was captured by a friend’s post on his Facebook page – on Roger Bannister. Most probably, the younger generation unfamiliar with Roger Bannister but for the older generation, this guy is a legend as his “current name” implies; Sir Roger Bannister. “The guy who broke the miracle mile”, they called him.

This man is famous for his achievement for breaking the record running for one mile below 4 minutes. Prior that, no one has ever done one mile below than 4 minutes and it was widely assumed it is impossible. Now, we have changed the distance measurement to 100 meters, 200 meters and so on; back then it was mile. As the record-breaker, Roger Bannister became the legend which is equivalent to today’s Usain Bolt. You can check Roger Bannister’s and Usain Bolt’s video here.

Roger Bannister is legendary (but am surprised no one makes movie of him as yet), and he is still alive. Now age 92.

“The record was broken within two months by John Landy, highlighting how the four-minute mile was as much a psychological as physical barrier. Bannister went on to race Landy to decide whom the world’s best miler was – Bannister won (both men ran sub four minutes).”

Why it means so much to know this? Let me explain.

Welcome to “breaking-barriers” world. What we used to believe or what our parents used to tell us about, that can be changed. All of them. Barriers are for you to break and rules are to bend. The consequences is, there will be an ocean of very talented human beings hunting for the same things i.e. jobs, pay, houses, food, water and so on. This effect also will trigger the “very thing” of human being; “the animal spirit”.

Ponder this.

Many years ago, it was very difficult to find talented singers, band boys and artists. They say all singers are born not made. They need packaging this and additional that. Now, with the reality show we can see a lot more of these people to some extend you find it difficult to track who is on the A –list and who is not, who can sing and who can’t really sing. These talents that used to be hidden and suppressed because of life conditions and upbringing (to some extent, access to opportunities and lucks!) have broken “the ceiling” because the playground has been democratized if not demolished. It’s a free for all business. Besides, the access to the know-how also becomes greater thus more and more people can learn new things and use it for their own benefits. Subsequently make a living out of it.

Entreprenovator seeks to improve his life and the life of others through innovation, no matter how small it seems.

I have a younger sister that just took one of the big exams of her lifetime. It was an exam taken at her 6th grade. She didn’t score full, but still great result. Therefore we tried harder compared to some of her friends that scored full, so she can get a better school. Then the evening news announced, there are only 9, 000 vacant seats for those better school and the students who scored full (better than my sister) were close to 90, 000. Our eyes went rounded but then it got me thinking, how on earth the better students emerged and so many of them. Then I found the answer, because they have greater access to knowledge. They got it from extra tuition near their house, extra books from the bookstore at the mall, internet which installed by their parents, from the cybercafé near their school, from interactions at school, from the younger teachers and better school accommodations. In other words, they have improved the fundamentals to perform better. Not to mention in some families, they have better food because of better purchasing power of their parents.

Take a look at another scenario. I have a friend who just graduated, he dropped his first attempt to university and he took part time study after that. He recently graduated and the whole family overjoyed. But how many students graduated that day? 8,500 students graduated and my friend is just one of them. Of that, more than 70% scored the same just like my friend. And this was just from one university. There are more than 100 universities (public and private) in Malaysia and there tens of thousands around the world. List of university around the world.

Ponder about your current job. Do you know there are a lot of people out there waiting to take over your place? At a cheaper salary, don’t mind to work twice as hard and a lot younger than you? Some says, we need experience to move up the ranks. What if your boss doesn’t move up? Are you going to stuck there? Brothers, if we were to ask questions about life, work place and marriage, I am pretty sure we have lots of them.

The point here is, the era of fierce, brutal and ridiculous competition, wherever you are in this world. If some places, the competition is between the countries and nations. That is not going to slow anyone’s down. Recent meeting at Copenhagen “explained the message” briefly. The challenge is up and if you come from poorer country no one is going to back you up.

So if it is going to persist for the next few decades, what should we do about it? What should we do to ourselves? How we can be “our very own Roger Bannister”? Are these challenges only psychological? Or are they so real that we considered ourselves “missed the train already”? Check out my next post, on How to Survive Competition If You Want To.

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