The Project Management Course: Fill & Download for Free

Office Politics:An employee composes a mail at 3 pm but sends it at 11 pm to show his work ethics.A lazy IT guy is promoted instead of a high performer of marketing dept because the ERP project is at the implementation stage.A factory manager lets a small labour issue to bloat into a union strike. Why? So that he can intervene later and prove his importance.A project manager is prolonging a project by creating unnecessary obstruction. Why? If the project is completed, his position becomes irrelevant.Mid-level managers hold key information of the company for selfish motives. Don’t think CEOs are holier than them. They hide from the board members.Highest efficiency is recorded in the month of March.Mid-level manager usually throws his subordinate under a bus before his boss.Though you perform well, the AssKiss*r is given a huge bonus.Office politics is the bitter truth of corporate world.One can’t live with it.One can’t survive without it.Though there are several HR courses at IIM but they hardly focus on real life office politics.I am not advocating office politics in any manner but one should be smart enough to protect himself to be played around.A course on ‘Office Politics’ by a professor having the industrial experience of 10+ years is a need of an hour.

INTJs are underestimated at work, because we anticipate the problems and clear them out of the way, before they even happen. The colleagues never see the problem. They only see strange things that we do and they do not understand why we do it.Imagine this situation: You have the ability to time travel. You go back in time and you kill Hitler before he starts the war. Will you be perceived as a hero who saved millions of lives? No. You will be perceived as a crazy person, who killed a successful politician.I learned this the hard way. When I was working as a team leader, project managers were coming to me with project plans and estimates. I always insisted on including certain things, because I knew that if we don’t take care of these things, the project will fail and we will have to spend weekend at work. The problem was, they perceived it as me bullying them or trying to blow up the project scope. It was constant conflict between me and them.One day I said to a project manager: “Ok, screw it. Do you want me to sign this project off as it is? Fine, here you go. But if we don’t add these things to it, this will happen, which will cause these problems down the line, which will result in us staying at work whole weekend.”Of course, everything I predicted, it happened. We spent weekend at work. I made sure that the project manager stayed with us the whole time. Only after that experience, he never doubted or negated my requests, because now they made sense to him.The problem is, I had to do this with every single one of the project managers I have worked with. That’s a lot of weekends spent unnecessarily at work.

Process is your friend.Project management is largely about process, while production mostly manage "what is this product", project management is about "the process of making this product". So our work involves a lot of flow chart, network diagrams, work break down structure, critical path method... all of these are about process, and the sooner you figure it out, the better off you'll be. I would like to think in the perfect world, project managers design a system in which all department fit like well oiled machine and the project practically running itself. Of course, such system doesn't exist, but still it is the system that manage your team, and you manage the system.Communication and Team work is the KeyAs a project manager, you end up dealing with a lot of people from different department, your bosses, client, stakehoders, contractors, functional managers, depends on your organizational structure ( Functional vs. Matrix vs. Projectized), you end up having various level of authority and influence. Regardless, project managers are often the front and last line of communication, the one person who know who's doing what and what should start and what will end soon, what's ahead of schedule, what task has float... It is your job to communicate with your team member, and make sure project running smoothly.In my experience, almost 50% of my job is communication. It's crucial to keep emotion out of communication, don't get pissed off when contractor tell you they can't finish the job on time; don't get frustrated when client come back the 5th time asking for revisions. That's why process is super important, because most of the time, you rely on process to do the talking for you. Have all stakehoders to agree upon your system and process, and let the system and process control the stake holder expectation when necessary.For example, client come back for 5th revision which will delay your deadline, well, don't tell your client to go to hell with his ridiculous changes, tell him "if he want this changed, it will impact the deadline, and we can't guarantee resources after a certain point".Success is team work, failure is your responsibility.This is a personal motto. When the project is successful, make sure the team know it's team effort. When the project failed, project manager should step up and take the responsibility and make sure you do your lesson learned, find out the problem but don't point fingers. Do this once or twice you'll have a loyal team that willing to move heaven and earth with you.There's no glory in project managementDespite the crucial function of a project manager, you'll never be credited for the product, construction or service provided. It'll always be product manager, design lead, or mostly likely, your CEO. Project manager doesn't design or produce anything, we are here to make sure things get done. It can be an extremely unpopular position, Because you're the one who bring out the schedule and ask "why activity A is late?" or "why is your CPI so low?" or "where's that staff you promised to assign to project B 2 weeks ago"? but someone has to do it. When I was studying Quality Management at Berkeley, a professor said: As a project manager, people might not like you, but if you do your job right, they'll respect you.So if you want your name attached on something, might want to consider a different career. But if you love process, love make things work, love working with different people and teams, love problem solving, love looking at the project running following the process you designed... Nothing is more fulfilling than project management. I LOVE project management!Last not least:Project Manager's work is invisible.If you do your job right, the project will run itself. And most people don't really know what you've done for the project.===I'm still relatively new with project management with only a few years of experience, this is just something I learnt on the job and from various training I took. Hope it helps.