Using MS Excel as your first Project plan.

You can use MS Excel to quickly timeline out your project without using MS Project.   Another PM shared how he projected out his project timeline and it has really helped me in the past to quickly put a timeline together.  The bonus it is quickly shared in email to your team as well.

Let me point out a couple of items here.   I manually put in the first two dates above.  Then I select those two cells and drag to the right to auto-populate the rest of the dates.   Then I insert my tasks.  Sometimes, I will create a line for each group.  So line one might be network, line 2 server team, line 3 security, etc.   To show what is done by each time.  More of a swim lane approach.   I find this extremely helpful in presenting to the kick off team.  Because this is really fluid and they can tell you  what might work and what might not work based on your projections. For example: there might be change freezes during a period that you didn't know about.  A task that you thought might take 2 weeks might take 3 weeks, etc.   Best of luck to you.

Project Change Requests

What is a change request?  Change Requests are changes to the project scope. A lot of clients see projects going on and on and wonder how do you handle scope creep. The answer is CR's.   For example: you are working on your enhancement release and the company wants to start a new initiative to change the report label to ABC One Stop.   You are already in the design phase, the new portion is scoped out and we can complete that work in the project timeline.   We open a CR to show that change in scope, document the costs and any impact to timeline.  This is probably logged in your PPM tool, perhaps on sharepoint or notated in your document repository.  As always, you need to communicate this out to your project team and sponsor.

NOTE: just because your company doesn't have a CR system, doesn't mean that you don't need to track this work and communicate.  I guarantee you will think yourself later when you have some sort of documentation as to why your 3 month project became a 6 month project and all fingers are pointing to the PM.

Microsoft One Note

I have become quite a fan of the Microsoft One Note tool.  Its already in the MS OFFICE suite and it helps me to create good notes when tackling my projects.  Date and time stamps are automatically added at the top.   Let me review my format for my project notes:

ATTENDEES

• Joe
• Stan
• Fred

NOTES

What was discussed.  I tend to type as much as I can during this time.
More was discussed
Even more was discussed

ACTION ITEMS

1. Do this first
2. Do this second
3. Do this as well

Another good point of MS One Note is that you can cut and paste in emails into your notes or pictures, or whatever you need.  So after the meeting, I clean up the notes above and then I add a Summary of the meeting to the top of the email and send that out to everyone.  The summary is great because execs don't want to read through every line of your notes but they will read the summary.   Keep this in mind.

Now that I have talked about organizing the meeting notes, how about organizing the One Note area.   You have a Note book a section, and a page.   I work with 5 business units.   I have a notebook for every business unit.   Under the notebook, I have a project in a section.   Under that project, I have my meeting notes under the page.    When that starts to get crowded, you might have to create additional sections or notebooks to clean that up a bit.  But its a great tool.  Notes auto save for you so that's a plus and you can sync them to the cloud for multiple devices to access.

Understanding the Risks

One of the jobs of a project manager is to discover the risks of the project.   What are some of the risks that we will encounter if we move forward with the project?    You will want to keep this question in the forefront of your project team and communicate those risks out as early as possible.   Remember the next question though that will come from your leadership.  How do we mitigate those risks.  How do we ensure that those risks don't become issues in our project?  That's an excellent question.   As the PM, you need to ensure that everyone, especially the project sponsor understands all risks identified.   Keep a risk log and communicate out that risk log.   If you have a PPM tool, log that risk.  Log the mitigation plan.

When I was a system administrator, we always had to open a CR or change request before making changes on any system.   Along with that CR, we had to have a backout plan.  This is crucial for your project.   What is the backout plan?  Do the stakeholders understand the backout plan?

TIP FOR THE DAY: Do you understand the difference between a risk and an issue?   A risk might happen and an issue has already happened.   Learn that answer because you are asked that in most interviews.  Welcome to Project Management.

Understanding the processes

Within all IT shops there are different ways to launch your IT project and get it off of the ground.  Some companies have more well defined processes while others do not.  For example: At Coca-Cola, there is a rigid gating process for each phase of the project.   Each gate has specific documents that need to be in place and define where you are going with your project. Each piece of documentation must be present in a folder for that project and in the gating area.   Your PPM tool must be updated with all of the relevant information.  

In smaller shops, you might not have any required documentation or gating process.   What you do need is some kind of sign off before you proceed.  Or at least a good communication path forward. Smaller clients might not have the processes in place but that doesn't mean that you don't need that paperwork.   You need some type of email or signed form that gives you the go ahead to move forward with the project.   A stickler in one of my clients was security.  Security might need to sign off on your project.  This might be a PMO, infrastructure team or networking team depending on the organization and project.   You might need a Project number generated from a tool like Service Now or Clarity PPM before you begin.   It all depends on the client and the processes.

What is the culture of your client?   Find out quickly, assimilate and move forward.  Best of luck.