Project Manager

Careers in IT project management

Elizabeth Harrin

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781780174181
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

This book is a highly accessible guide to being a project manager (PM), particularly a project manager working within an IT field. The role is set out with reference to required skills, competencies and responsibilities. Tools, methods and techniques for project managers are covered, including Agile approaches; risk, issue and change management processes; best practices for managing stakeholders and financial management.

1 INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT

This chapter defines what a project is and looks at what project management delivers. You’ll learn the differences between project work and business-as-usual work, and see why an understanding of your company’s strategy in the widest sense is going to help you be a success as a project manager.

By the time you’ve finished reading through this chapter, you’ll know all about why project management is a highly valued skill within IT and you’ll be in a good place to decide if it’s a career that sounds interesting for you.

WHAT IS PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

Businesses never stand still. If you want your company to move forward, you’ve always got to be tweaking a product line or introducing something new. These changes help keep your business competitive and ensure that you can deliver your company’s strategy.

Strategy is what drives businesses to change. Whatever your strategic themes and objectives – to be the market leader for something, or to be your customer’s first choice or to be incredibly profitable – you aren’t going to get there by doing the same things you are doing today. Strategy underpins the changes that your business makes in order to get to where you want to be.

The changes that a business needs to make in order to deliver strategy are called projects. Projects can deliver small changes or contribute to major business transformation.

To be sure we’re all talking about the same thing, this is a good place to define a project.

A project is a unique series of activities that together have a common goal and that must be completed within a defined timescale, a specific budget and to a defined specification.

Projects are different from the day-to-day activity of the organisation because they have a defined start, a middle and an end. They are pieces of work with parameters fixed by their very nature, and while they might deliver an ongoing service, such as a new product line, the project itself will close down once this is complete.

This makes projects distinct from business-as-usual tasks as you can see from Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 The differences between project work and business-as-usual work

Project work	Operations
Changes the business	Identifies the need for change
Defined start and end date	Ongoing
Often involves mainly capital expenditure; can be difficult to budget due to unknowns	Costs are normally taken in the profit and loss accounts; budget fixed for the period
Often involve cross-functional, multi-disciplinary teams brought together on a temporary basis	Mainly delivered by line or functional teams who work together permanently
Manages risk to deal with uncertainty and to take calculated decisions	Mitigates risk to remove uncertainty from business operations where possible
Does something new	Does repeatable work
Planned around business need with time, cost and scope constraints	Operational, often annual, planning cycle

HOW IS PROJECT MANAGEMENT DIFFERENT FROM PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?

Great question. And there is often a degree of confusion between the two terms. As we’ve seen, project managers are responsible for the successful delivery of a project, as a one-off piece of work. Product managers are responsible for the life of a product.

A project might produce a product, and the product manager will be on the project team. But then the project manager walks away … and the product manager stays. The product manager ensures the product is successful. They may initiate other projects to improve the product in the future. They work with customers to define how the product should evolve, and they develop any strategies around the product. Eventually, they decommission the product when its useful life ends (and that might be another project).

The easy way to distinguish between the two roles is that the product manager provides continuity for the product. The project manager is involved for the duration of the project.

Businesses can have any number of projects on the go at the same time, depending on their size and the resources they have available.

A programme is a group of related projects that use a similar group of resources and have a similar overall objective (to become a paperless business, for example).

A portfolio is the sum of all projects and programmes in the business, department or division, and often includes elements of business-as-usual operations too.

Programme and portfolio management give you the tools to scale what you do on projects and gain efficiencies in how work is managed. These are looked at briefly in Chapter 5 in relation to how your project management career might develop, but they are really outside of the scope of this book – we’re focusing here on managing projects.

Projects don’t just happen by themselves. Project management is the activity required to get a project going and to keep it going until it achieves its objectives or is closed. Project management involves:

• removing roadblocks so other people can do what they need to do to hit the project’s goals;
• planning, monitoring and controlling projects;
• getting work done through and with other people to deliver a goal;
• making sure projects deliver the objectives on time, on budget and to the required quality.

In other words, project management is getting things done in a sensible, structured way.

Project management is not:

• purely an admin role;
• telling people what to do all the time;
• ticking off tasks on a list;
• following processes and expecting everything to work out for the best.

What is a project manager?

Project managers use project management to make things happen.

As we go through this book you’ll understand more and more about how project managers contribute to the business overall by shaping and delivering the work with the project team.

WHAT HAPPENS IF A PROJECT CAN’T ACHIEVE ITS OBJECTIVES?

It would be great to think every project delivered exactly what was expected, but that doesn’t happen in real life. Objectives can change, especially if the organisation’s strategy takes a different direction. For example, you might need to scale back a project or extend the scope. It’s highly likely that what you deliver at the end of the project is different to what was set out in the original business case, but as long as all the project stakeholders agree to the changes, that’s OK.

The other thing that might happen is that the project is closed before it reaches the planned end point. It’s more common than you might believe for a project to stop prematurely. This can happen for lots of reasons. For example:

• The senior manager who started the project leaves the organisation and no one else thinks the project is worth continuing.
• The business strategy changes and the project no longer fits with the new strategy.
• The project takes too long or costs too much and management decides to stop the project as there is no longer an adequate return on investment.
• It becomes clear that the project will never achieve what was hoped for and the decision is taken to stop throwing money and resources at something that won’t deliver anything of value.

If this happens on your project, your role becomes to close down the project, move the project team on to other projects and salvage anything that can be used from what work has been completed so far. It’s also important to learn and record what happened so that future projects don’t end up in similar situations.

WHAT IS IT PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

IT project management involves taking the principles of project management and applying them in an IT context.

This normally means delivering IT solutions and working in an IT environment, either in a permanent, agency or contract role. Projects could involve infrastructure, platforms, security, software or anything in the IT estate. Even changing a switch could be managed as a small project.

However, the vast majority of ‘IT projects’ have a business element as well. We rarely implement technology for technology’s sake and projects should be initiated to support a strategic business objective. You might be rolling out a software update, but that ensures the organisation has a safe and stable infrastructure from which to serve customers. Customer service and business continuity are the larger goals; the technology helps ensure that they can be achieved.

Here are some projects that might look like IT initiatives but that have an impact outside of the IT department:

• PC refresh: Staff need training on new interfaces, hardware and applications. The switch over should be planned with operational requirements in mind so there is minimum disruption to working patterns.
• Change to information security policies: Implications for staff need to be investigated as there might be the requirement to get users to sign to say they have read and understood the new policy, or handbooks in other divisions need to be updated, or existing contracts may need to be refreshed. Users need to receive some level of communication about what it means for them and when they will see new pop-ups amongst other changes.
• Telephony upgrade: Staff training might be required to deal with the change to a new telephone system, especially around accessing previous call recordings or reports. Downtime needs to be managed carefully to avoid operational impact.

For that reason, it’s wrong to think of IT project management as a stand-alone discipline. At worst, doing IT projects in a way that is considered disconnected from the rest of the organisation leads to a ‘them and us’ mentality where IT is somehow separate from the rest of the business. This attitude breaks down relationships and results in decisions being taken that are not always in the best interests of the organisation as a whole.

What is an IT project manager?

An IT project manager is someone who works within the IT division of a company, leading and managing projects that have a large IT or technical element, or those being led (or sponsored) by the IT department. The role can involve different things in different organisations. Here are some examples of the kinds of projects IT project managers would be responsible for:

• An IT-led initiative for a purely technical project, such as looking at upgrading network switches across the global estate.
• The IT workstream or sub-projects within a larger business transformation project or programme. In this case, they would work as one of many project managers or workstream leads on the project, but would be responsible for the IT elements of the project.
• A project being sponsored by IT with a large business change element, such as a PC refresh or software development...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• BCS, THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE FOR IT
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Preface
• 1. INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT
• 2. THE ROLE OF THE IT PROJECT MANAGER
• 3. PROJECT STRUCTURES
• 4. HOW PROJECT MANAGERS WORK: TOOLS, METHODS AND TECHNIQUES
• 5. CAREER PROGRESSION AND RELATED ROLES
• 6. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN IT PROJECT MANAGER
• Appendix 1 Professional associations
• Appendix 2 Project management websites
• Appendix 3 Project management templates
• Index
• Back Cover