A Project Manager's Diary

Sometimes referred to as the Triangle of Horror… where the PM tries his best to maintain his balance while walking on the very thin project rope between this triangle and the Project Constraints Triangle (time, cost & scope). The triangle sides represent: The Team, The Client and The Management Every side of this triangle is obsessed by the sole idea that the other two sides want him dead, i.e. the team thinks that the client and the top management want him dead and vice versa. Usually a good PM gets lost while trying to maintain this triangle in good shape to keep all parties satisfied and happy while making them think they are his first and only priority to get out what is needed from them for the sake of the project. From my perspective, this is a much harder balance to keep rather than maintaining and managing the Project Constraints Triangle… It highly depends on people, their culture, maturity level, and on the PM’s ability to understand this and deal with it in a ...

By experience -the bad one of course- I discovered that the famous Project Management triangle is missing a very important containing circle… The Strategy Circle . The Strategy Circle is my simple explanation for many of the catastrophic situations projects end up with. I totally believe that this should not happen and that Strategy exists to set goals and directions for the benefit of organizations and accordingly for the benefit of projects and teams. Unfortunately, I witnessed many cases where it was exactly the opposite. I was an eye witness of the failure of many projects and sometimes companies because of misunderstanding the meaning of Strategy and how to use it to bring companies to success. Some companies bankrupted because of this! De-formation Effect The Strategy Circle is sometimes surrounding the Project Management triangle and thus imposing pressure on it and suppressing it and some other times it is pushing on the triangle from the inside and thus inflatin...

Who are Pretenders? Simply these are the people who Pretend … Pretenders can pretend anything in the world. They pretend they understand and they claim they are experienced. They think they are superior when compared to others and they want everybody to obey them blindly. Most of the people I met falling under this category were consultants or acting as consultants. Pretenders are characterized by the following: Think they know everything in the world Think that books contain everything Have faithful beliefs in theory and nothing but the theory Use theoretical definitions heavily Believe in all best practices Use the word should a lot… they believe what books say, no what facts prove Have an amazing superiority feeling, which may be coming from studying definitions by heart or from hiding behind their many certificates They are Theory Relatives I guess… otherwise, they might be breathing theories! Also, they: Are logical but not reasonable, while others may be r...

Usually a PM cares about his projects and is keen to develop them as per the planned budget, time and scope. However, managers should not listen to their PMs for the following reasons: 1. PMs are Time Wasters PMs plan… They study and mitigate risks and project issues in proper ways to guarantee the smooth execution of the project. Planning is a bad practice that PMs should stop using and referring to whenever they discuss a project related issue. Plans are not really needed and in most of the times they are useless because no one follows them (all gratitude and respect reserved for PJs). Also, it is preferable to face risks when they fire. Anyways, who really cares for risk mitigation and contingency stuff! Let’s face surprises when they arise and use panic mode to push on teams to solve their issues! 2. PMs Forecast PMs track their projects and use trends, issues, project and client historical data to forecast project status and use corrective actions properly to maintain thei...

Who are Project Jeopardizers? As the name implies, these are the people responsible for jeopardizing your projects and accelerating their failure! They gracefully and confidently push projects to drift from their track to the disaster track. Project Jeopardizers (PJ) AKA Project Monsters are people who have authority and who, for some odd reasons, have a say in your work, and can destroy it completely by the directions they give and the decision they make. They usually help driving projects to their catastrophic ends or in the best cases they lead projects to disastrous situations only! These people run afterwards and disappear from the picture. They also exist in the background of every team project photo. In most of the cases, PJs think they are doing this for the benefit of the project. They are also the first people who panic in stressful situations and leave everything for others to save. They are also very professional in transferring the blame to others, and they are the one...

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 ...