Four key elements of project management capability improvement

Summary:In response to the rapid development of business activities, two management will play a key role, one is strategic management, one is Project management. Strategic management is based on the enterprise's long-term and macroscopic, consider the core competitiveness, and project management is to achieve the strategy and support the rapid and healthy development of the means and protection. Understanding Project Management

"In today's society, everything is a project and everything is going to be a project," said Paul, president of the American Project Management Association. "Project is a one-time effort to complete a unique product or to provide a unique service for a period. As long as there are goals and processes, you can become a project. For example: design and development of a product function, house renovation, wedding preparation, etc. can be called the project.

Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques in project activities to meet the project requirements, with the aim of meeting and exceeding the project stakeholders ' needs and expectations. In essence, project management is goal-oriented, and all methods and actions are served to achieve the goal. Project Practice of Internet companies

Early or start-up internet companies, product managers, and technology development have a role to play in almost any number of roles. In addition to product design, product managers also do interactive design, product testing and project implementation of the overall coordination and promotion work. In addition to the implementation of the program coding, the technology developers do the system test and the test completed on-line deployment.

In fact, the interaction design is the work category of the interaction designer from the aspect of the Personnel role Division of the standard norm, and the system test belongs to the work category of the test engineer; the on-line deployment belongs to the operations engineer, and the overall coordination and promotion of project execution is also the work category of project management. When those early or start-up Internet companies are growing in size, more and more projects, a person with multiple roles will feel overwhelmed and will inevitably affect the progress and rhythm of the project.

As an example of the well-known Chinese Internet industry, a company's W division in the earliest organizational structure, there will be independent products, UE, UI, page production, Front end, back end, testing and other departments, there was no full-time project management staff. Most of the project management work is undertaken by the head of the product and technical department. This stage has not yet formed a systematic project management process, so the related project work does not have the unified basis, the management is more extensive. Project leader's definition is not clear, sometimes the project out of the problem will inevitably happen shifting the situation. Later, the problem of project implementation was constantly exposed, and there was no quick and effective solution. The need for project management has become increasingly strong, and business line leaders are aware of the need to manage projects from a global level. Mainly reflected in: need to ensure the rational use of project resources, clear the role of project members of the Division of labor, formulate a reasonable project plan and promote implementation. Seemingly very simple requirements, but is a company W division in the project management set sail.

In order to enhance its project management capability, W Division has established the Project Management Department (PMO) to report directly to the head of the line of Business (senior Director level). At that time, in the product, design and technical sectors, the following forms of Personnel Role Division (Operations and marketing departments, not introduced), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Business Unit structure diagram

Among them, interactive design, visual design, page production and front-end (JS) development, are subordinate to the UED (User Experience Design) department, back-end development, testing, network operations, are subordinate to the technical department. The PMO, the product department, the UED, the technical department as a strong matrix structure, are directly governed by the head of the line of business. The project Management Department is responsible for the overall management and execution.

With the project management work gradually standardized and recognized by all parties, W division has also made a new function of the Department of Project management positioning. On this basis, the project management department in the project operation of the exploration practice, but also to help other functional departments to develop relevant codes of work.

For example, the Department of Project Management has the following sections in its functional scope.

Responsible for all project management, implementation and promotion, ensure project safety, solve various risks and problems in the project, and timely landing the correct destination. Establish and maintain the company's project management methodology to help the company project pursue the best project management practices. Establish and implement a series of common project management processes and templates, and continuously optimize the company's project management process, to guide the project management personnel. Establish and use standardized processes, tools, and terminology to facilitate communication within the project team, across teams and across functions, reducing misunderstandings and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of project communication and collaboration mechanisms. Manage the project portfolio and improve the core competencies of the project management by providing the project stakeholders and functional departments with the popularization and training of project management. Build and maintain project management information system (such as Jira, confluence, etc.) to improve the level of automation and adaptability of project management in terms of process, operational rules and team collaboration. Strengthen project management system construction, through the training and guidance for project management, strengthen the team construction of project management personnel, improve the management level of project management personnel and the first-line management ability. Perform performance management on project, project manager, and project role members. During the period, the company HR department also invited the industry well-known project management experts, to the company to do the project management field of system training. After a long period of operation, the project management level of W division has been greatly improved, mainly manifested in: standardize the project collaborative process, project planning, Progress Rhythm, implementation control and other more reasonable improvement, project management methods, tools are widely used, communication smoother, improve management efficiency and effectiveness.

the embodiment of four core elements

The project management has four core elements namely Sppt--strategy strategic goal, people talented person, process system flow, tools management tool. The improvement process of the whole project management ability must accompany with the four core elements which the project management pays close attention to supporting.

These four core elements seem simple, but there are not many people who really know and practice in the field of Internet Project management. For example, I've interviewed dozens of candidates for project management before, and few have been able to correctly answer the four core elements and use them for practical guidance. Many people will confuse sppt with the four indicators (multi, fast, good, provincial) of the project management process and four core constraints (scope, time, quality, cost) of project management.

The four core elements that project management focuses on are complementary and interdependent, like four linkage gears, to ensure the smooth implementation of the project, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Four core elements of project management

Here are four elements to talk about how to combine the specific practice of project management. Strategy Strategic Objectives

Strategic objectives can be understood as the purpose and meaning of doing things, the purpose and the meaning of different, will lead to the results of doing things completely different. So before the project starts, the project sponsor must first make the project members understand the purpose and meaning of the project.

For example, a company W division is responsible for the management and operation of the microblogging business, but because of a company's strategic issues, leading to the microblog business started very late. January 2011, a company launched a micro-Beaucoin screen version of the project. In April, according to the plan design and development completed into the test phase, but after the completion of the test, the department leader announced that the current project can not be launched. This made the project team very frustrated at the time, but also raised a lot of doubts and doubts, resulting in a large negative mood.

The reason why the project can't go on line is that the product and the strategic goal, product vision (comfortable reading, visual feast, speed experience) are different. That is to say, the result of actual work does not match the strategic goal of the initial project. After the project, widescreen version of the product design and interactive design program blindly follow the foreign site Twitter, the lack of independent thinking, widescreen version of the "wide" word understanding is not in place, resulting in the project members go a larger detour. Later, after two months of unremitting efforts, the micro-bo timeline and related pages to make a series of transformation optimization, making the visual level of full-screen version of the effect, and in the user experience, browsing speed and other aspects are also optimized to provide users with more comfortable, fast reading experience. Finally, 5 months after the project launch, finally officially launched.

Project members work hard according to the project plan, spend nearly three months to do things, the results have not been released on the release of recognition, no matter on which team, there will be a variety of doubts or negative feelings. This example shows that it is important to understand the project strategic objectives correctly before the project is executed, and that if the project leader or project member does not correctly understand the intention of initiating the project, it is difficult to do the project well and get the desired results. People outstanding Talent

In project management, the human element is very important. Sometimes in the project as long as there are enough competent and excellent people to act as the project leader or the core backbone, even in the system and process is imperfect, can also make good results.

The most valuable thing about internet companies is people. Office furniture, computer equipment, etc. will be depreciated, but for an internet company, always in the value-added is the company's every employee. But at the same time the Internet industry fierce competition, talent flow is also very large. Take the technology development post as an example, the same level of technical development positions, the level of recruitment of development engineers are different, so when they participate in the project, to the same development task point, the time and the output effect may also vary from person to person. From the overall project dimension, how to integrate the human factors into a reasonable project rhythm, it is necessary to combine with the system and the process, and stabilize the people by the system mechanism. Process System Flow

Project management is a lot of time to study the method of doing things in order and arrangement, process and process. The establishment and implementation of perfect quality system process, can make the internal management of the company's efficiency and effectiveness significantly improved.

Figure 1, a company W Division division of the various roles of the project, how to develop a system in line with the Department and to ensure that the functional departments to work together in a systematic process, and continuously improve the optimization is the project management needs to focus on. At that time, combined with specific business realities, the following processes were developed, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 System flow in project management

After the project, the design, review and explanation of product demand plan. After the product review and explanation, the project team can do two things: the back-end technician to do the back-end technical summary design and review preparation, interactive designers to do UE design, review preparation and follow-up explanation. After the UE review and explanation, the project team can do three things: front-end technical staff to do the front-end technology summary design and review preparation, visual designer to do UI design and review preparation, if necessary, need to do UI explanation, test engineers do test case preparation and review readiness. After the UI effect design is completed and reviewed, the page production (graph) link is made, and the page is provided to the developer for nesting. The front and back end outline design is completed and reviewed, and the developer gets the page and enters the development stage. The test case is written and reviewed, and the test version provided by the developer is entered into the testing phase. When the test is basically completed, before the official launch, to the project's core stakeholders (mainly refers to the functional departments of the leadership) to do a product demonstration, to demonstrate the project team during the project implementation of the results of the work. Product demonstration links, depending on the size of the project, it is not necessary to have some links. Product on-line after the data monitoring, and according to the data situation of continuous product optimization, and gradually meet the initial strategic objectives of the expected.

Project management in the entire project to do the whole process of control, open meridians, clear obstacles, risk warning and avoidance, to help the team to solve the project in the process of implementation of the various problems encountered.

Combined with project management The second element people mentioned the human factor, from the overall project dimension, in order to be able to fit the human factor into a reasonable project rhythm, in this process set up "back-end summary Design Review", "front-end summary Design Review" Two links, these two technical aspects of the review process, It is possible to develop students with uneven technical levels to ensure that they tend to the desired rhythm at the development quality and point of time. The purpose of the pre-and back-end technical Summary Design Review meeting is to hope that the development engineer before the formal coding, the adoption of the technology selection, technology implementation plan, can be developed by the development of experienced development managers to check and guidance, the use of the best technical solutions to achieve, and evaluate a reasonable development cycle.

From the project management point of view, to the new employees or just contact with the process of development engineers to introduce the two technical review links, must pay attention to communication skills, not directly to the development engineer said "technical level of engineers uneven" and so on, easy to hurt people's self-esteem. Project management from the perspective of the overall product complexity, such as "the complexity of the microblogging products, involving a wide range, you develop this module may lead to other module problems", "need to do technical summary design review, by your development supervisor to check ..." this expression.

In short, a good system process allows the project team to consistently produce good project results. A bad system process can hardly make the project team have good results. Tools Management Tool

Project management involves the decomposition of projects, the implementation of priorities, so really want to do a project, many times to use a series of tools, methods or techniques. The main point of the project decomposition is that we should grasp how to simplify a complex problem, how to prioritize the business modules, to find the right time management, the bottleneck in the progress management, to find the key person and path. This content can be managed by landing on Office Office software, or on the ground to professional management tools. If the number of items is small, landing to excel may feel more relaxed. But when the project gradually increased, dozens of, hundreds of projects in parallel execution appears, if you use Office to manage it will be too weak. In this context, it is necessary to select a professional management tool that is appropriate to the team's characteristics to assist project management. High-quality project management tools, is the project successful operation of the carrier.

People should do things that they like and are good at. The tool is the same, taking advantage of its finest features. I prefer Atlassian Company's Jira in proposal tracking and project management tools. Project execution management, agile development management, system process management, product bug tracking, proposal tracking, demand management, customer service, etc., are jira best. I have published in the April 2014 issue of "Programmer" magazine, "because you change--jira use experience" article, interested readers can consult, mainly introduces my experience of using Jira for more than six years.

A brief summary of the four core elements of project management Focus (SPPT): Strategy, is that we want to understand the purpose and significance of the project, it determines the way we do the project and methods, people, process, tools is we need from people, processes, The order and management tools go up to understand and comprehend.

Author Dutis: NASDAQ:WB Project management manager, Sina's micro Dream division. More than six years experience in Internet industry project management, has worked in Sohu Company, responsible for project management and overall project operation management System construction. Focus on Internet project management, product design, Jira practice and so on.

Transferred from: http://www.csdn.net/article/2014-06-05/2820086-Project-Management