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Project Manager's Survival Kit

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Managing a project is no less challenging than fighting a war, be it a multi-million dollar project, involving over a hundred team members and spanning multiple geographical locations OR a small project with less than 20 team members occupying no more than a corner of your office space! Regardless of the size, every project needs to be handled with an equal precision and needs the same set of skills to be applied by a Project Manager. Experience has shown that the amount of challenges faced by a project manager during a project do not come down just because a project is smaller in size. For smaller projects, even if the number of stakeholders and thereby the quantum of requirements may not be as large as bigger projects, the quantum of changes happening to the original requirements may be more, thereby having a potential to disrupt the project schedule and budget. In short, no matter what the project size is, every Project Manager needs a survival toolkit. Here are some of the ...
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Understanding Customer Requirements

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For any project to be a success, understanding the customer requirements and being able to map it correctly with the deliverables is the key. Customer requirements form the foundation on which the entire project is built. If the requirements are not understood, then a Project Manager (PM) has started on a wrong foot and is surely headed towards a disaster! Understanding customer requirements, which is formally known as the "Requirement Gathering" process, involves interacting with people and hence a PM has to possess excellent interpersonal skills and has to be good at managing stakeholders' expectations. Stakeholder management is such an important subject that the Project Management Institute has introduced a new knowledge area for "Stakeholder Management" in its latest edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)! Requirement gathering is a part of the Planning Process Group as per the PMBOK, which means the requirements have to be collect...
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5 mistakes Project Managers should avoid

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Projects, by nature, have a lot of uncertainty built into them, which is why Project Managers (hereafter referred to as PMs) have to identify risks throughout the project and need to plan meticulously for mitigating (or avoiding wherever possible) those risks. There are various other aspects to managing projects such as timelines, quality, scope, resources, etc. But to my opinion and in my experience, the reason most of the projects fail or do not get delivered to the customer satisfaction, is improper planning and management of risks throughout the life of a project. But well, we are not here to talk on Risk Management, since its such a big topic that it warrants a different discussion altogether. What we are going to focus here is some of the common mistakes that PMs do, that result in project failures, especially by those who have just stepped into PM's shoes. As mentioned earlier, there are different aspects that make up a project, and each one of those aspects req...
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