About 'Making Things Happen'

I just finished reading 'Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management', by Scott Berkun.

Rather than trying to explain why this is a really great book (although it is, and you can find reviews here, here and there), I thought I'd rather just mention a few ideas/topics/quotes I noticed while reading.  If you want to know more about these items, you know where to go...

p 11 - PMs have to balance several pairs of forces: ego/no-ego, autocrat/delegator, tolarate ambiguity/pursue perfection, oral/written, acknowledge complexity/champion simplicity, impatient/patient, courage/fear, believer/skeptic.  Depending on the phase of the project, or the situation at hand, PMs must balance these forces differently

p 16 - "PMs have to understand the advantage of their perspective and choose to make use of it"

p 25 - A schedule has a forcing function: people tend to try and stick with it

About schedules: a simple way to build one is to ask people in the team to provide an indented list of one liner tasks with estimates no longer than 2 days

p 137 - Specifications are needed to build a plan, and help define tests:

- ensure the right thing gets build

- create milestones to focus the team

- enable reviews and feedback

They should be in VCS (markdown format?) to allow others to check what changed.  PM should make it clear with the team what the goals for the specs are (p 138)

p 143 - "Remember that good feedback comes more easily if you ask for it than if you wait for it."

p 144 - Ask the readers of the spec 'Do you have what you need to do your best work?'

p 145 - When writing a spec, put the questions about the specs itself at the end, or in another document.

p 183 - PM is tough: you have to invest in relationships with people, regardless of how much they're investing in you

p 185 - PM should discuss, wich each person, his role, the other person's role, and the common parts.  This sets expectations.

p 186 - "What can I do to help you do your best work?"

p 215 - When an urgent issue arises:

- Calm down

- Evaluate the problem

- Calm down again

- Get the right persons in a room (and often, you don't belong to this group -- Offer help, but don't get in the way)

p 221 - "The challenge [of managing projects] isn't sailing in calm, open waters with clear skies. Instead, the challenge is in knowing w to juggle, prioritize and respond to all the unexpected and difficult things that you're confronted with".

"Taking responsibility for something doesn't make it your fault: it means that you will be accountable for resolving the situation"

p 224 - Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher -- Know you BATNA (Best Alternative To Negociated Agreement)

p 232 - It's much more expensive to recover from burnout than to slow the project down

p 232 - Feelings about feelings

If someone says something to you that makes you sad ("You smell funny"), next that happens is a feeling (anger) about this first feeling (sadness) and one usually only can express the former (the feeling about the feeling). Cf Virginia Satir

p 233 - Living, loving and learning, by Leo Buscaglia

p 233 - Beware the hero complex (the person creates bad situations to be able to solve them)

p 234 - 'Always' and 'never' are not valid answers to the question of when a process is necessary

p 235 - Beware codependance between bad management and heroes, where the former creates the bad situation that the other saves

p 236 - Exercises for bad situations

p 242 - "To be a good leader, you must learn how to find, build, earn, and grant trust to others - as well as learn how to cultivate trust in yourself"

p 253 - Criticizing others

p 254 - What to do after a mistake, what to learn from your mistakes

p 255 - Never reprimand in real time

p 257 - Self-Reliance, by Ralf Waldo Emerson

p 261 - PMs do ordered lists of stuff

p 265 - Saying no.  "If you're asked something, say no and point them to me"

p 354 - Project Management Clinic (closed now, but archives available) - http://www.scottberkun.com/forums/pmclinic

LaTeX-like Project Management

With project management role comes the need for a project scheduling tool.  The obvious choice would be Microsoft Project, but I thought I'd rather look for some free programs first.

I tried two that are very similar to MS-Project: OpenProj and GanttProject.  Both are open-source software.  Both have a GUI that's centered around a Gantt chart, and allow you to manipulate activities as in MS-Project.  But both also lack a very basic feature: resource leveling.  They don't have any intelligence whatsoever, and the user must check by himself that resources are not overloaded, and correct issues by adding spurious precedence or 'starts after' constraints.  I therefore don't really see how to actually use these tools for any serious work...

But then I discovered The TaskJuggler.  It's a command-line program written in Ruby that will read a text file and output HTML pages with various reports like a gantt chart or a resource allocation graph.  Installing the tool is as easy (once/if you have Ruby) as typing 'gem install taskjuggler'.

Using a text file as the input for all your project data has important benefits. The first one is that you can make use of your Source Management system to allow multiple people to collaborate on the file, while with a binary file (or even a text file that's completely rewritten by your tool when you save it) can't effectively permit sharing.  Another is that changes are much easier to track, as a change to a single part of the project will not touch the rest of the file.  So it's possible to revert individual changes...

This very much reminds me the difference between a word processing program, and LaTeX...


Here are some screenshots:

The Gantt chart

The resource allocation chart

And here is an example of a trivial project file. You'll find a much more complete example of a project file in the tutorial that is provided with the project.

project tiny "Example TJ3 Project"  2012-01-09 +12m {
  timezone "Europe/Paris"
}

resource Xavier "Xavier Nodet" {}

resource dev "Developers" {
  managers Xavier
  resource dev1 "Dev1" {}
  resource dev2 "Dev2" {}
}

task Tiny "Our Tiny Project" {
  responsible Xavier

  task t1 "Task 1" {
    
    task sub1 "Sub-task 1.1" {
      effort 30d
      allocate dev1
    }
    task sub2 "Sub-task 1.2" {
      effort 10d
      allocate dev1
    }
  }

  task t2 "Task 2" {
    effort 20d
    allocate dev2
    depends !t1.sub1
  }
  
  task deliveries "Milestones" {

    task start "Project start" {
      start ${projectstart}
    }
    
    task ega "EGA" {
      start 2012-11-01
      depends !!t1, !!t2
    }
  }
}

# Skipping the report generation part...

I only scratched the surface so far, but this seems very promising to me...

Results are not enough

Of course, results are a very important part of a manager's evaluation.  But that's not the end of the story...

Consider the manager of a great team of engineers. One can expect that the team will deliver good results. And this may be the case even if the manager is not so great... Conversely, let's consider the manager of a bad team: it may be the case that whatever the manager will do, the team will not deliver. In the long run, a great manager will manage to improve the results he gets from the team, but it may take quite some time. Evaluation of the managers only from the team's results is thus not enough, and may even be completely counter-productive...

So what's a good manager to do?

Of course, a manager must make plans. But that's not enough: as Tom Foster puts it, managers should build robust plans that take external factors not under their control into account. And they should be judged on the fact that they not only planned for success, but made it more likely to happen. Luck, or the lack of it, should not play a role. Kids learning chess often setup traps, only to discover that their opponent did you fall into it. They plan for the best, instead of planning for the worst. Explicitly supposing that things can go wrong is a good way to not depend on random external factors, and improve the likelihood of getting good results.

Getting results is not the mark of a good manager.  Consistently getting results is.