Project management is also one of the daily tasks of product managers, and it is also a relatively large part. In this article, the author shares some methods of project management from 9 aspects, which are based on the PMP system for your reference.
The product manager is the overall person in charge of the product, and project management is one of our indispensable capabilities in the process of promoting the implementation of the product.
1. Definition of project management
Project management is a sub-discipline of management, and the definition of project management is: refers to the process of using specialized knowledge, skills, tools and methods in project activities to enable the project to achieve or exceed the set needs and expectations under the limited resource constraints. Project management is the overall monitoring and control of activities (e.g. tasks) that are associated with the successful achievement of a set of objectives. This includes planning, scheduling, and maintaining the progress of the activities that make up the project.
Projects are temporary work to create unique products, services, and outcomes.
Several characteristics: Project management is ad hoc, with clear goals, and resources are limited
2. The relationship between scope, schedule, cost and quality in project management
The four influence and constrain each other, and have a certain rigidity (under a certain extent, a certain factor can no longer be adjusted). Generally speaking, an increase or decrease in any one of them will have an impact on one or all of the other three, and an increase in scope will lead to a delay in schedule, an increase in cost, or a reduction in quality, and the same effect will be felt when changing schedule, cost, or quality. As project managers, we need to always remember the relationship between these four and be able to accurately identify the impact of any change in the event of a change.
3. Characteristics of different project processes
Generally speaking, the project is divided into the following five process groups: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control, and closing, the five process groups have a certain order, but not a strict linear relationship, such as the monitoring and control process group will run through the entire project management process.
In the five major processes each have difficulties, here I would like to explain the closing process group, generally in the closing stage of the project when the most problematic stage, but also determine the success or failure of the key stage of the project, in the later stage of the project scope, schedule, cost, quality between the contradiction will become increasingly acute, the early reserve of the cost, progress are consumed, at this time any problems or changes will have a serious impact on the project, project members have also gone through a lot of overtime, fierce discussions are prone to extreme situations in thought, In this process, the project leader needs to have enough courage and charm to lead the team to success, and need to be able to deal with the problems and risks encountered in the process from management to business to IT.
4. About progressive detailing
A very important feature in project management is "progressive detailing", which means that in the process of continuous development of the project, the understanding of all aspects of the project will become deeper and clearer.
In project management, as our project continues to advance, our evaluation and control of the scope, schedule, cost, quality and other aspects of the project will become more and more accurate, this phenomenon is inevitable, because many of the factors we describe the transaction are generated or clear in the process of project development.
Because of this characteristic, project managers are also required to be able to continuously output and adjust the scope, schedule, cost, quality related plans, documents and other outputs at each stage, and cannot not avoid the processing of relevant outputs because of such repeated adjustments.
5. On the issue of risk management and control
In project management, when there is a deviation between the actual and the plan, it is generally accompanied by risks, where the plan can refer to the planning content in different aspects such as scope, schedule, cost, and quality.
The most important thing in risk management and control is to identify risks in advance and avoid risks, rather than how to deal with risks when they occur.
Secondly, as a project manager, we must have a basic awareness, risk reflection is inevitable, we must be able to reserve and reserve resources in advance to deal with risks, these resources can be professional personnel, project progress, funds or other resources that can have a positive impact on the project.
6. What about stakeholder management in project management?
The most important factor in a project is people, and the people in a project can be broadly divided into two categories: stakeholders and team members.
In many cases, students who do project management can manage team members well, but they do not do well in the stakeholder area, which is likely to become a huge risk in our project management.
Stakeholders are the people who are related to the project, generally the people who can have an impact on the achievement of the project goals, we need to constantly find and identify the stakeholders when doing project management, and classify them: high weight has a big impact, high weight has a general impact, ordinary people but have a big impact, and ordinary people marketing is average.
Among them, "high authority" requires us to understand the basic information such as the organization, position setting and other related to the project, and be able to clearly understand what kind of position the stakeholders we identify in the whole system; Judgment on impact is more difficult, requiring us to understand the historical reasons behind many things, the causes and consequences of business development, and the human relationships between stakeholders.
Although it is difficult to manage stakeholders, as long as we sort them out in a certain way, we can always get unexpected gains.
7. How do you communicate in project management?
There is no doubt about the role of communication in the process of project management, and all students who have managed projects know how important communication is throughout the process.
But how do you communicate effectively in project management?
It is estimated that there are not many people who can understand or do a good job.
Here's a process model of communication:
In the project management week, we talk more about communication and communication, which can reach a consensus or complete a task together, and there is little difference from communication in life.
In this model, the information that needs to be conveyed through communication from left to right is reduced sequentially (some are even distorted and out of shape), which requires us to have professional communication skills, but also to be able to understand the role that different forms of communication can play, and to be able to understand that the communication does not end after we have expressed the content of the communication, and we also need to confirm the degree of reception and transformation of the person being communicated to how well it is transformed into behavior.
8. Project management for external procurement
For most product managers, they are more exposed to self-developed projects, and occasionally they can also come into contact with procurement projects, but in the process of digital transformation, product managers should have more and more opportunities to contact procurement projects.
The first thing you need to pay attention to when approaching this kind of project is to "clean yourself" and not have some unrealistic ideas.
Secondly, in this type of project, if we are Party A, it must be as clear as possible in the early stage of the project to talk about the relevant aspects of the problem, the clearer the better, some students may think that the early stage is ambiguous, and the later maneuverable space is relatively large, but from the perspective of Party A who wants to do digital transformation, the project must be able to go online as soon as possible and in line with the project objectives is the first priority, and the cost of project investment must be more than Party B. Moreover, Party A also needs to invest a lot of personnel to participate in the project, which are some hidden costs that cannot be seen.
After the project starts, the product manager should also play a good role as a bridge in the project, not only to be able to cooperate with the supplier to effectively manage the needs of the business side, but also to be able to cooperate with the business side to promote the supplier to implement the business needs.
In the later stage of the project, it is necessary to be able to effectively control the content of the supplier's change, and if the supplier finds that the cost is uncontrollable at the end of the project, the general procurement project will largely choose to change the project, so as to obtain additional project benefits.
9. Perspectives on Waterfall Project Management and Agile Development
Both are ways of project management, but the starting point and specific operation are different, and the essence is to create products, services, and results.
Waterfall project management has existed for many years, and most enterprises currently run the waterfall project management method, while PMP is the best practice of the waterfall project management method, which follows five major process groups and is mainly plan-driven.
After the rise of the Internet, in the face of the changing market environment, enterprises are required to be able to respond to customer needs in a timely manner, and the rapid iteration of the system, the waterfall project management method is difficult to meet this scenario, so agile development has become popular with the rise of the Internet. Agile development focuses on value delivery, customer-centric iterative upgrading of software systems, does not need to have grand system planning, and believes in the power of iteration.
However, at the moment when the Internet is gradually cooling down and digital transformation is being increasingly mentioned, it will be found that the above two ways are difficult to match the needs of digital transformation, we believe that the integration of the two models to form a new project management method has become more and more mature, and enterprise-level software needs to consider the overall system planning and project planning from a macro and long-term perspective. There is a need for agile development to deliver value quickly. Therefore, when we do digital transformation, we are required to have both global management and the ability to divide a large system into several small products that can be quickly iterated when doing digital transformation, so as to complete digital transformation well.
The above are the 9 aspects I want to talk about, I hope it will be helpful to you as a product manager.
Columnist
Unclassifiable, WeChat public account: digital products, everyone is a product manager columnist. Focus on the product design of the e-commerce middle platform, good at product planning and demand analysis; He is keen to study the latest product forms in the fields of middle office and SaaS.
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