Our daughter is an public elementary teacher in Austin Texas. A nice school, Number 2 school in Texas.
While visiting this week, we were talking about a new book a group of us are working on. While showing her the TOC, she said Dad we do all that stuff (minus the finance side) every day, week, month, semester, and year. It's not that hard. That's what we've been trained to do. OK, but talent, dedication, skill, and a gift for teaching helps.
Here's how an elementary school teacher sees her job as the Project Manager of 20 young clients.
- Plan before starting anything, it’s going to go wrong, so know that up front and be able to recognize the train wreck is coming and get out of the way.
- The plan is a strategy for the successful completion of the project.
- Without the plan, you don't know how to assess progress in terms meaningful to the decision makers. Measures of cost and schedule are measures of effectiveness. Measurers of stories produces, features delivered aren't measures or capabilities produced.
- A Capabilities Based Plan is that measure. What capabilities does the customer need to accomplishment the business case or fulfill a mission.
- In education Blooms Taxonomy with TLOs and ELO's define the capabilities the student will possess at the end of the course.
- Have a notion of what done looks like, so when you get there, you can stop and move on.
- Done is defined as possessing a capability to accomplish something.
- Write this down in units of Measure of Effectiveness and Performance.
- Have your Plan B always ready to go and then start thinking of Plan C when Plan B is under way. No Plan A ever lasts too long in the presence of uncertainty.
- Risk management is how adults manage projects - Tim Lister.
- Adult supervision is the role of the teacher. Many times adult supervision of the role of the project manager.
- Make sure you’ve got all the right resources lined up and ready to spring into action when things go wrong. Classroom aides, class leaders, parents, staff all ready to go when the plan goes in the ditch.
- Resource planning is a critical success factor for all projects.
- Know what can go wrong before you start, steer away from trouble and trouble will stay away.
- Risk planning is planning. Planning is strategy.
- Apply good risk management to all activities on the project. Perform some formal sequence of risk management. Pick one. My favorite is the SEI Continuous Risk Management process.
- Separate the trouble makers from the main stream. You know them on day one.
- Any good project manager can see trouble coming.
- Isolate the troubled parts. Assign them to separate teams. Have them fix the problem so the rest of the project isn't impacted by them.
- Show up early, prepare for the work, clean up afterward, so you can start “clean” again the next day. No less than 100% complete at the end of each period of performance. If not you’ll pay dearly for it later.
- Being prepared is the major attribute of project success.
- This means planning.
- Letting things emerge is nice of small trivial projects with low value at risk.
- Letting things emerge on non-trivial projects is going to turn out bad.
- Always ask “is this your best work?” and “did you put your name on it?” Otherwise you're creating re-work.
- Set the highest quality standards possible.
- No crying when it doesn’t work. Redo it and get back on schedule, recess time is schedule margin - you get to stay in and finish your planned work.
- No whining, every one put your "big boy " pants on a do the work needed to get the job done on time and with the right outcome.
- Take a break, go outside and play, think what you’re going to do next hour. Come back and do it.
- Have retrospectives.
- Look back for opportunities for improvement.
- Do Root Cause Analysis to find out the "real" why things didn't work.
- Have fun while still working hard.