A Project Manager's Diary

In addition to the very well-known techniques/lifecycles for project management, I found out that a new technique emerged lately. This new technique highly depends on performing project tasks and phases in a reverse non-organized order! This is known as the Project Baxecution (Project Backward Execution) concept. It embraces the following practices in addition to the Surprise factor which is a common factor at the end of each stage: Deliver the project before getting the requirements (because it is not important!) –> Client is surprised Test the project after receiving some of the requirements –> Testing team is surprised Develop the project after reviewing bugs –> Development team is surprised Plan for the project –> Top management is surprised Gather the project’s requirements –> Client is surprised again Restart the project in the same order, kind of Spiral Development model –> Everyone is surprised!! Just to clarify, this is a stand-alone technique that ...

A friend of mine used to classify projects into 2 mutually exclusive categories: Strategic or Political projects Profitable projects At first, I thought this classification was a joke, but after some contemplation, I found that it is very true… Most or almost all of the projects I worked in fell under the first category (strategic). This means that I was either always chosen to work in such projects or that all projects are strategic non-profitable ones!! Which of course cannot be true, so, let’s stick to the first assumption! Strategic Projects Characteristics First of all they are… Strategic! Either start with quick-wins or are major-projects Non-profitable Low or no price quotation offered with pleasure to clients Very tight in time Killer teams are allocated on them Strategic importance and priority only apply on the team who works in the project, i.e. not on other needed helper functions such as IS, DB or Operations teams Teams working in them are burned o...

Everyone asks for a strong project manager... When they get him they don't want him! By definition, a manager is “ the person responsible for planning and directing the work of a group of individuals, monitoring their work, and taking corrective actions when necessary ”. The Project Manager in the field of Software Development is a very special type of manager… I mean this when I think about the people who really care about their work and carry it out as it should be… From my point of view, I think these people are very rare to find. They are always put under the stress of delivering successful projects despite all obstacles related to pleasing their clients, top management and teams. Super Man-ager Or in other words, the Invincible Hero known as the Project Manager should possess a countless set of qualifications… He should have the: Wisdom of Confucius Brilliance of Albert Einstein Courage of Gandhi Endurance of Jacob … The PM should also be able to contain all...

The more you know, the more you know there will be more to know! I found that in practical life, a project is a group of upside-down events and tasks. It is as much as if you are walking in Wonderland… People’s knowledge, way of thinking, decisions and behavior are countless and weird, accordingly, projects -which I consider kind of living creatures- follow people… and the results are well known in such cases! I discovered that bad practices usually take 2 years to be moved from the frustration memory to the experience memory. By time, the 2 years period -based on some self-extensive training- can be eliminated. It is also proportional to the duration of the bad practice itself. I used to believe that everything I see in a project is the utmost extreme of all what I saw and that there will be no odder situations to face, though this thought was proven wrong by time… I keep meeting and seeing new Wonderlands and new project management adventures! I was thinking about naming the blo...

Some people consciously choose to fail! Usually people write about their success stories… Well, I decided to write about what I call my failure story . You can consider this blog as part of a documentary book on the quickest steps and worst practices to attain failure smoothly! From my point of view, a good and very fast way to failure starts with having to deal with uneducated not willing to learn people who reinvent the wheel in everything they do while thinking they are making great achievements for humanity, which is of course by going many steps backward! Such people highly rely in their work on the concept of pretending to be smart and on applying theories in very wrong ways. This always ends with catastrophic failures in projects accompanied by huge financial losses. In our contemporary life, these people are not rare, I think they invaded and dominated the fields of Software Development and Software Development Management, though there are still many many good people who ...

My awareness with the field of Software started in my early childhood. Engineering Symptoms Some engineering symptoms started appearing on me when I was a kid… At first, I was staring at things for hours without talking… My father told me that he was always wondering “ what’s going on in her mind! ”… Sometime later, I started disassembling things, starting from toys and ending with electrical appliances (radio cassettes, washing machines…) and using the spare parts to build something else. I sometimes just disassembled machines just to rebuild them after a great exploration phase. I was kind of danger, but my folks liked this. I also used to sketch weird drawings for images in my mind till I was introduced to my first PC at the age of 11. When I saw it, new ideas started formulating in my head, I was reading a lot, and I wrote my first computer game at the age of 12, it was kind of strange for people around me but I liked the idea a lot and I decided to be an engineer, a computer’s...

I am a Project Manager and I love my job… I am a project Manager and I love doing my work! I am nothing more but a Project Manager amongst many others. I got married to my work (not job) after a great love story which started from early childhood ( coming soon ). I started my career as a Software Developer in the late 90s, then held many positions in the field of Software Development, some were promotions and some were kind of additional assignments due to my performance. Among the positions I held are Developer, Team Leader, Project Manager, Project Leader, Senior Project Manager, Senior Project Leader, Program Manager, Business Analyst… though I was dreaming about becoming an Architect! But seriously the job I loved the most is Project Management. The things I hated the most in my early years were politics and economics/finance, which both became the core of my daily work for some years now! 94% of my experience was built by working in Software Houses as a vendor/provider and ...