Project Management Innovation

Overview

In projects management, the goal is to get the project done and meeting it's resource and time requirement. From my years of project management. I found that many managers are rather rigid in their management style. Some insist on waterfall method, some insist on full documentation at each stages, some afraid to let people see their project unless all details have "green light" at once. Many of these traditional practices have delay, client changed their requirement mid-way and caused chaos and finger pointing, none of which leads to completion with client's acceptance. My experience in managing 30+ project a year tells me there should be newer ways to manage project. Frankly, my take is a hybrid type of setup for project management, which encompass Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and CPM.

Key Elements

Critical Timeline

The more I manage, the more i found the importance of schedule. Schedule is not just dates, or bars in Gantt Chart, it is collective set of agreement that is visual and vivid. It communicates desire and workflow that may have legal consequences. Dates of deadlines can also affect funding availability and budgeting issues. I always develop Critical Path Method schedules to see what are the buffers and how we allocate manpower.

Visualizing Success

Humans likes to see things to completion, to check boxes, or move things, so that's why apps like Trello were so popular. This gives the visualization that things started, in progress, done, or not even started. Kanban is a way that i use to make sure that people see how things are progressing.

Visualizing Ritual

There is something to having special practices to people. We are creatures of habits, there is a special thing about regularity that is attractive, that is why i like the Scrum methods to have certain efficient meetings, roles, celebration rituals that help push things along

Push Together In Efficient Manner

At last, Agile (which Scrum is part of) is a key framework that makes things more efficient, it focus on short periods pushes, it focus on client vendor communication, it focus on key things instead of endless wall building against client and vendor and endless project delays.

Conclusion

All in all, my strategy is not just a single schedule, not just a bunch of Scope of Work, and legal timelines. My strategies is a collaborative mindset that takes in useful elements from each of the key project management frameworks to make sure things are Done, Budgets are met, Stakeholders are happy, essential learnings are cascaded.