Making the difference through Project Management

By admin, February 5, 2012

After a few years working on small businesses in Brazil, I had the opportunity of being part of medium-sized and take part in international projects.

I experienced good and challenging situations in analyst and project manager functions. I had the luck to work beside seasoned people on their subject matters. On the other hand, I managed projects with though stakeholders, clients, and fuzzy management team. But it was not bad at all.

I realized since I worked on government-funded projects under the Brazilian startup program context, I should make the knowledge widely available through the programs’ implementation.  The Research Government agencies I have developed projects with were FINEP, FAPESP, and CNPq.

In the private sector,  I worked on an intense project to the Port of Santos Authority. It was a multi-million project to put in place the ISPS Code in the biggest port of the South Hemisphere by that time.

Therefore, I ended up learning and contributing to initiatives related to the subject, not in a straight timeline, but on-demand. The knowledge may be retrieved whenever it is required.

Methods

I knew some project methods and execution strategies from my university course. The first I had contact was the Pert-CPM and some further administrative controls using excel spreadsheets. Then I was introduced to Waterfall and MS project. After that, I had contact with ISO 9001:2000 standards, while I made my company sensibilization for CMMi levels.

Consequently, I took contact with the PMBoK of PMI. In order to execute software projects and electronic projects, I used Scrum-Agile related concepts such as backlog, iterations, deliverables. All life-cycle architect tools like EA (Enterprise Architect) along with Autocad and UML drawings.

To every problem there where the best-fitted approach to be applied. Each of the tools mentioned above may be used in different projects and contexts. Hardware projects have different requirements and controls than firmware projects.  All before having a different approach when it comes to software, including ERPs like SAP, Totvs, Microsiga, SugarCRM, Salesforce. Even a different approach we would consider in telecommunications and mining projects.

In some projects, I was engaged after the scope and deliverables definition. A classical table of pictures represents most projects I participated in. You may see that in somewhere else.

In Brazil, technicians and the involved parts have not the native reading habit. This has implications. Superficial documentation is generated. Even being short, technicians tend to fail in their tasks by not reading restrictions or manuals in general. The cultural training may fix the problem of existing teams. This cultural training requires close work with the junior or senior technicians and may well worth the time invested in them.  This also may help the company trigger a succession plan.

For software (and often IT projects), the iteration processes showed below where taught in most graduate programs. However, most courses used to present the theory of ordinary situations about project development.

Creating a project culture within the company, regardless of its business may be key for both Established and Startup companies.

Among the standards, I would consider the following 5 project phases:

1 – Initiation

2 – Planning

3 – Execution

4 – Monitoring

5 – Finalization

At the same way, I would consider thinking about 9 knowledge areas:

01 – Integration

02 – Scope

03 – Term

04 – Costs

05 – Quality

06 – Human Resources

07 – Communications

08 – Risks

09 – Acquisitions

This topic can be further explored.