The Everyday Project Manager

A Primer for Learning the Principles of Successful Project Management

Jeremy Nicholls

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000191677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The best organizations, and even the best departments within organizations, have a roadmap: a clear vision of where they would like to be and the means by which they will get there. This roadmap drives the everyday activity of the company as well as any change it makes both internally and externally. And it is what drives projects.

In fact, it is arguable that success in business is almost wholly reliant on an ability to implement change effectively – whether it is a computer system that gives you the edge on your competitor, bringing a new product to market, adopting new ways of working, or completely redefining the approach your company takes. Success and survival in business relies on change and the way that business implements change is through projects. Therefore, if you work in the world of business, sooner or later the chances are that you will be involved in a project, as a stakeholder, advisor, sponsor or possibly running it - as the project manager.

In The Everyday Project Manager, author and project management expert Jeremy Nicholls shares the key attributes and skills of successful project management and describes the practical skills that will enhance project delivery regardless of your level of experience.

The skills and concepts detailed in this book can be easily understood and implemented. They are "everyday" (that is, commonplace) skills, but they are skills and the concepts that the best project managers use every day.

Each chapter details the concepts, practices, and tools that readers will use to build their proficiency in every phase of delivering a project efficiently and effectively.

Introduction Part One

What Is The Everyday Project Manager?

We live in a world of projects. From complex, national infrastructure projects to the small, personal projects we each undertake, wherever there is a group of activities, a budget, and a target date, there is a project.

Success in business is almost wholly reliant on an ability to implement change effectively – be it a computer system upgrade that gives you the edge on your competitor, bringing a new product to market, adopting new ways of working, or completely redefining the approach your company takes. Success and survival in business rely on change and the way that business implements change is through projects. Therefore, if you work in the world of business, sooner or later the chances are that you will be involved in a project, as a stakeholder, advisor, Sponsor or possibly running it – that is, as the project manager.

Business notwithstanding, all of us at one time or another need to deliver a project. It might be building a garden shed, putting on a show or event, moving house, preparing for a wedding, or any of the numerous things in life that require a bit of thought and preparation. And all of these things become less stressful with even the most basic understanding of how to deliver projects. You don’t need to be a famous chef in order to bake a cake, but having an understanding of the basics of cookery will help you get a better result each time. You don’t need to be an accountant to manage the family budget, but knowing how to use a spreadsheet will make it considerably easier.

And so it follows that you don’t need to be a professional project manager to benefit from an understanding of what makes projects tick and apply them to the projects in your life.

Welcome to the world of The Everyday Project Manager.

Who Is This Book For?

Anyone. Anyone at all who needs or wants to deliver a project – and sooner or later, that’s everyone. Specifically though, this book is aimed at the following people:

• Project leaders and any member of a project team. If you have been assigned to work on a project team – maybe you’re even sponsoring or leading a project – then reading this book will help you to relate to others on your team. By following the principles laid out in this book, and understanding who does what (and who should be doing what), the whole team will work more effectively to deliver the desired goal.
• The beginner project manager. If you’re just starting out on a career in project management, or you’re considering it and would like to learn a bit more, this book will help you get your head around some of the key concepts within project management so you can get a feel for the subject.
• The seasoned project manager. It might be that you have been delivering projects for years, but the best project managers take time out occasionally to remind themselves of the basics. This book is intended to give an overview of project management, so acts well as a high-level refresher. You may even be at the point in your career where you are mentoring others – this book will be useful to structure and guide mentoring sessions.
• The layperson. If you are interested in understanding the basic principles of project management. Perhaps you’ve been given a project to deliver at work, or have a personal project such as planning a wedding or building an extension. You don’t need to study for weeks or become a fully qualified project manager, but an understanding of the basics will definitely help you to reach your goal.
• You. Trust me, whoever you are, there will be something in the pages that follow that will help you in some way. The information in this book is derived from years of experience (both mine and others’) that I have attempted to distill down to the essentials – the nuggets of gold in the enormous mine of project management. There will be something for everyone – the skills of project management are also excellent life skills and you will find yourself achieving more in life and in work by following the principles, tools, and practices in this book.

The Everyday Project Manager vs the Professional Project Manager

The skills and concepts detailed in the following pages are those that the average person can easily pick up and start putting to use. They are everyday (that is, commonplace) and should be simple to understand and implement. They are also the skills and the concepts that the best professional project managers use. Every. Day.

For example, understanding the difference between the benefits and the objectives of a project isn’t something that is simply learnt at the start of your career and then consigned to the textbooks. It is an understanding that is vital to the delivery of every project at all times. Again: the best project managers use these skills every single day.

However, there is a cautionary note. In an attempt to distill the essence of the project management skill set and key concepts, some of the nuance and detail is necessarily lost. In this book, I have done so consciously. Much of the nuance is useful or of interest to project management professionals and experts only and is therefore not helpful in an introductory approach to the subject. That said, I will endeavor to point out where project management in the “professional world” may benefit from a more in-depth understanding of the subject.

For the most part though, we’ll focus on the everyday skills that will enhance project delivery regardless of your level of experience.

The Structure of This Book

I have attempted to structure this book to follow the typical lifecycle of a project. Projects obviously vary wildly, but most (broadly) follow a pattern of Start-up ⇒ Design ⇒ Execute ⇒ Close, though there are many variations on this theme. Within each of these phases there are certain activities that you will need to undertake and so I have divided the book according to the phases, with each chapter focusing on an area or activity that needs to be undertaken during that phase. Not everyone joins a project at the start (in fact, few do), so it is hoped that this structure will allow the reader to dip in and out in order to cut straight to the activity they are currently involved in, interested in, or considering.

At the end of each chapter you will also find a summary of the key points to take away from the chapter. These summaries are themselves collated at the end of the book so that you can have a sort of project health checklist. By reviewing the “In Summary” section, you will hopefully be able to identify areas for improvement within your project or – better yet – satisfy yourself that everything that should be considered on a project has been.

What This Book Is and What It Isn’t

Finally, this book is not intended as an exhaustive explanation of project management. It is not a “bible” containing everything you will ever need to know about project delivery.

Nor is it a manual that gives step-by-step information to deliver a perfect project every time. This book will not guarantee project success. Believe me, if such a book existed I would either be incredibly rich or out of a job!

What you will find is sufficient information to gain a broad understanding of the basics, alongside lots of ideas to improve projects, reduce stress, and manage everything else along the way.

I’ve endeavored to ensure each section is concise, with no lengthy explanations – I’ll leave that to the more detailed project management manuals, of which there are plenty. In this book, I’ve tried to keep the information short but sweet, making it perfect for dipping into – either to learn about a specific element of project management or as a quick refresher.

Above all, it will give you the tools you need to immediately start delivering better projects and, in doing so, put more change into the world and get more out of life.

Introduction Part Two

Some Project Management Definitions

For this book, we are looking at The Everyday Project Manager – a person tasked with a single project to deliver and looking to understand the principles and techniques of project management to enable them to deliver successfully.

If you are currently working in an environment that delivers projects, you might be familiar with some terms which are useful to understand, as they provide a context for project delivery in general, but which will not be covered in detail in this book as they do not fit with The Everyday Project Manager remit described above.

However, because they are useful concepts to understand, and for completeness, I will briefly outline some definitions below along with some explanation (which will hopefully become obvious) as to why they are not covered in more detail in this book.

Projects, Programs, and Portfolios

It is worth distinguishing between projects, programs, and portfolios. The distinction has to do with the number of projects and their relation to one another. A project is a single, cohesive set of tasks that delivers an end result. It will produce a deliverable, or set of deliverables, so projects are said to create outputs.

A program is a group of projects which taken together deliver an outcome. In other words, it is a group of projects, all of which will deliver their outputs, but when all of these outputs are taken together, a broader outcome will be achieved. For example, let’s imagine an organization wants to encourage more remote working. It identifies five pieces of work that could be undertaken to promote remote working and agrees to pursue three of them as projects. The three projects are: a software project which will roll out teleconferencing software to make it easier for remote workers to dial into meetings and follow presentations at home; a hardware rollout project to provide any identified remote workers with a laptop and mobile phone; and a Human Resources project to identify candidates for remote working and work with them to create new contracts and benefits packages accordingly. It could be argued that none of those projects on its own would deliver the organizational outcome of a workforce for whom remote working is a realistic option with, say, 25% of employees working remotely at least once a week. But taken together, those three projects will deliver outputs that make the outcome possible. Similarly, there might be no realistic justification to undertake just one of those projects without the others also being undertaken. The projects do not have merit in isolation. But taken together – as a program – the projects become justified as part of a larger initiative. A program, therefore, is a group of related projects whose outputs, together, deliver an outcome. A program will normally be run by a Program Manager who will have the project managers of each of the underlying projects as their direct reports.

Finally, a portfolio is the entire suite of projects and programs being undertaken by an organization, be it a department, business unit, or company as a whole. The portfolio may be made up of multiple individual, unrelated projects without any of them grouped as programs. It may be a series of programs all delivering their specific business outcomes with no standalone projects. Or it may (more usually) be a combination of programs and projects, all of which are delivering for the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction Part One
• Introduction Part Two
• PHASE 1 Project Start-Up
• PHASE 2 Design and Planning
• PHASE 3 Build and Execute
• PHASE 4 Project Closure and Lessons Learned
• Appendices
• In Summary: Delivering a Project in Three Pages
• Key Information for Every (Everyday) Project
• Index