The first step that Fitchnel explains in his podcast is to create a project initiation report. You need to let the customer know what you assume about the project, and what you expect from them. “Assumptions allow you to manage the expectations of the customer.” Loosely quoting Cornelius Fitchner here; “A house of cards will fall, if someone changes a card.” What this means is that if you and a customer have created and set up a project it doesn’t take much to have it collapse. A customer needs to understand that if he wants to change something in his project requirements, the overall project constraints will need to be edited to suit that change.

The second step is to add reserves into your estimates, we assume that the project will have delays, changes. Some people might argue that adding reserves is unethical, but it really isn’t. The reserves aren’t there for personal gain, but rather for the assumptions of changes and delay.

We need to show the customer the affects of schedule cuts, and money cuts. If the customer understands how your work is affected when they cut time off of what was previously agreed upon, he would be less likely to change all that much.  You need to be able to present alternatives, and negotiate. If a customer wants something done differently, perhaps quicker you need to be able to somehow create a strategy that would allow that. Negotiation is a good skill to have, you need to be able to say ‘No’. There needs to be a boundary of what can and can’t be done within the specified requirements.

A project my group and I worked on before had a big scope, we promised a lot that we couldn’t have possible done in the time that was given to us. I would have cut out a lot of the extra, ‘flashy’ stuff that wasn’t really necessary and focused on the requirements that were a must. We would have been able to really flesh out those requirements and make a better starting platform for ourselves.

Now some PM’s believe that there’s only 3 constraints: Cost, Time, and Scope. There are others that believe in a fourth constraint, Quality. I believe quality should never be negotiable, I would always want to be known for quality work. I would always try to do my work to my best ability possible.

You can listen to Cornelius Fitchnel’s podcast here

The Project Manager will be vital to the economic downturn, they are the ones responsible for the budgeting of such things as time and money. With the arrival of the Millennials the Project Manager will need to take into account that these people are used to a different treatment than the Boomers. With the Millennials also comes new technology, newer software and better hardware makes the work easier.

The skills a person would need to deal with this trend would be: communication, and felxibility. They need to be able to talk to the new

employees, perhaps pass over some of their knowledge. The Project Manager needs to be able to learn how to use the same tools the new employees are using. Their knowledge of the way a Millennial works needs to be applied to their work habits. With the Millennials comes that new technology, it is much easier to code a piece of software these days then it was decades ago. Simpler and faster coding technically allows us to finish our projects much faster.

We are currently working on a project called Dirt Tracker. We’ve been hired by Natural By Design to create a personalized software solution. This program should eventually be capable of automated form creation, project comparison, designer comparison, and in general reduce overtime hours.