Project Manager note

The last project has come to an end, and the progress has been very poor. However, it is also an experience and many things have been learned from it. To do a project, you need to learn from failure and analyze the factors that lead to adverse project progress, so that you will not make the same mistake again in the next project management process. As the saying goes, people should not be tripped twice by the same rock. Therefore, failure is not a bad thing. Although the project is not completed on time, the project manager assumes the primary responsibility and is also called by the leaders, I feel that I can analyze the cause of my failure, this is enough for the next project correction.

Now, another new project has started. After a detailed summary of the previous project, I have been thinking about it, at the same time, I also read some books on project management and post-posting. I personally summarized some of the problems I found and found some improvement methods, we hope to implement the Program in the next project and receive good results. Of course, project management can not be learned and mastered flexibly from books, but some good methods learned from books can be applied to project management, to a certain extent, it is still very practical.

 

1. How to analyze and mine requirements?

In fact, this problem should not be a problem, because a real project manager does not need to do requirement analysis, but should be done by full-time demand analysts. In my understanding, the project manager should define the scope of the project as part of his/her work: Determine which projects are to be done, you do not need to pay attention to it and clearly define the boundaries of the project. In addition, other work should be carried out by dedicated personnel for professional information collection and processing. But as we all know, in actual work, project managers often act as both fathers and mothers, and one person performs n jobs, especially when the project is not big, the project manager needs to do everything first and foremost. At the same time, the boss's expectations for you must be hard-pressed. Therefore, from the perspective of reality, we still need to discuss this issue.

I remember when I first graduated from school to my company, I told my boss that I was still very experienced in demand analysis. The boss smiled and said to me, in fact, to become an experienced demand analyst, you must have at least 10 years of experience. At that time, I only thought that my boss was too fond of my debut, but after some projects, I had a deeper understanding of the demand analysis work, it is not easy to understand the demand analysis.

First, we lack domain knowledge. Our customers are not all well-known in their fields. It is not like designing courses in schools, not a library management system, or a student management system. They can even be compiled by mengtai. The diversity of industries will inevitably lead to the diversity of required domain knowledge. In the face of such dilemmas, how can we obtain enough information to complete a complex software product in just a few conversations with our customers.

 

Secondly, the customer's understanding and communication of requirements are insufficient. The requirement is clearly delivered to the project team by the customer. When explaining a requirement, the customer sometimes has a large ambiguity, and the customer's description of the requirement cannot be completely correct. If it is to communicate with foreigners, the loss of information will be even greater. In their dealings with foreign customers, it is fortunate that people in English-speaking countries can talk to you in their mother tongue. They have met customers in countries where their mother tongue is not English, both of them need to talk in non-native language, and both parties can express what they want more than 70% of their thoughts, even if it is a very successful communication. Likewise, analysts may misunderstand the requirements and some information will be omitted. The results can be imagined by developing with such demands.

 

There seems to be no better solution than experience to solve the above problems. It takes some time to get familiar with an industry. After learning a certain degree of knowledge, you can easily communicate effectively with the customer and obtain the information required by the project. The importance of requirements for a project is needless to say. from the beginning to the end, a project is designed to satisfy the customer's needs. In fact, it is a process of mixing down the demand. To achieve this goal, there are also some steps called methods to reduce the misunderstanding of the requirements:

1. Detailed division of project stakeholders (Stakeholder): In particular, what is the customer and what is the user. When we understand the requirements, we can obtain information from whom. At the same time, it should be noted whether the obtained information has been confirmed by the owner.

2.Demand Analysis meeting: meeting with customers is of course essential. Find as many unclear points as possible and propose them in a timely manner. If the customer permits recording, it is difficult to do this. Most of the time, the customer does not want to leave his or her own words. The meeting with the project team members aims to deepen the understanding of the needs in the group, brainstorm in a broad sense, and use the mind to divide violence and other things to discover more questions.

3.After the initial requirement is obtained, You need to analyze it in detail and divide the functional blocks, their attributes, and constraints.

For more information, refer to "Exploration requirements-quality before design" by winberger.

 

2.How to communicate effectively

There has been no dispute over the topics of communication, and it is a dead end to having no communication in the project. The project I was working on was delayed due to a communication problem. After I posted my post, many of my friends also replied to the communication problems that existed. In fact, during the project, the project manager should spend most of the time in communication. The main functions include proposing project directions (making decisions, authorizing work, guiding various work, negotiation, and reporting), attending meetings, managing the entire project, and providing public relations, record Management (meeting records, reports, specifications, and contract documents. The communication relationship mainly exists in three aspects: internal communication with the project team, leaders, and customers.

 

Communication within the project team is the basis for developing quality assurance software. Without communication, it is certainly impossible for everyone to build a car behind closed doors. LastArticleI also mentioned this issue. The communication methods between project members are as follows:EmailMeeting, telephone, face-to-face conversation, etc.EmailThis communication method is convenient and convenient, just likeQqChat, don't be nervous, it is a good news for people who are not good at communicating face-to-face, but this method is still useless. It is far from enough to communicate with people by words. Of course, it is good for technical things, but for understanding or emotional things, the ability to express words is still lacking. There are also a lot of problems in the form of meetings: Effective conference organizations can make various decisions the results of meetings to achieve the purpose of meetings; ineffective Conference people are chatting over there, no final confirmation result is available for many questions. Therefore, meetings are a double-edged sword, and how to effectively organize meetings is also a matter of attention. It is necessary to arrange the meeting agenda in advance and make sufficient preparations before the meeting, so as to draw a conclusion at the meeting. The telephone communication is relatively better, but if the project manager communicates too much with the team members through the phone, the information will be transmitted just like the superiors send commands to the lower-level members, and the team members will think that the project manager is too big, this will give the group members a bad impression. Therefore, face-to-face communication is also an essential form, and the project manager needs to spend more time directly communicating with the team members to actively grasp the progress of the project, get Feedback from Team members in a timely manner to make adjustments. In addition, direct communication also creates a loose environment in the project team.

One thing to mention here is that I have encountered this situation many times. When a project manager communicates a task to a team member, you must pay attention to your own terms and make sure that they are clear and accurate, so that you do not find this is not the result you originally wanted after others complete the task. It is best to ask the team member to confirm whether they have understood your requirements accurately. This information transmission is effective.

Communication with leaders is an interesting topic. In my previous project, the leaders took the initiative to ask me about the progress of the project. At that time, I was not aware of the need to report the progress of the project to the leaders. As a result, if a problem occurs in the project, the team leads the project again. This means that the team is responsible for pushing the issue to the team lead, which is dangerous. So, as a project manager, you must communicate with the team lead in a timely manner, it is far from enough to pass the current project progress to the leaders. We recommend that you have more informal conversations. During the conversation, some leaders may find some unexpected problems. If the leaders feel necessary, they should make timely adjustments and increase resources. In this way, the project, the project manager, and the leader are all beneficial.

Customer communication is very important. Poor communication with customers in the previous project has caused many problems. Many netizens are also replying to this question. The project manager has the responsibility to communicate with the customer, ask for unclear requirements, and report the project progress in a timely manner. However, you should note that you cannot call the customer once there is a problem, so that the customer will be very disgusted. It is effective to use a limited number of opportunities to obtain more necessary information. In comparison, the team members can discover unknown problems to the maximum extent and collect a certain amount of questions to the customer at a time. This will not only affect customers, but also improve the ability of the project team to raise questions. In this case, the project manager may not be able to contact the Customer directly due to many factors such as the company's organizational structure and personnel arrangement, back to the above-mentioned communication with the leaders, the project manager should also put some pressure on the leaders and urge the leaders to arrange opportunities for contact with the customers.

 

3. How to manage the time

From the perspective of the project manager, the time management should be divided into two aspects: on the one hand, the Project Manager manages the time resources of the project, and on the other hand, it manages the work time arrangement. Time resources are very valuable for projects. Although man-month is just a myth, every day, this myth is constantly expected, especially bosses (maybe they know this is just a myth ).

The perfect time allocation is the amount of time that everyone is allocated for 8 hours every day. This is obviously impossible. Project development is a bit like process concurrency, sometimes waiting. At this time, the project manager should promptly adjust the work arrangements of the team members. One way is to arrange the team members who have already completed the tasks to be blocked by the bottleneck, help other team members solve the problem together (also known as myth). The other is to check whether the work in the next stage can be divided into several stages. If the team members are idle, the project manager's arrangement is not completed. In the previous project, some team members said that there was nothing to do. At that time, they did not make good adjustments, which caused the shortage of resources in the future.

For their own time management, the project manager must always put the important things first. From the morning to the company, you need to arrange your own work for one day and sort the work in order of priority. Next, you need to do the first priority. In the long run, we need to divide it according to important and urgent arrangements. I believe you have seen it in many places.

 

An important and urgent task is to be executed at present, making people busy.

A waste of time is an unimportant and urgent task.

An important but not urgent task is the key for the project manager to take the lead. The reason for the emergence of many urgent matters is that the project manager is busy all day, in many cases, because he is not sure about these important but not urgent matters in advance. If he can prepare in advance, the subsequent schedule is a step-by-step approach, which rarely gets too busy.

If it is not important or urgent, let's go with it.

In particular, it is best to standardize some templates for documents to be written by some project managers. Generally, companies have corresponding document templates, but that is far from enough. Similar information should be written for each project, so it is best to organize a template by yourself. Every time you create a new project in the future, you only need to enter information about some new projects. This greatly reduces the daily work of the project manager and minimizes the time spent on documents.

4. How to discuss development methods

The discussion on development methods has always been a hot topic. Both scholars and practitioners are constantly looking for a good method. From the classic Waterfall Model to the current popular agile development, software development has been improved again and again. Although there are so many methods, to be honest, although the waterfall model is difficult to cope with the rapidly changing software requirements, in most cases, software development is based on it, there can be at most some iterative changes. At least after I have participated in many projects, I found that they are basically based on it.

The waterfall model clearly specifies every step of the software development process. Each stage begins with the completion of the above stage. At the end of each stage, a milestone check is required to determine whether a milestone can enter the next stage. This method is suitable for projects with stable or large requirements. The iterative development mode stage is consistent with the waterfall model. The difference is that when a stage encounters a problem, it is allowed to go back to the previous stage for improvement. This method is actually more practical. In reality, few projects have exactly the same coding requirements or design document requirements. At present, agile development in Hot talk seems to be not implemented much in China. This method focuses on lightweight start and implementation, simple and flexible design in order to respond to changes in demand at any time. I think this method may seem simple, but it has extremely high requirements on developers. It is just a flexible design and a deep understanding of object-oriented ideas, how many of us are competent?

I personally think that the use of methods should be combined with the features of projects. For example, my previous project isWebProject, you should use the Rapid Prototyping Method: After receiving the customer's requirements, the first time is to carry outUIDesign, all the pages are made according to known needs, and links between pages are made, and then showed to the customer, this method is more prepared for positioning the requirements, it can communicate effectively with the customer in the early stage, inspire the customer to provide further detailed requirement descriptions, and greatly help the later development. For another exampleMISSystem, all requirements have been clarified, the customer provides detailed requirements information, and is a version to add features on the previous system. In this case, we should choose a standard process.

Different project types determine different development methods. The project manager should be familiar with various development methods before deciding what development methods to use after analyzing the project.

 

5. How to deal with technical details

I believe that the technical details are a headache for the project manager. In theory, the project manager is responsible for management and has no strict technical requirements. At most, it is necessary to understand it. But in fact, in our environment, project managers are generally technical people and have a passion for technology. It seems that it is meaningless to not study technology. To address this issue, I would like to share my views on this issue:

1. The Project Manager cannot have no technical background

It is hard to imagine how sad it is to be a project manager by someone who has no knowledge of technology. The team members will always put their anger on the project manager. "How can someone who doesn't know anything lead us to be smart ?"ProgramClerk ?", In this way, how can we see the dawn of the project? Of course, in most cases, the project manager is still technically developed and upgraded from a programmer's position, that is, the so-called editor and superior manager. A project manager with technical experience can be executed more effectively with rich experience in planning and decision making. At the same time, we will have a more profound understanding of the needs and can more accurately grasp the progress of the project.

2. The Project Manager cannot fall into technical details

Having technology is essential for the project manager. Too much focus on technology is a big headache for the project manager. The project manager should put the main tasks of the work on management, that is, planning and arrangement, resource allocation, progress control, and communication. It takes a lot of time and effort to complete these tasks. If the project manager is focused on technology and cannot extricate themselves, it will inevitably affect the work he should do. In addition, people who are over-focused on technology often have the characteristic that they love to pursue perfection. Sometimes, I am also like this. I think things will always have a perfect solution, and I will study it in depth. This spirit is a good thing for researchers, but it is a different thing for people in the enterprise. Especially for project managers, do not pursue perfection when managing a project. A typical problem is the relationship between the three elements of software products, namely time, cost, and quality. If the project manager wants to pursue perfection in these three aspects, this project is basically not required. Therefore, when starting a project, we need to determine which two of the three factors should be focused on. The other one can be discarded. Don't be discouraged because you haven't found a perfect solution. The world is not perfect.

3.The project manager should grasp the development direction of technology

If you don't focus on technology, it doesn't mean you don't care about it. In particular, in this era of rapid technological development, project managers should take the initiative to receive new information faster than others. The development of technology should be well grasped as a project manager. DoWebProject should understand the currentWeb 2.0You should understand how to develop products on the Microsoft platform.. NET 2.0, 3.0. At this time, the project manager is not required to learn specific knowledge points. Instead, the project manager is required to use a little time every day to obtain the latest information from the Internet and update his/her knowledge structure, with a clear understanding of the technical direction of the project, we can better cope with future technological changes.

4. The project manager should work with the functional manager to promote the technical improvement of the team.

When the project is coming to an end, the project manager needs to prepare a summary report to comment on the project. The work of the team members has basically ended. In fact, the work to be done at this time is very important. It is to summarize some technical points in the software development process, for example, generate reusable controls and a general solution to a problem. Such work is a kind of accumulation for technicians and a potential benefit for the company. Therefore, the project manager should arrange technical personnel to do this. In most cases, the functional manager may arrange for them to go directly to the next project considering the actual situation. However, the project manager should have a good communication with the functional manager and get some time to do the above work. The so-called cutting-edge workers with a lot of knowledge can improve the efficiency of developers and the quality of products. In the end, the project manager's headache has been lifted.

 

Summary

After talking about so many things, I just want to talk about my thoughts on problems encountered in project management. In fact, each of the above points can be expanded into the capacity of a book, but they are not as thorough as they can be analyzed. After all, I am a newbie who just stepped into the project manager team. In more cases, I still need to learn from the project experience and sum up success or failure. I also hope that I can sum up my experience in a timely manner to share and exchange with you, and learn more from your opinions.