What is Project Management?

According to PMI's PMBOK® Guide—Fourth edition (PMI, 2008a, p. 434) a project can be defined as a temporary effort that produces a unique product, service or result. Projects are a temporary endeavor, and close down upon completion of the work they were chartered to deliver.

When undergoing any kind of project, including software development, strong project management is essential to keep teams organized, focused, and to avoid missing other activities such as communication, stakeholder buy-in and administrative tasks, ultimately to complete the project within scope, schedule and budget.

Genesis

Just getting started? maybe you've just got an itch. Are you brainstorming?

That's totally fine.

Lots of projects are born this way.

I like using sticky notes and doodling when throwing ideas around. I find it's a really good way to organize thoughts by yourself or with a team when putting together your projects.

I found Google Jamboard to be a free and easy-to-use app on desktop and mobile. You can have multiple whiteboards to write, draw and arrange sticky notes with remote teams in real time.

And with the mobile app, you can use Jamboard if inspiration strikes when you're on the John... I mean: on the run.

Planning

Once your ideas start to come together, it's time to start planning. There are lots of moving parts in a project, but these are the main areas you want to focus on. In project management, they are known as "the triple constraint"

Scope

The scope of a project is what's included in the project. Anything outside of the project scope is excluded.

In project management, The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a very useful tool that helps you identify the scope of the project and define the deliverables (products, services or results) and success criteria by breaking work into smaller tasks. This is a common productivity technique used to make the work more manageable and approachable.

Again, using sticky notes is awesome for this process because you can move ideas around with your team while putting together the WBS.

Schedule

How will you estimate time for each activity? Will you take into consideration previous projects you've been involved in? how will you set baselines? how will you deal with schedule changes? What are important milestones? These are things you need to think about when planning your project's schedule.

A very important part of developing project schedules, is defining de dependencies between activities. While Finish-to-start is by far the most common dependency, there are of four categories that dependencies can fall under: source: Project Insight

Activities can also be independent from each other which means they have no dependency.

Budget

Well, how much is everything going to cost? You should consider money being spent on equipment, rent, licensing, audits, and manpower.

Also, consider previous project management experiences. Do you remember any projects where you went way over budget? could you have anticipated this?

Once you've defined what the project scope is, what the timelines are and how much it's going to cost, it's time to rock-n-roll and kick off your project.

Execution

Once your project kicks off, the project will be moved to execution phase. During execution, the project management team will monitor all activities and compare to the baseline. If things start running behind schedule, for example, the PM will notify the client and stakeholders along with an action plan in order to come to an agreement on the best course of action.

A project plan is not written in stone, so to speak. It can be updated when new information comes and/or unforeseen events happen. But a plan is much like having a map during a trip. You might encounter a roadblock or heavier than expected traffic which might force you to find an alternate route causing your original plan might change a little bit, but your destination will still be the same.

Source: mock PolyCUB project for Leo Finance made by me in Monday.com

Managing multiple projects at once

Managing a single project is one thing. Managing several projects at once is a bit more complicated, but not impossible with the right tools and a little discipline.

When managing a portfolio, you need to be able to take your micro-manager hat off and get a more general overview of all the projects, their interdependencies and the resources you're assigning to each project.

You can't have a developer working 8 hours a day on three different developments, now do you?

Source: mock portfolio manager for Leo Finance made by me in Monday.com

How is the Leo Finance team managing all the work?

With all the awesome development that's going on this year in Leo Finance, it's hard to imagine how @khal keeps everything in lockstep and under control. There are at least 5 areas of the Leo Finance team that have been mentioned in recent AMAs:

• Developers
• Curation Team
• Marketing Team
• Admin Team
• Project Management Team

If we estimate 3 team members per area, that's a total of 15 people on the Leo Finance team.

The word around the block is (no, it's not Soon™) that the Leo Finance Office has picked up project management tool called Asana to keep track of everything from deadlines, to curation activities to administrative tasks such as payroll:

This is very good news because with further control of all projects comes higher probability of success.

And higher probability of success means a lot of things: More confidence from potential investors, partners, happy lions, a growing community and full pockets for everyone.

So congratulations to the Leo Finance team. you're an awesome bunch and we're all rooting for ya!

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta