The following is a summary of my interview with Sundeep Reddy, a project manager in IBM. I’d like to thank Sundeep for taking the time to help me with my 3rd year project and helping come up with some good points which I will incorporate into the project. This post will not be a transcipt of the interview, but instead focus on summarising the key points.
I aim to do several more such interviews, so if you’re a project manager, think your current project management system is slightly lacking, work in web/software and have some ideas or just want to help, then leave a message in the comments and I’ll get in touch.
And on to the interview…
What sort of projects do you normally manage, how many people and are you the only project manager?
I’m currently managing a fairly large project spanning several years with several smaller related projects. There are 2 project managers on this project, one senior and one junior project manager. The number of people we have on the project varies week to week, but on average, it’s 35 people per week. Some of the workers work remotely.
How often do you review the project? Daily, weekly or just when there’s a problem? What’s involved in a ‘review’?
I check the status of the project every day and generate a weekly report as well. This report is primarily for passing up the chain and contains information such as where we are in relation to the plan, the financial situation, any potential risks etc. It’s currently all compiled manually.
Whats the average length of one of your projects, or do they vary a lot? Do you normally have just one big project at a time or lots of smaller projects simultaneously?
There is no such thing as an average project. The large project I’m currently managing has been broken down into a number of sub projects. There are also a number of smaller projects being carried out at the same time, which aren’t part of the main project, but it makes sense to do them at the same time, due to economies of scale. These related projects shouldn’t show up when viewing the main project, but there should be a link to them.
What methodology do you use for your projects? Waterfall or some form of iterative? Is this by choice or company policy?
I use the waterfall model for my projects, as I find it works well for large projects and has proven to be the best in the past. It works well in the time frames I work in, where as agile might be more useful for getting some code out fast.
What project management system do you currently use?
We currently use Microsoft Project as it’s the industry standard. We need something we know will work with everyone else we communicate with, such as our subcontractors. We need to know that they see exactly what we intended, so MS Project is great in this sense, although it does have slightly limited functionality.
What would you say are they key strengths and weaknesses of MS Project? DO you still find yourself doing certain things manually or using external tools?
One thing that’s very difficult to keep on top of with MS project is the commercial aspects of a project. Another potential problem is managing resources, especially ones which span multiple projects/systems/locations.
Another problem we’ve had in the past is resubmitting of time sheets. This skews all our data and wastes more time resolving it, so anything that could prevent that is a bonus. I then take these times and put them into an Excel file to track the finance side of the project.
Essentially, I need to know if we’re on track and if we’ll hit out milestones, so anything which helps achieve this is great.
What are your thoughts on the following areas of the PMS and their relative importance?
Nested projects – This is a pretty useful, as I said earlier, I have my main project split into several smaller ones, which would become nested projects in your model. It’s nice to also have links to the related side projects, but not have then actually be part of the project.
Messages – Sounds like a nice feature and it would be good to have all communications consolidated in a single place, but it wouldn’t be all that much use to me. Most of our communication is face to face.
Milestones – These are pretty important, but if you’re keeping on top of all your tasks, these should just fall in place.
Tasks – This is probably the most important thing as everyone needs to know what they need to do next. Dependencies would be great too, as then we can see the critical path.
Tickets (after some explanation of what and how they are/work) – This wouldn’t be of much use to me, as we don’t really get many changes as we use the waterfall methodology. I’m sure this would be very useful for iterative projects though.
File sharing and version control (Used for documents, mock-ups etc, not source code) – Would be pretty useful to have all documents such as specifications in a central location.
Time tracking – This is a very important part of any project, but has potential problems as I mentioned earlier with resubmitted timesheets, so anything which would be done to prevent that would be great. Also if the PMS took care of the financial side as well, that would be great, as I currently track these manually in an Excel spreadsheet.
Project health – Sounds like an interesting idea, and would be nice to get an idea of how all your projects are doing on the dashboard.
What level of control and detail do you need? Minute, hour or day?
Clients don’t like it if we use hour increments, as it can be more expensive for them but in most case they’re fine with 30 minute increments.
In one of my emails, I mentioned 2 features I was thinking of, project health and automated prioritisation. Would you trust a system which attempted to define what was the most important task at any given time or would you prefer to have manual control over this?
This sounds like a good idea, as it may take into account a factor we missed, and if it gets it right it saves doing it manually, but I would need to be able to override it.
Would you trust a system you can’t install locally?
It depends on what is meant by locally. With some projects, such as government, it can be very difficult to get away with it not being stored on site, and it definitely won’t work if the servers not in the country. Also, you might not have an internet connection at all times, so a local system is sometimes the better option.
Would you take advantage of fine grained user permissions or would you want everyone to see everything?
Leaving everything open can be dangerous. All sorts of people, both internal and external would be accessing the system, and certain information may only be intended for users of a particular band (level). Anything related to financial figures and other confidential information needs to be handled carefully and be hidden from sub contractors.
On the other hand, items such as milestones should be visible to everyone including who’s on the critical path. As you mentioned, time is a sensitive issue and has the potential to make people look bad. If someone is doing a job and then goes off (on holiday) and someone takes over and does 1 weeks worth of work in 2 days because they’re more experienced, it could make the original person look bad.
Most web based systems send out email notifications out whever anything occurs. If you would use the system each day, you would end up receiving the same information twice. Do you think this would be the case for everyone? Thoughts?
If you’re using the PMS regularly, then as you say, the email notifications will just be the same information twice, so you would need to be able to opt out of it. One good idea would be to only send out notifications (such as a text) if an event of a high enough priority occurs. This way, I will be notified immediately, and can then decide how to respond.
I will write up a post how my findings in this interview will impact the project and it’s features in the next couple of days and link to it from here.
