Summary : For projects with long periods, large scales, and large numbers of people involved, excellent project managers can play a very important role and contribute to the success of the project. So how do excellent project managers generally manage and coordinate the project? This article will bring you thinking and inspiration.

How to become a good project manager(Part.1)

This article is aimed at the development of software projects and is for reference only for other types of projects.

Recently, due to the adjustment of the company's business and organizational structure, the staff cannot be deployed. The boss of the company asked me to temporarily take charge of the management of an annual R&D project.

Although I have been engaged in product management for these years, the author has also undertaken the management of multiple software system projects in my past work experience.

Today, I was communicating with several other project managers in the company on how to quickly develop into an excellent project manager. Here I will share with you my experience in this area, hoping to give some help to friends who are engaged in software project management. I also believe that through this article, you can quickly grasp the key points in the project management process, achieve project goals, and improve yourself in the process of project activities. At the same time, I hope that the big guys who read this article can give comments and suggestions, thank you!

We all know that all forms of project establishment have only one purpose, that is, the success of the project, and work is carried out around this goal in the project management process.

If we want a project to successfully complete the task within the set time, resources, and scope, there will definitely be a certain degree of difficulty. The wider the project involves, the larger the volume, the greater the risk.

We all know that all forms of project establishment have only one purpose, that is, the success of the project, and the project management process also focuses on this goal.

Image: iStock/NicoElNino

We all know that all forms of project establishment have only one purpose, that is, the success of the project, and the project management process also focuses on this goal.

If we want a project to successfully complete the task within the set time, resources, and scope, there will definitely be a certain degree of difficulty. The wider the project involves, the larger the volume, the greater the risk.

As the core figure of the success or failure of the project, the project manager plays an important role. Because of this, the project manager needs to start from the following six aspects:

1.Establish Prestige
Since ancient times, all newly appointed officials must first establish prestige in order to better exercise their management powers.

The project team is formed temporarily, and the life cycle is generally not very long. Many companies are also functional management methods with members from different departments. Therefore, when the project manager takes office, he also needs to establish prestige in order to mobilize team members .

There are mainly the following two aspects:

1.1 Formal appointment required

Normally, the company will have a project initiation, but some companies have to go through the process of project approval for the so-called "efficiency", and the project team will notify it and it will be finished.

Before the project manager launches the specific project management work, the company must "announce the world" in the form of formal publication of the project approval document. This is the emphasis on the project and the best opportunity for the project manager to establish prestige.

If a company has not issued a document, the project manager can completely request the company to formally issue a document, formally appoint the project manager, so as not to be harmful to the follow-up work.

1.2 Clarify the responsibilities and powers of the project manager

I believe that when many companies are doing organizational structure, the HR department will sort out the company's job responsibilities, so the responsibilities of the project manager must also be clearly written, and the reference to the job responsibilities documents will be emphasized in the project document. If your company has not clarified the responsibilities of the project manager, you need to clarify it before initiating the project.

As the soul of the project, the project manager is directly responsible for the results of the project, and needs to effectively promote the project progress and control the project risks to achieve the project goals.

At the same time, the project manager should be given corresponding powers, including:

Power for project team building and resource scheduling management;
Right to assess the project team;
The right to formulate and implement the reward and punishment system for the project team, including the right to distribute bonuses to the project.

The above-mentioned clarification of these powers is also helping the project manager to establish prestige.

2. Goal decomposition

Only by departure can we arrive. Having said that, if there is no clear goal, you will get farther and farther away from the goal.

As for the importance of clear project goals, I won’t go into details, as everyone on earth knows it. However, if the project manager has only one overall goal in mind, he will inevitably encounter trouble when landing.

The project will never be completed suddenly. There must be a gradual process. If the overall goal is not dismantled and milestones are used as the inspection criteria in the process, the possibility of project failure will be great rise.

Project goal decomposition

Before setting up the project, I believe that the overall goal of the project will be clarified within the company. When the project manager takes over the project, the first thing to do is to disassemble the goal to form a milestone goal to ensure that the project can output results in stages , And finally reach the overall goal of the project.

At the same time, milestone goals are also for better control of project costs and risks. They can be simply understood as sub-projects, but they are not equivalent. Because there is no output in the milestone, it does not mean that the corresponding work will not be carried out in the milestone, because the solution of some technical problems may run through the entire project, but only the results will be reflected in the subsequent milestones.

Milestone goals need to include three aspects: output time, goals, and inspection indicators. In principle, the milestone goals are determined by the project manager, and subsequent changes are also determined by the project manager. However, in the actual implementation situation, the project manager needs to output the results according to the milestones as much as possible, and cannot be changed at will, otherwise it is very likely to affect the output of the entire project.

As for the granularity of the milestone output, from the author’s experience, the milestones of a project cannot be too many or too few. Generally, it is more appropriate to split the project into 2 to 4 milestones. The results of each milestone should have the ability to be output, and it needs to be able to be tested. It is clear that the output of each milestone should have the ability to release, but as to whether it must be output, this can be done by the project manager, product manager, The project management committee consults and decides together.

3.Select Talents

No matter how strong the personal ability of the project manager is, the development of the project work also depends on the concerted efforts of everyone in the team.

For the project manager, it is very important to set up a project team and select the right core personnel. This is also one of the important factors that determine the success or failure of the project.

According to the normal process, the selection of project team members must be completed before the project is established. Of course, there are cases where the team is slowly formed after the project is established. However, no matter what the situation, the selection of people is a necessary ability of the project manager, and it is also a must Experience.

3.1 Selection of core personnel

The larger the size of the project, the wider the scope and the more complex the composition of the project team members.

Our article mainly refers to the development of software project work. According to the regular composition of software project personnel, it is necessary to complete the selection of the four core roles of product manager, architect, core developer, and test team leader.

In different companies, the core role of the project may be different. This does not matter. It can be determined according to their respective circumstances. The key point is to clarify the core roles of the project team and the selection of corresponding personnel.

3.2. Personnel requirements

When selecting personnel, it is necessary to evaluate from two aspects to ensure that all personnel can meet project requirements.

The first is the skill requirements. After the project manager has passed the initial decomposition of the project objectives, he needs to analyze the key technical difficulties of the project. According to past experience, this risk seems to be small, but it has become a constraint on the project schedule in many projects. "Tai Hang". Therefore, in combination with the technical requirements of the project, use this as a reference point to select the appropriate personnel.

Seeing this, some people may ask, the project manager is not omnipotent, what if the difficulty is uncountable?

Good question, if due to the technical deficiencies of the project manager, for example, the project manager only knows Java, has never used C# to develop a project, and is not clear about the corresponding technical problems, then first find a suitable one. Net architects, and then help you analyze together to clarify technical requirements.

The second is the literacy requirements. This sounds like nothing to consider, but I think this is similar to non-functional requirements, very important and must be considered.

From the author’s experience analysis, in terms of professionalism, the core personnel must be proactive, responsible, and able to think, analyze, and take risks in the project together with the project manager.

The core personnel should have positive energy, have certain communication skills, can listen to the opinions of other members of the team, so that the project team has strong cohesion, and can also help the project manager recommend reasonable project members to jointly complete the formation of the project team.

How to become a good project manager(Part.1)

How to become a good project manager(Part.1)

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