BarCamp / ProductCampNYC

Andrew — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:08:08 +0000

ProductCampNYC was a fantastic event where I met likeminded individuals and enjoyed a day that’s dedicated to the amorphous blob of a role/function that is the Product Manager. I highly recommend going if it’s offered in the future!

I’m particularly interested in the product manager function both from an improve-my-everyday-work perspective as well as this-could-be-the-next-step-in-my-career point of view. And what found today is this:

Product Managers are the customer/are not the customer.
Product Managers occupy a very interesting intersection between senior management, marketing, and development (mind you, this is biased towards my background in software development, YMMV when it comes to physical goods).
Product Managers communicate a lot/do not communicate enough.

What do I do with this as a project manager in a Engineering organization (not a rhetorical question)? More on this topic later!

Did You Get the Status Report? – Project Management Tools and Communication Capabilities

Andrew — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:19:53 +0000

One of the key elements (perhaps arguably the key element) of effective project management is proactive and compendious (my little word of the day) communication with all stakeholders involved. I have been in many situations where I was in charge of multiple streams of work for multiple clients and initiatives. Keeping things straight in a high intensity environment with multiple klaxons going off makes it difficult to keep issues and stakeholders lined up to be resolved or simply informed. I came across the following article recently about a project management tool that was supposed to emphasize usability, but there was no mention of integration with diagrammatic (eg. Visio, MindManager) or communication (eg. Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail) tools. Why hasn’t someone come up with this?

I’ve personally seen demonstrations or used the following tools:

but they all serve some subset of functionality that could be addressed by a better integrated and streamlined tool.Â Consider the following scenarios:

The project is starting up, and you’ve identified all of your stakeholders. Where does someone set up resource assignments for WBS planning? Where does someone set up mailing lists for the team? Where does someone set up collaborative workspaces for documents and deliverables?
The project is in flight, and a new resource has joined the team to assist with a new stream of work that arose because of scope changes. Where does someone make assignment changes on the planned tasks? How does someone get the person up to speed quickly with his/her respective peers?
The project is closing down. How does someone close a collaborative workspace, draft/issue a final status report, and archive deliverables with a minimum of effort?

In many cases, all of this work is distributed across physical machines, distinct programs, and perhaps even in analog form (as opposed to digital copies). Managing projects to success should be about the project management, not the tool management.

Recommendation: Combine or integrate:

ad-hoc organizational modeling
sophisticated communications tools
work breakdown structures, and
collaborative workspaces and their deliverables

to foster a project-oriented work environment. Has anyone seen such a beast?

aktually » software

BarCamp / ProductCampNYC

Did You Get the Status Report? – Project Management Tools and Communication Capabilities