Planning for project success

Uff Ali tackles the fraught issue of quality project management in IT

We desperately need better project managers in this industry. But how do you spot them? Everything we do is a project, whether it is working our way up the career ladder or growing a company from SMB to behemoth. Or, indeed, transforming the datacentre sector from a niche to an industry in its own right.

Each journey has specific, quantifiable stages; victories that must be achieved as you progress towards your goal. You need to define success in order to achieve it. Define and cluster small battles together if you want to win the war.

This means also having detailed business plans and objectives. Effective project management should breathe life into the business case, ensuring that what is written becomes tangible, usable, and meets the requirements of the business and the people within it.

The problem is that the best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, as the poet said. A good project manager (PM), however, should go one better than Robbie Burns, because he or she will always have considered what may go awry - even to the point of paranoia.

This means an effective PM should engage in divergent thinking and note all the possible ways a project can go wrong. Then they must develop methods of mitigation and relevant contingency plans. And sometimes even contingency plans for those contingencies.

The presence of a contingency obsessive in the datacentre is not evidence, as some might incorrectly think, that certain stakeholders are incompetent because they cannot manage their own processes. Whatever you do, your performance can always be improved by the contribution of a more objective outsider. Even the greatest playwrights and authors have editors.

Neither Arsene Wenger nor Roy Hodgson played football at the highest level, and yet both are brilliant at bringing out the talents of international-class players. And Mohammed Ali, one of the world's greatest athletes, hung on every word of advice he received from trainer Angelo Dundee.

Wenger, Hodgson and Dundee are great people managers. People man-agement, however, is only a small part of the project management role. Some may also require a good grasp of the technical elements, but the kind of “pure” PM who can do anything, with transferable skills, is likely to be the most useful in today’s fast-moving IT environments.

Next time you recruit a PM, test his or her skills by asking them to make breakfast. And make sure you order something exotic that he or she will probably have never heard of. A more broadly based or “pure” PM will either be able to find out how to do it, or delegate. A less able one will tell you the chef’s off sick and hand you a Yorkie bar.

Uff Ali is an independent project management consultant