For many projects, a full-time project manager is overkill, and so balancing two or three smaller projects is something project managers often have to do. I do it by being organised and flexible, and very open about what I’m doing. I make sure all clients are aware of my availability through my weekly reports to them, and book days in advance. If there’s any emergency on a day I’m elsewhere, I’ll deal with a call or email as quickly as I can while treating the other client’s time with respect. In reality, that means a quick call or email with followup overnight or at lunchtime.

If you look to the right ==> of this screen, you’ll see a paragraph describing my availability. That’s always up to date, so visitors to the site know when I’m next able to take on more work.

By being flexible, the client saves the cost of a full-time project manager, while I get the security of having more than one client at the same time. Everyone wins.

Most, but by no means all, companies will make some sort of plan for the first few days. At best this will be a well-organised handover from an incumbent project manager. At worst, the new Project Manager arrives into chaos and is left to sort it all out.

When coming into a new project, at whatever stage and state its in, it is essential to quickly:

• Establish it’s current state
• Get to know the people involved
• Make sure basic processes and procedures are in place.

The first few days are a time for learning about the project, listening and working out how you are going to manage it. Be nosy and energetic, and find out as much as you can.

If you have the chance, get some documentation beforehand and arrive with a plan of action for the first few days. You client may already have something arranged for you, but they’ll be impressed at your proactive attitude.

The ‘essential’ project management documents are perhaps open for debate, but include:

• Project Initiation Document
• Project Plan (including schedule, resource plan, and budget all up to date)
• Risks and issues register
• Change log
• Project diary

If any of these are missing, you will need to create them. These may or may not exist, and their quality may be very variable. Client documentation standards are variable, making it very useful to have your own templates to use if they don’t have them (or use mine).

As soon as you can, start to set up meetings with the people you need to get to know. Meet the project sponsor before agreeing to take on the project if you can, or at least make them your first port of call. This relationship is critical to your personal success as well as the success of the project.

You will want to meet the team as quickly as possible. I prefer to do this in a team meeting, to see them together and get an idea of how they interact. After meeting as a group, one to one meetings with those who report directly to you will tell you far more about the state of the project than any monthly report.

Outside the core project team, your meetings should be focused on starting to build the relationships you will need to deliver the project, understanding each stakeholders view. The list of people to meet will vary depending on the project and the company in which you are working. For a commercial IT project, it is likely to include:

• Key users
• Key external suppliers, account managers and professional services / consultancy services managers
• Line managers of permanent staff team members
• IT operations manager
• Head technical architect
• Security manager
• Change and release managers
• Project office, or whoever is responsible for project management standards in the client
• The accountant responsible for project budgets

As you go, build up your own registers of risks and issues, and note any gaps in dealing with corporate processes. These discussions often reveal surprising omissions, such as the project planning to launch a new system on the same weekend as IT was intending to use to upgrade power in the data centre, or a project which has never had its budget formally approved by the corporate finance department.

There are basic processes which you must have, depending on the methodology you are using. Make sure they are in place, and set them up if they are not. Take a good look at the existing processes before you make any changes. There is no point in disrupting everyone else’s work patterns, and it will be much easier to get people to accept the changes you do make if you have good reasons rather than just stamping your imprint on the situation.

After doing this, you’ll be well established as the new project manager. Good luck!

The designer, lead developer or, as a last resort, project manager, breaks the work up into smallish units of some sort - modules, screens, reports, whatever seems to be appropriate. A group of developers meet with the project manager to discuss the list, making sure its complete and that everyone understands what’s involved.

They then each go away and separately make the estimates.

In a followup meeting, they come back with their estimates and, facilitated by the project manager, review them and come to a consensus. I then feed this into the project plan and, with contingency based on my own judgement and perhaps in consultation with senior team members, that becomes the plan.

Scrum suggests a variant on this which I tried yesterday with a team which is not fully working under the Scrum method. Instead of going away to make their estimates, we did it together, using playing cards. I gave each team member a suit including Ace, 2, 4, 8, Jack (for 2 days) and King (for far too big - lets think about this some more). We worked through our list of tasks, the team discussing it amongst themselves and, when they were ready, I asked them to select a card to show how long they thought the task would take. When they had done that, I asked them to put the card down.

We then discussed the results, talking about why one person thought something would take a lot longer than someone else did, and came to an agreement on the time we’d assign for each task. Their project manager will now use these estimates for his planning.

And I’m happy to say, it worked a treat. The team appreciated the chance to work through it together. The newest member, who is still coming up to speed, learned a lot. Their project manager got a chance to see how they all thought through the problems, which was revealing in itself. Both he and I now have a much better understanding of what is being done. The most senior team member, who is about to leave the project was able to pass on more of her knowledge to everyone.

We’ll see in a few weeks how good these estimates were, but certainly in the past I’ve found Wideband Delphi (without the Poker variation) leads to better estimates, and a more thorough understanding of the work.

So now, a pack of cards is part of my project management toolkit.

As ScrumMaster, I found myself calling on facilitation skills and soon realised that knowing when to keep out of it and let the team get on with their jobs was as important as trying to lead. Of course, like most projects, there were areas outside the development team that still needed project management, so there was still plenty of work to do.

When I moved on to the next project at the same client, they were not using Agile, and were keen to see more traditional project management, but I found it useful to incorporate some of the Scrum ideas into the new project, particularly the short daily standup meeting and the idea of fairly short iterations with detailed scope defined at the beginning of each cycle. These are by no means new ideas, or unique to Agile / Scrum, but having the ‘big picture’ of the methodology in the back of my mind gave me the impetus to use them consistently.

So, having read the book and put it into practice it was time to make sure I had theory well understood and to get the certification. A two-day course with the very experienced and able Martine Devos taught the detail of estimation techniques and immersed me in the philosophy behind it all, as well as giving me the stamp of approval from the Scrum Alliance.

At the start of a new project, I work out how to manage it based on the client’s requirements, the nature (size, complexity, type) of the project, the experience and practices of team members already in place, the needs of any major external suppliers if relevant, my own practices and industry standard methods. Thinking back over projects I’ve run in recent years, most of them would have benefited from at least some aspects of Scrum, and I expect that will be true in the future.

This latest assignment, at Lloyd’s of London, has added some new tools to the armoury. I’ve learned a lot about how the insurance market, and industry, works. The first project there upgraded their website, lloyds.com, using the Agile methodology, SCRUM, and I’ll be building on that by doing a Scrummaster certification in a couple of weeks. They then asked me to set up a project to implement the rules for participants in the Lloyd’s market to use for the document checking tool, Wordsensa QA I’m reluctant to write here about the details, or how well it went, but I’ve been offered references which anyone who’d like to hire me is welcome to take up.

So, what next? Do you have a project which involves IT? Would you like someone to run it, or perhaps to spend a few days advising you on how to handle a particular project management issue? Please contact me to discuss how I can help.

Technorati Tags: SCRUM, insurance, rules, Lloyds,

Design patterns had their origins in architecture, and the work of Christopher Alexander, who is an architect (of buildings) and has had enormous influence on design, in both computer science and architecture. A design pattern is a conceptual solution to a common problem, and a good working knowledge of the ones which have been identified, according to both this book and the developers I’ve asked while reading it, essential for any developer designing software now.

Rather than being a list of patterns, this book is a tutorial on good object-oriented design, showing how the patterns discussed are derived from design principles, and reinforcing those principles as it goes. Armed with a basic understanding of object-oriented ideas, and the ability to read the Java code fragments, the reader is lead through case studies and examples which introduce a dozen standard patterns and shown how good design practice leads to them. This is linked into agile programming ideas, and analysis techniques (particularly a matrix for analysing commonality and variability).

It’s clearly written in that structured American textbook way, with review questions at the end and a companion website with answers, code examples and further information. It is well-pitched for the project manager who is a few years away from hands on technical work, but who would like a better understanding of the ideas involved.

Added to the reading wish-list: The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander

• is free
• allows multiple people to access the same map at the same time across the internet
• allows notes, sketches and links (I like to scribble as well as mindmap tidily)
• can be rendered into a general format, such as a PDF, for printing and using elsewhere
• simple and stable

We’ve got a list of possibles, and I’m taking a quick look to see which are worth trying.Bubbl.us is the only one I’ve used before, and it was still in a very early state.

• Thinkature Ticks the boxes, particularly the free form drawing and pictures, and has chat facilities, but seems very slow.
• Mindmeister 30 day free trail, after which you can sign up for the Premium edition for $4 per month. Integrates with Skype. easy to use, and can export to pdf and various other tools
• Gliffy more of a general diagramming tool, and more fuss to bring people in to collaborate. Ads in the diagrams on the free edition
• Kayuda Looks likely, but doesn’t render well on my screen
• Bubbl.us diagramming isn’t conventional mind-mapping, just joined bubbles. no way to put anything else into the diagram. Free, and can export to html, xml or image formats
• Mindomo Free version is limited in number of maps, but only $6 per month to upgrade. Very smooth mapping, and rich diagrams can be created. No brainstorming mode.

For the moment, MindMeister looks to be the best, so I think we’ll try that. If it doesn’t work, there are a few more to look at.

• Flowchart.com
• Comapping
• Mind42

Technorati Tags: brainstorming online

Or worse still, the project is just about done and somehow you forgot to tell IT Operations.  After all, they barely speak the same language and sometimes you’d wonder if they work in the same industry, let alone the same IT department.  Shortly before you’re ready to go live, you call an emergency meeting and tell them its on its way.  Your sponsor is an important person in the company, and they have little choice but to catch the ball as you throw it over the wall.

In my experience, there is normally at least a level of tension between those who create new stuff, and those whose responsibility it is to keep the existing stuff going.  Sometimes, that’s creative and fun, but it can be a nightmare.  One way out of that nightmare is for Project Managers and other project staff to make a move towards that other world, learning about ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library.  If nothing else, you will learn to speak the language of service management and have a framework for understanding what they do. Even if the IT Operations department you’re dealing with doesn’t really implement the best practice guidelines contained in ITIL they are likely to be aware of it, in the same way that most Project Managers understand Prince2, although they don’t always apply it.

One of the big gaps in ITIL has always been the lack of any good guidance on how to cover exactly the problem I’m talking about - how to take a new service or product out of the project state, and into fully supported live service.  It was with some delight, therefore, that I recently attended a lecture by Aidan Lawes at the British Computer Society about the new version of ITIL which will be released later this year. 

The new ITIL is organised on a ’service lifecycle’ basis, starting with strategy, moving through to design, transition, operations and continuous improvement.  The Service Transition section is expected to deal with the way in which a new service moves into use, and I hope will address this area well.  If that is indeed the case, it will go a long way to breaking down one of the biggest areas of risk in many projects, and make life much easier for both project teams and IT Operations staff.

Technorati Tags: ITIL, British Computer Society

Khoi Vinh, lead designer at NYTimes.com, talks about how they design the paper.  The hidden costs of features are born far more by users in the digital media than they were in traditional papers.  Experts aren’t as easily offended as beginners, so make it easy for beginners.  Even the New York Times pushes content out with digg, permalinks for bloggers and so on.

Simon Willison was the star of the day for me, with his talk on openID.  Now that this is being supported by industry giants such as AOL and Microsoft, perhaps the reality of single signon is at hand.  Importantly, it allows a user to be authenticated - I am who I say I am - but authorisation - what am I allowed to do - is left up to the application.  That keeps it simple, and is likely to help its acceptance.  I own my authentication data, and chose the server which authenticates me (perhaps even my own server).  Its early days yet, and may be a while before its acceptable to the corporate world, but its definitely an idea to watch.

A series of short attendee selected presentations went well, and provided a much needed antidote to the earlier corporate slant.  Phillip Wilkinson of crowdstorm came up with a nice set of criteria for deciding whether a site would succeed or not, including the idea that a site should appeal to the selfish individual before the social good - it should be useful to one person, then their friends, then others.  del.icio.us, flickr, even potentially wordpress.com and linkedin.com (with its online profiles) all fit into this model, so I think he has a point. 

As I do a little php (eg. the wordpress hacks on this site) I was looking forward to seeing Rasmus Ledorf, its inventor, but it was a bit dry and I was tired by then.  Not that I fell asleep, but I don’t remember much.

Have you seen those tiny wee business cards with lots of different photos on them.  One of the designers in our project team has them, and they are very funky indeed.  Moo are the people who make them, and they were the only business that produces a physical product to speak at the conference.  A beautiful piece of marketing, well executed, and with praise for Royal Mail’s ability to get stuff places cheaply.  I wish more web delivery firms would use Royal Mail as its so much easier to pick up parcels from their depot if you’re not home when the postman calls.

So, what did I take away from all this? 

Firstly, a strong sense of the energy and creativity being poured into the web, as much from the conversations going on around me as from the presentations.  I want to have an idea, and do some coding!

Increasingly, web applications are seen as organisms in an ecosystem, growing, adapting, feeding off each other.  Even the New York Times realises that it isn’t a portal for everyone, and many people want to get in through the side doors.

openID, content management and applications which transcend the online / offline divide are areas to watch.  I met three people launching, or planning to launch, CMS sites.  openID came up again and again, and, if it happens, will not just make it possible to be sure who you’re talking to, but will make it practical to ask. 

The importance of kittens.  For a gather which was at least 90% blokes, I would never have expected to see so many furballs on slides, even if one was carrying an uzi.  You never know, it may just be shoes next.

Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07

The speakers are a parade of young Americans.  Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, turns thirty tomorrow.  These geeks are remarkably articulate.

Its a lot more about web business than the applications themselves, which is something of a relief.  I had wondered if it would turn out to be a developer-fest, but they’re talking about entrepeneurship and venture capital, not java wierdness.  Someone gives me a copy of the product that’s about to replace Microsoft Frontpage, Microsoft Expression Web.  Apparently it does real css, so maybe my developer mates won’t be quite so scathing if I use it.  Maybe.

Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch, sees a big future as integrating offline and online apps - email, photo libraries and editing on your PC with photo sharing on the web.  If the web is ubiquitous, should it not be transparent.

Provide services, not a portal, suggests Edwin Aoki from AOL.  I’m amazed AOL are even speaking at something like this, don’t geeks snigger at anyone with an AOL address anymore?

Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency translates some fairly standard sociology into the idea of virtual communities, and it is so clear why some sites work and those which treat their members poorly do not.

I learn a new term.  Yak shaving is all the stuff you have to do before you get down to the real work.  If you’re developing software, its getting the development and test environments set up, making sure you’ve got source code control and standards in place.  Scarily, its a lot of the stuff that keeps me busy in software development projects, and here is a crowd of people who’ll take all that away and commoditise development and staging environments.  They’re right of course, and they give me a t-shirt, so I guess I’ll have to find something more useful to do.

At lunch, I see an old friend from university days, and learn that GuardianUnlimited has taken over the role of newspaper of the liberal left in the US, not so much a gap in the market as a yawning chasm.

Now, I thought amazon sold books, but it turns out that they’re a giganormous provider of disk space and processing power as well.  They have a server and disk farm that would make the average IT Manager’s eyes water, and sell it on a  pay-as-you-use basis.  Interesting, but without some SLAs and good guarantees, I suspect its of more use to the entrepeneurial market than my corporate clients.  Still, an area to watch.  I become ever more convinced that there is no more point in a normal commercial company running their own data center than there is in their having their own power station (except Google of course, but they ain’t normal).  Simon Wardley, a man who likes ducks and runs fotango, the yak shavers, confirms this view.

And then a couple of shy looking geeks shuffle onto the stage to explain that they’d spent two years studying how quotations work.  Yes, ‘Alas poor Yorrik’, ‘alea jacta est’ and all that.  In the meantime, they missed web 2.0, but now they’re catching up.  With flickr for your photos, youtube for movies there is a missing piece - and the answer was launched today at www.quotationsbook.com.   This is what the entrepeneurial web should be about.  A couple of guys with an odd passion, hacking away somewhere to make something which just might change the world.  I hope they make it.

It is inspiring to see what people outside the mainstream corporate world are up to, and to realise that the days of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard building their first device in a garage in Palo Alto are still going strong.  After 20 years in IT, I am still impressed by something clever, something I’d never have thought of but once I’ve seen it, it’s obvious - yahoo pipes, groups of people moving through digg together, or perhaps a quotations website.

And more tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07