7 Principles for Project Management

In case you have any doubts, yes it's true: this blog here is the official Supai Systems employee manual, handbook, body of knowledge, standard operating procedure, and guideline for conduct. Today's topic is project management.

Project Management in Pictures

The final word on project management may be found in the attached cartoon by Gary Larson, who is at least in the top five best business writers I know. (Seven if you include fictional characters. You know who I'm talking about.) (Do or do not...there is no try.) But in another sense, we try to live by the following seven principles.

The 7 Principles

1. Ensure we work every single hour that we said we would, and record every one of those hours correctly in our time keeping system. We use Cashboard.
2. Keep every project on track at all times. This means that we have a plan and are following it. If you are off track, work harder or modify the plan, but whatever you do: get back on track.
3. Deliverables and deadlines are sacrosanct. They must be on time, every time. This reminds me of Admiral Nelson's advice to a midshipman in 1793 aboard the Agamemnon. You can replace "orders" with "deadlines"; "Frenchman" with "missed deadlines"; and "king" with "CEO" of course. Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.

4. Clients should always know what's going on. That means you have to tell them. You cannot count on them paying attention to Cashboard, reading your status reports, or listening to your voice mail. (By the way, have you noticed that nobody uses voice mail any more?) Refer to the below embedded video for additional insight.

5. Management should always know what's going on. What each Supai person is working on, and what is on his or her plate, should always be obvious at a glance.

6. Keep your team focused. Each Supai person should have enough work allocated to him or her at any point of time.

7. Communicate until it hurts or a little more. It is almost never a bad idea to communicate with every client about the status of ongoing projects and new ones that are about to start.

Tweet Like No One's Listening

   I have had one success in using Twitter for business, so that makes me an expert. Next on my bucket list is giving advice, so here goes. To use Twitter for marketing, you must be real, join the conversation, and don't market. If you follow these three special steps, you will earn your Twitter marketing digi-medal.

Special Agent Oso, Earner of Digi-medals

   But wait, you ask, are you really such a Twitter success, Bo? And if you are, why don't you have a million followers and your own show on Fox News? To this I answer: am so. The client I found by searching for Livelink has been good for hundreds of thousands of dollars; and not only that, but I have enhanced awareness of my company in many ways, some of them good. I may not have a million followers, but what I got are prime. There are a few where we chose each other just because of the last name, I admit, but Warburton is a cool name. A good Lancashire name.

   Oh, also, the thing about Fox News, in case you haven't noticed I'm not a blond woman. And anyway most of the people in my business, well, I doubt they watch Fox News. Unfortunately, IT is mostly a well-to-do, limousine-liberal crowd. I tried to unfollow people who made blatant errors in their liberal Tweets, but I couldn't stand it, I missed them and refollowed. So now I have to practice patience and understanding, which is very difficult for me. But that's the downside of being a Christian But enough about me, and more about those three special steps.

Tweet Like No One's Listening

Be yourself. Try not to hold back. Use a photograph as your avatar, not a logo or a joke. Especially not a logo. Write a meaningful, personal biography. Post about details of your life, hobbies, and family. You are trying to make connections. You can write about what you had for dinner if it contains two or more of the following: beef, bacon, ice cream, or donuts.

3 out of 4 ain't bad

Walk Up and Say Hello

Find and join the conversation. That means your are dialoging, not monologing. Search for people who are talking about things that matter to your target clients. For me, it is "Livelink" or "Open Text" or "Open Text Content Server" or "ECM". Find their blogs. Follow them, @ them, DM them. Talk about your life and their life. Threaten, cajole, plead; chastise, observe, report.

Don't Market

Which brings me to the last point: don't sell. People have this idea that Twitter is a way to force people to listen. Wrong. I hate to state the obvious, but nobody has to follow you. You know what? I don't hate to state the obvious. You want to force-feed, go live in the 60s and hire Mad Man Don Draper. (Bring me back a hat.) In 2010, or even in 2070 if you are my great-great-great-great grandson Edward Z. (ask me about that story) ingesting this post via edible ink, you can't trick anybody into buying. You have to trick them into wanting to buy. You do that by being yourself, being interested and interesting, someone great with a wonderful service to sell. Then one day, you too will have hundreds of angry followers carrying pitchforks and torches, eager to criticize your every uncareful word. Just like me.

The Professional Resume

If you're a real professional, you will see your work as a career. I despise the hucksters who talk about "building the personal brand," but an important part of building a career is keeping a professional record of what you do. Such a record describes skills, knowledge, and experience in such a way that other professionals can find within it the credentials of competency. This is the official resume. For professionals who work on projects, the resume should describe them in three parts: the client, the project, and your personal deliverables.

Here is an example.

So-and-so is a Canadian energy company focused on exploration and development of natural gas. They have had an enterprise license for over 4,000 seats of Livelink in two instances for years, but use it unevenly: for example, land records are managed well, but other areas are just dumping grounds. Interestingly, SharePoint is officially forbidden.

This project was designed to increase usage and improve access to specific document collections by building a friendly and interactive search screen. It was written using WebReports, not OScript, and subsumed standard Livelink functionality such as a custom category, LiveReports, and forms. The project lasted from March to August, 2010.

Mr. Such-and-Such was the BA and PM for this project. Working from incomplete requirements, he wrote the project charter, AFE, CIS model, UI, test scripts, user documentation, system documentation, and lessons learned. He maintained status reports and a change order. He wrote one WebReport, communicated detailed requirements to the remote development team for many others, and installed the application in multiple environments.