| MBA Tool #1 - Project Management |
| Written by Gil Allouche |
|
Managing a project is a complex task and I am far from perfecting the process. However, Managing several projects in the past gave some perspective on the challenges involved in the various tasks around creating the project, getting buy-in from stakeholders, identifying and managing risks etc.
For me, there are two big types of projects: top-down or matrix. Top-down: You are the manager of a project. The project has tasks, deliverables, deadlines and resources. You are personally in charge on the resources (people, budget ETC). Matrix: You are the managet of a project. The project has tasks, deliverables, deadlines and resources, but you are not in charge on the resources. Instead, you get % of resources (20% of someone’s time) or you simply need to get their involvment based on your communication skills. Matrix project, for me, is much harder than a usual project since a lot of organizational behavior issues are involved (aka ‘politics’). However, your familiarity with the stakeholders and the organization - that, too, can be overcome. Now, since this is the first part of managing a project (and I did promise you a tool), let me get to one of the most crucial issues in project management. PLANNING Planning a project is an interesting task. It involves identifying the big components of the projects, creating the dependencies between them (e.g. you can’t build a chair before you designed it, but you can sell it before its ready), prioritizing them, identifying and writing down the small sub-tasks under each component, assigining the owner and lastly - setting the deadlines. The result of these actions are a “Gantt Chart”. Gantt charts is simply the project dashboard. It provides a visual way of auditing the project tasks, watching who is doing what, who is late etc. Many project managers use Microsoft Project as their main tool of managing their resources, tasks and the overall picture. However, for small projects (or unbudgeted ones) - you might want to prepare your own Gantt. I have prepared a small template that might give you a nice start. Gantt Template : Excel 2003 | Excel 2007 If you want to create one of your own, please watch this quick video explaining how: How to create your own Gantt chart from scratch
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