13 Tips for a Project Manager

13 Tips for a Project Manager is extremely relevant even today. Programmers and managers should read this. We have updated it and made it more relevant for current tastes.

1. Document the project— Write! Write! Write! When you put your thoughts and plans on paper you will seriously start interrogating yourself, and this sorts out most of the teething problem.
2. Understand the requirements clearly—Many projects fail because project leaders do not understand clearly. Compare the requirement to the business problem, and then document the project again.
3. Clearly communicate project team roles and responsibilities- People will take responsibility only if they understand what their roles are and what is expected of them. Spell it all out and save yourself some grief. It doesn't take long to do and is time well spent.
4. Never start the project without proper tools and workers— You cannot build a house, furniture or an automobile without having the right tools and the right team members. In these days of tight deadline, some project managers start projects hoping that some developers can be hired on the way. Finding right people is tough, and will be tougher when you need them the most. Similarly make investment into right tools and get your people trained in them.
5. Develop a formal project plan and set sub-goals- Your formal project plan should now be ready. It is actually a recycled plan of the first documentation. But the beast is lot sharper now.  Now you should have developers and other team members ready, and you should set sub-goals for each of them.
6. Code a little, test a little, and then plan a little- Different iterative methodologies tell you to code a little and test a little. I will recommend you to make subtle changes in your plan. Small changes in plan can still keep things flexible. The trick is to break up the plan into manageable chunks.

• Do it top down with a high level division into phases of no more than 3-4 month duration.
• Break out the main activities and milestones per phase.
• Grab the first phase and list all the key deliverables you must produce.
• Identify the activities that will produce the deliverables.
• Identify the interrelationships between your activities (e.g., what must happen before something else can happen).
• Finally, assign project resources. Then you form out the next level of detail planning to the project resources. 

1. Build alternates for redundancy- Software development is people business. People leave organizations, now and then. Good project leader should calculate such events in advance, and trust special and critical tasks to developers who are likely to stick round till project gets over.
2. Have regular team meetings and reviews- Team meetings should be regular and must involve all the members. If the team is big, then divide the team into smaller ones. Have individual and collective team meetings.
3. Provide good testing environment- There cannot be a bigger embarrassment than a serious bug after a project is commissioned. A good project leader will try to have tests that are user driven, and not just done by some other developer. The ultimate judge of your project's success is the end user.
4. Have backup teams and switch functions— In long meetings it is likely that some of the team members will go through burnouts. Be prepared for such eventualities and is preferable to look at options like switching functions between two developers of same caliber and levels.

The Updates

11) Use a wiki- Wiki was practically unheard of, in 2003, but it is a boon for project managers now. A wiki is a new open source package which acts like an internet whiteboard. Everyone  can edit pages. It is very useful for planning out projects together and keeping  documentation in one place. It is also very useful for putting together conference call agendas. It is better to use with long term freelancers, as it takes a while for others to learn how to use it.

12) Use Instant messengers

2003 the cost cutting wave meant that developers use lesser Internet, lesser facilities and lesser bandwidth, messengers were almost banned in some organizations. Most people know about instant messenger, and many get turned off by it, due to the

constant interruptions it can cause. However it can be a killer app for project management.

13) Study the functions available in various programming languages/ frameworks/platform.

Increasingly companies are discovering that very few non technical project heads actually are good enough. Developers lose respect if their boss know nothing about technology.

Read the functions available in a programming language to know what it can do. Then

Guide the developer to implement your ideas. Since you will know exactly how the

programming language works or a framework works , you will be more accurate in your requests, and also know

just how far you can make things go. You will not end up screaming at developers too.