Yellow Lines and Dead Armadillos

As an IT team member at Penn State, I am never far away from Projects and Project Management practices. Many people think that project management is about managing time, money, task lists, you know, the details. It is partially about these things, but mostly good management is above making decisions and staying focused. There is a delicate balance that must be maintained when you are managing a project. On the one-hand you have a goal or list of goals that must be completed, and on the other hand you are one person who cannot succeed without the help of others.

Over the years, I have participated in quite a few projects both as a team member and as the project manager. The projects that succeeded had some things in common.

• Defined goal(s)
• Defined deadlines
• Defined scope
• Dedicated team

They didn't necessarily have Gantt charts or extensively detailed plans. Remove any of the above list and the project will flounder. Another good way to kill a project is to rule it by committee. I don't want to discuss indecision by committee today, but it you want to read more on that check out this post by Mark Linton.

I want to talk about making decisions. Someone must make decisions. The listed definitions cannot exist until someone says, "Make it so." One of the sites I frequent, Mavericks at Work, had a recent post about indecisiveness and failure. The post discusses how and why companies should avoid being in the middle of the road. You don't have to be a manager to make decisions. Every project team member needs to make decisions to get their respective jobs done. Managers need to decide what the priority project is. To quote Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, "There can be only one."

We are currently working on upgrades for our core VoIP applications. We have two applications that are tightly integrated through a proprietary vendor. To maintain supportability with the vendor, we have to upgrade to more current versions. Here is my Cisco Unified Communications Manager 6.1 and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 upgrade project outline.

• Defined Goals
Upgrade both applications to new versions.
• Prevent service interruptions.
• Manage Expectations.

• We will perform this upgrade over Winter Break 2008.

• Software will be upgraded to new versions. That's it. No new features, no service changes, no redesigns. We will take exactly what we have today and make it work on the new version.

• Remember what I said about missing components. We don't have resources dedicated to this project as top priority. I am working as much as I can as are my peers, Doug Dreibelbis and Bill Simon.

Hmmm...I am apparently not following my own advice. Well, we will just have to make that Dedicated Team thing happen. My first official action toward getting that dedicated team item that needs help is to end this post and get back to the project. Thanks for reading. Extra thanks for commenting.