Scott Berkun's Account, thoughts and Experiences of a Project Manager

Chapter 1. A brief history of project management (and why you should care)
-in many organizations, the person leading a project doesn't have the job title project
manager. Everyone manages projects in their daily work, whether they are working alone or
leading a team. These distinction are not important. These strategies don't required specific
hierarchies, job titles, or methods.
Using history
-the concept of project management is not a new one. We have thousands of years of
project experience to draw on, if you consider everything that has been built throughout the
course of civilization. Project managers have taken on similar tasks throughout history,
using technology to solve issues that were pertinent to their ages the time frame we use to
define the extent of relevant knowledge is considerably more constrained by the present
than it should be.
The history of engineering projects reveals that most projects have strong similarities they
have requirements, design, and constraints, they depend on communication of creative,
and logical thought. Projects usually involve a schedule, a budget, and a customer.
Key lessons from inquiries into the past are the following three points:
1. Projects management and software development are not sacred arts. Any modern
engineering work is one new entry in the long history of making things. The technology and
skills may change but many of the core, challenges that make engineering difficult remain.
All things, whether programming languages or development methodologies, are unique in
some ways but derivative in others.
2. The simpler your view of what you do, the more power and focus you will have in
doing it. If we keep a simple view of our work, we can find useful comparison to other ways
to make things that exist around us. There will be more examples and lessons from history
and modern industries that can be pulled from, compared with, and constructed against.
Staying curious and open is what makes growth possible, and it requires practice to
maintain the mindset.
3. Simple doesn't mean easy. Remember that simple is not the same thing as easy. For
example, it's a simple thing to run a marathon. You start running and don't stop until you're
reached 26.2 miles. The fact that it's difficult, but their nature getting things done in a
specific way toward a specific goal is simple.
Learning from failure
-human beings, who are almost unique (among animals) in having the ability to learn from
the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams
-In Henry Petroski's book to engineer is human: The role of failure in successful design
(vintage books, 1992), he explains how many breakthroughs in engineering took place as a
result of failure. In part, this happens because failures force us to pay attention.
 -They are only two kinds of theories: those that are wrong and those that are incomplete.
-Without failure, we forgot, in arrogance, that our understanding of thing is never as
complete as we think it is.
-The trick then is to learn as much as possible from other people's failures. We should use
their experiences to leverage against the future. While the superficial details of failure might
differ dramatically from project to project, the roots causes or team actions that led to them
might be entirely transferable (and avoidable).
-Perhaps this is why the Boeing Company, one of the largest airplane design and
engineering firms in the world, keeps a Black book of lessons it has learned from design
and engineering failures.
The role of project management
-Project management can be a profession on, a job, a role, or an activity. Some companies
have project managers where job is to observe entire 200 person projects. Others use the
title for line level junior managers, each responsible for a small area of a large project.
Depending on how an organization is structured, what it's culture is, and what goals of the
project are, project management can be an informal role (it's done by whomever whenever
necessary) or highly defined (vincent, claude, aand raphael, are full time project managers).
The balancing act of project management
-it is hard to find good project managers because they need to maintain a balance if
attitudes. This means that a project managers needs not only to be aware of this traits, but
also to develop instincts for which ones are appropriate at which times. This contributes to
the idea of a project management as a art: it requires intuition, judgment, and experience to
use these forces effectively. The following list if traits is roughly derived from peter's essay:
● Ego/no-ego. They must be willing to delegate important or fun tasks and share rewards
with the entire team. As much as ego can be a fuel, a good project manager has to
recognize when his ego is getting in the way.
● Auto crat/delegator. A project manager has to be confident and willful enough to take
control and force certain actions onto a team. However, the general goal should be to avoid
the need for these extreme situations. A well-managed project should create an
environment where work can be delegated and collaborated on effectively.
● Tolerate ambiguity/ pursue perfection. The early phases of any project are highly open
and fluid experiences where the unknown heavily outweighs the known. It requires wisdom
to discern when the quest for perfection is worthwhile, versus when a mediocre or quick-
and-dirty solution is sufficient.
● Oral/written. There will always be meetings, negotiations, hallway discussions, and
brainstorming sessions, and the project manager must be effective at both understanding
and communicating ideas face to face.
● Acknowledge complexity/champion sim Project managers must be persuasive in getting
the team to strive for simplicity in the work they do, without minimizing the complexities
involved in writing good, reliable code.
● Impatient/patient. the project manager is the person pushing for action, forcing others to
keep work lean and focused. So, knowing when to force an issue, and when to back off and
let things happen, is a sense project managers need to develop.
● Courage/fear. A project manager must have a healthy respect for all the things that can go
wrong and see them as entirely possible. But a project manager needs to match this
respect with the courage necessary to take on big challenges.
● Believer/skeptic. It's important for a project manager to have confidence in the work being
done and see true value in the goals that will be achieved.

Pressure and distraction

-One fear of those new to project management is that success requires change. New
projects are created with the intent to change the state of the world by modifying, building,
or destroying something. It's hard to ignore the underlying pressure this implies for project
managers, but it comes with the territory.

Confusing process with goals

- Some PMs in this situation resort to quantifying things that do not need to be quantified.
They focus on the less-important things that are easy to work with (spreadsheets or
reports), rathet than the important things that are challenging to work with (the programming
effort or the schedule).

The right kind of involvement

-The insecurities managers have stem from the fact that, in industrial revolution terms
managers are not in the line of production. They don't make things with their hands, and
they are not the same kind of asset as those who do.

Take advantage of your perspective

-That wider perspective makes it possible to deliver critical nuggets of information to the
right people at the right time. Though this power can have broad effects, what follows is a
simple story that helps illustrate this point in a comprehensive way.

Project managers create unique value

-The PM should be able to perform feats of thinking, strategy, and leadership that positively
impact the team in ways few others can. They don't have to be superhuman or even
particularly bright, to do this.