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Manager

“Management is about skills, leadership is about skills coupled with character.”

– Patrick Townsend and Joan Gebhardt in Five Star Leadership

It is said that “Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things.“

Leader

Who comes to your mind when you think of world leaders? May be Gandhi, Kennedy, Mandela, among others. Can you imagine them to be good managers? May be. May be not. Probably the word ‘manager’ itself looks a bit odd on them.

Management is defined as “organization and coordination of the activities of an enterprise in accordance with certain policies and in achievement of clearly defined objectives”.

Leadership is defined as “a process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of  people in the accomplishment of a common task”. [continue reading…]

Courtesy: surreyschools.ca

A project needs to have right set of people in the team, and right type of physical resources, in order to execute project work. After all, these are the ‘moving parts’ of the project that take it to completion.

That is driven with a sound resource planning exercise, the one that acts as a guidepost throughout the project life.

Resources generally mean two types – people (or, human resources), and physical resources.

The plan to identify, acquire, and manage these two types and the skill needed for the same are completely different.

When it comes to people, we look at the skills as well as attitude in order to make a selection.

Skill needs range from low skilled (manual labor at construction site), to semi-skilled (handling machine tools), to highly skilled (precision carving, handling complex machinery) – depending on the type of project.

Irrespective of the skillset needs, the success in getting right people is governed by supply-and-demand situation in the organization, or outside in the industry.

For instance, let us say you work in a software development organization and require junior engineers with 1-2 years of J2EE experience for your project. Usually this is not a problem. But getting them on your project may be still difficult if many other projects in the organization require similar skillset, and hiring from outside the company may have a lead time of several months.

As with physical resources – there may be few that are scarcely available, there may be few that are available based on seasonality, and few that are more/less expensive due to demands based on certain events. Acquisition of such resources need to be planned by keeping in mind the schedule (when are they needed?) and cost.

What does a Resource management plan contain?

In short, the Resource management plan contains list of type of people needs and physical resource needs. For people – their skills, roles and responsibilities, reporting hierarchy, the duration that they need for, resource ramp up plan, resource utilization across different phases of the project, their training needs, and release criteria. The last few aspects common for physical resources as well. [continue reading…]

“The only vital value an enterprise has is the experience, skills, innovativeness and insights of its people”

– Leif Edvinsson

Resource management – people, equipment, material, tools and more – is one of the crucial as well as most challenging area for the project manager.

Let us talk about people first.

The main benefit of a team is it’s synergy.

Synergy is defined as ‘two or more entities functioning together to produce a result much greater than sum total of the results produced by individual entities’.

A team can produce things much greater than sum of what its people can independently produce. And the main challenge for project manager is to keep the team functioning at the top of its capabilities in order to achieve best synergy.

This is easier said than done, because dealing with people has its inherent challenges.

People have moods, issues, concerns, aspirations, motivations, or plainly put – individuality. Every team member may not be capable of working in a team environment and the project manager has to ensure that such people do not alienate themselves. Knowing what motivates each team member and helping them achieve their goals is one way a project manager get people work together as a team. [continue reading…]

Right off the bat, let us try and answer this question.

What is the difference between Quality Assurance and Quality Control?

Assuring that processes and methodologies used on the project are in line with those prescribed by the organization by means of quality audit; and getting feedback for improvements on organizational quality processes is all that you do in Quality Assurance activities.

Controlling quality on the deliverables, by means of running tests, identifying defects and raising change requests – are what you do in Quality Control activities.

Like all other project management domain knowledge areas, you need a plan that ensures quality of project deliverables can be met. This plan talks about quality requirements and standards to be used to assess quality of deliverables as per documented requirements and to show how the project demonstrates this quality compliance. This plan is called Quality Management Plan – and is the primary outcome of this project management activity. [continue reading…]

Quality versus Grade

We saw in the earlier lesson on Quality Management project domain that quality of a product is a measure of how closely it matches its intended purpose.

Consider an example.

Two carpenters are given specifications of a table. First specification has a very fine design, with carved legs and flower pattern on the surface of the table. The other specification has a bland design with four straight legs and a plain sheet of wood as its surface.

First one is intended to be used as a dining table at an upscale restaurant and second table is intended to be used for cutting vegetables in its kitchen.

When these tables are made, if they match their specifications pretty well – then both of these tables are said to be of good quality.

Now, you being a connoisseur of art, would like the first table, with all its exquisite carvings and the fine finish, much better than the second one. For you then the first table is of higher grade, while the other basic table is of low grade.

On the other hand, let us say that the first carpenter did not read the specifications properly.  And instead of flower design on the table surface he carved a beautiful leafy design that he is familiar with.

It was well executed and had fine finish. For you it might still be of higher grade table than the second table, but the first table is of low quality now – because it did not match up to the requirements.

Let us look at one more example.

Which of these two television would you like,  42 inch LED 3D TV or the good old CRT television of 80’s?

If you opted for LED TV, you probably chose it over the CRT TV because of its superior grade. That makes CRT TV of low grade. However if you were the first ones to receive CRT TV when it was first introduced, you would choose it due to its superior grade – at that point in time. So, grade is a measure of value people place on the product.

A high grade product may be of low quality, and a high quality product may be of low grade.

Grade relates to Features of the product, while Quality relates to Requirements of the product.

Precision versus Accuracy

Recently I was at customer office at Phoenix, AZ. A bunch of friends decided to explore San Diego over the long weekend. We speculated the distance on our own (before referring to the Google maps) and one of my friends said that the distance is 423 miles. The other friend estimated the distance to be somewhere between 350 to 370 miles.

I had no idea of the distance. Which one would you take?

Yes, I thought the precise estimate of 423 miles is the right answer. The precise number made me think it should be right. However, actual distance was 355 miles, pretty close to the answer given by the other friend!

While the former answer of 423 miles was precise, latter answer was more accurate.

Let us look at another example –

Let us say you are firing at bulls eye, 5 shots at a time.
On your first attempt of 5 shots you got something line this:

Figure 1: Precise but not accurate

On your second attempt of 5 shots, it looked something like this:

Figure 2: Accurate but not precise

You would be precise in the first attempt but not accurate, and you would be accurate in the second attempt but not precise.

Accuracy refers to how far you are from the true value; Precision refers to how close you get to the same value if you repeated the exercise several times.

What is the relevance of these for Project Quality related project management activities?

I’m glad you asked.

Let us look at Quality Vs Grade part first. Requirements define what should be the quality of the product. If we are able to measure deliverables and find them to be close enough to the requirements, we are good on quality.

Quality measurements should both be precise and accurate. If we have tests in place to measure the quality of deliverables, and they pass the test – that would be accurate. But if tests repeatedly gave the same results but did not pass – that would be precise but not accurate.

What we aim for is to be able to get right results each time the tests are run.

With this introduction, let us see how to Plan Quality in a project.