IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (29 page)

Money

Chapter 6, Managing the Money
on
page 161
offers a full discussion on what you need to know as an IT Manager about budgeting. But for project management, you want to be able to identify different types of costs:

•
One-time costs

•
Ongoing costs

•
Hidden costs

•
Consultants

•
Internal resources

•
Capital versus operating expenses

See the section
“Justifying the Costs”
on
page 132
later in this chapter.

One-Time Costs

As the name implies, one-time costs are incurred for those items that require a single outlay of money. For example, new hardware and software licenses generally represent a one-time cost. Of course, if the hardware is leased (and there are monthly payments), then it wouldn’t be considered a one-time cost.

Ongoing Costs

Ongoing, or recurring costs pertain to those items that are paid for continuously. For example, the monthly cost for a new telecom circuit is an ongoing cost, as are the maintenance and support costs related to hardware and software (even though the hardware and software themselves are a one-time cost). Cloud-based services generally have ongoing monthly costs. Salaries for employees and the costs of contractors are also ongoing costs.

Hidden Costs

In addition to the visible costs of a project, there are many “invisible” costs that will serve you well to consider. This chapter discusses “hidden” items, such as unnecessary meeting attendance, but there are others. Consider the loss of productivity the company suffers when an employee is suddenly transferred to a new project and can no longer work on the tasks he had been doing. Other types of hidden costs can include costs for certain items that were not fully disclosed by the vendor (e.g., activation fees), or unplanned items, circumstances, or requirements that impact the cost of the project.

Consultants

The cost for consultants is often broken out separately for accounting purposes. As with the aforementioned costs, consultants may be a one-time cost (e.g., six months of time during implementation) or perhaps an ongoing cost (e.g., for ongoing support and training).

Costs of Internal Resources

In many companies, the costs of internal resources, primarily staff salaries, are factored into the total cost of the project. The decision to do this is essentially a policy set by the Finance department, if they want total project costs to be treated a certain way in the accounting. You should check with them to see if they want these costs included. If so, you need to determine how far these costs go (e.g., in addition to salary do they include benefits and cost of overhead such as office space?). Generally, if you have to account for these costs in your project, there are rules of thumb available from Finance for calculating them.

Capital versus
Operating Expense

As a general rule, one-time costs are considered capital expenses, whereas ongoing costs are considered operating expenses. There may be exceptions to this; for example, one-time costs under a certain threshold aren’t capitalized. In addition, there may be gray areas as to whether certain costs should be capitalized. For example, Finance may elect to capitalize the cost of training if it’s exclusively needed for the project. However, if it’s training that would’ve been taken anyway, it may get treated differently.

Work with Finance on these issues. You won’t be the first person to ask these questions, and they’ll understand that they are new issues to you in your new role. Get a good understanding of these policies the first time and you’ll make everyone’s life easier.

For a further discussion of capital versus operating expenses, see the section
“The Difference between Capital Expenditures and Operating Expense Items”
in
Chapter 6, Managing the Money
on
page 167
.

Roles and Responsibilities

A critical element to the success of any project is the clear definition of roles and responsibilities from the outset. In as much detail as possible at the start, work with everyone on the team to define all the roles.

Defining everyone’s roles doesn’t mean
dictating
to people what those roles will be. There will be times where power plays occur or where one person doesn’t want to assume the role that he should. Plan for the more common occurrence—every player on the team wants to know exactly what their role is and what they are responsible for accomplishing.

Confusion about roles is a real project killer. The question, “Who is in charge of the project?” is a common source of problems, as well as, “I thought I was doing testing.” You won’t be able to answer every question at the beginning of the project, but you should spend as much time as possible trying to anticipate any potential trouble areas.

Multiple Projects

To further complicate the issue, it’s entirely likely that you, and many others on your team, will be involved with several projects simultaneously, each of a different size, each at a different point in its life cycle, and each competing for resources. Not only will you be coordinating the companywide upgrade to a new accounting system, for example, you may also be overseeing the new operating system installation for a server, be involved in the purchase of a new phone system for the organization, and serve on a cross-functional team implementing a new work-from-home program. And every member of the various projects you’re working on is also working on other multiple projects themselves.

Not only should you be identifying everyone’s roles, but you should also be estimating what portion of their time will be expected on your project. In some cases their involvement in the project may come in batches. One example might have one person with virtually no involvement for the first three months, but then they will have to give 50 percent of their time for four weeks.

4.4 Phase Three: Launch the Project

You have scoped the project and developed a formal project plan; now it’s time to get the project off the ground.

Range of Launch Options

The range of options for launching a project is quite varied. Some projects start off with a brief memo passed down from your boss: “We are starting a project to upgrade our web site to allow online shopping.” Not an easy task, but a project has been initiated.

The other extreme might be one of Microsoft’s product launches. Microsoft announced it spent over $100 million on marketing Windows Vista. Launching a new operating system is a monumental task, but in a similar way, a formal project has been initiated.

Your projects will probably fit somewhere in the middle: You might get more formal notification of its beginnings (“Let’s meet Friday to discuss the request from Accounting to upgrade their database”) and a little less than Microsoft’s billions to work with (“We have to keep this project under budget, too, so let’s make sure the $15,000 number is on everyone’s mind”).

Stage a
Kick-Off Meeting

It may be wise to enlist your boss when trying to demonstrate the value and importance of your project to other department heads. Often the senior-most executive who is sponsoring the project will call for a meeting, along with various department heads, at the beginning of a project. The purpose of a meeting like this is to (1) make sure that all the various department managers are aware of the importance of the project and (2) encourage them to commit resources to it as needed. A meeting like this, often called a kick-off meeting, can be a critical success factor in a project.

A good kick-off meeting will have every member of the team in attendance. The roles and responsibilities can then be defined—ideally in front of the sponsors. Goals, schedules, budgets, and so on can also be presented to everyone—again in front of everyone. This public accountability (if appropriate for your project) can be a very effective method to solidify your team’s goals.

Goals of Your Kick-Off Meeting

At your kick-off meeting set some ground rules, establish some administrative procedures, and make sure that everyone is on the same page. Make sure everyone is very clear about the project’s objective and scope. This is the perfect time to discuss the project’s goals. You have already written them down, and this first meeting is the place for you to distribute them and make sure everyone buys into them.

At this same meeting you may want to establish how often and where the project team is going to meet. A regular schedule of a weekly meeting at the same time, in the same room, is helpful—it sets a valuable routine.

4.5 Phase Four: Track the Project’s Progress

The bigger your project, the harder it is to keep track of who is doing what, how long different tasks will take, and so on. Several techniques for project management (project meetings, minutes, etc.) are discussed throughout this book, but these techniques provide more snapshot-type information and fall short of giving any perspective about the “big picture.” Although many software tools are available for project management, one in particular, Microsoft Project, has become the predominant choice. It has become very popular for managing projects of almost any size.

Microsoft Project

There are many project management software tools, but Microsoft Project is the most popular. It has legions of users who would never dream of using any other product. And they can’t imagine why you would consider using anything else, either. In some companies, using Microsoft Project has achieved a near-religious status. If you’re working for one of those companies, get used to receiving .mpp files.

Simply entering your project’s information into Microsoft Project is a valuable exercise in itself. It forces you to think of the specific tasks needed, their dependencies on other tasks, and the times and resources needed. As you do this, Microsoft Project will alert you when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. For example, if you’ve over-allocated resources, or if time constraints are exceeded, Microsoft Project will let you know.

By defining to Microsoft Project which tasks can occur simultaneously and which must be done sequentially, it’s easy to make changes to any portion of the project and have all the dates and resource allocations updated automatically and see what the impact is.

Microsoft Project also allows you to integrate your data with other time tracking and office productivity tools relatively seamlessly.

Remember, however, all the power that Microsoft Project provides can overwhelm you and you can forget that
you
are running your project, not Microsoft Project.

How Formal Do I Have to Get?

Focus your time, energy, and money tightly. You don’t have to be very formal about it—not every good project manager uses
Gantt charts
, for example. But you have to manage your project carefully, regardless of how formally you do that.

Whether you are installing a new phone system, taking over the management of a building, or deploying a fleet of brokers to evaluate a potential new marketplace, you have to
systematically schedule your efforts and the team members’
.

By managing your time lines, you can anticipate when your resources will be slack or overdrawn, when the project will slow down or intensify, and when you need to step in and rearrange things. You need this kind of information, or the project will overwhelm you.

—Peter Hansen

Principal, Hansen Realty, Berkeley, CA

Other Project Management Tools

One reason you might consider using a different tool is that Microsoft Project is a sophisticated product. It has many features and capabilities, many more than the average person managing projects would ever use. However, there are many companies that use
enterprise
project management tools, which can track multiple projects and resource assignments across all of those projects. These tools can provide the manager with a high-level view of the status of all projects and identify opportunities to reassign resources among different projects. Examples of enterprise project management tools include:

•
Planview

•
Computer Associates Project and Portfolio Management

•
Oracle Project Portfolio Management

•
Microsoft Project EPM

•
IBM Rational Portfolio Manager

•
Hewlett-Packard Project and Portfolio Management

Also, Web-based project management tools (Redmine, Tenrox, and KForge are examples) are gaining popularity. Rather than e-mail files back and forth, users are making changes using their browser to access an application provider via the Internet, update project plans, and post and share project-related files. It’s more efficient and convenient. More and more work activities are moving “to the cloud” in this way. See an extensive discussion of the Cloud in
Chapter 11, Connectivity: Social Media, Handhelds, and More,
on
page 287
.

Gantt Charts and Time Lines