Saturday 19 December 2020

The core ideas of project management from Project

On the internet spread such a tencent product manager competency model, regardless of whether it is true or false, but it is not difficult to find that a qualified product manager needs a very comprehensive professional ability.

An important capability in the competency model is project management capability, which helps PMer plan product iterations, integrate resources, and control production schedules throughout the life cycle of the product.

In their day-to-day work, most organizations or teams choose collaborative software to manage their products/projects. But in the more specialized area of project management, project managers generally use Project software from Microsoft to do this.

One or three principles 

 

The sooner the better

In Project, project information needs to be established at the beginning of each project, primarily on the project start date and schedule. There are two options for scheduling: a project start date or a project completion date.

When you switch between the two options, Project gives the user a prompt: When you select an item start date, you'll be prompted that the sooner all tasks start, the better, and instead, the slower you start all tasks, the better.

why is there such a hint? imagine two scenarios first:

the boss develops a product iteration plan that requires the iteration of version 2.0 of the product to be completed within 3 months from today

the boss develops a product iteration plan that requires the product version 2.0 iteration to be completed on october 1

although both scenarios require product iteration time, in the first scenario the boss specifies the start time and budget duration, while in the second scenario the boss specifies the completion time.

obviously, when the date is scheduled, the first scenario must be based on the project start date, and the sooner you finish, the better, and the second scenario is definitely based on the project completion date, as long as it can be completed by the deadline.

So the question is again, why is it better to be slower and better when project completion dates are the criteria in Project? In fact, this corresponds to two important principles in project management:


In fact, most product iterations or project management plans are based on asap, because of course the sooner the better, within a limited budget period. however, there will still be some product/project content that is clearly relevant to time, and alap will be used as the standard.


to give a simple example to help understand, here's a diagram of a product developing a 2.0 version iteration plan on august 1st, with the goal of celebrating a special national day release, so it needs to be online on october 1st.

there are three tasks in the schedule: a 30-day development task, a 10-day test task, and a 1-day on-line task.

In accordance with ALAP's principles, development can begin on August 1, but testing can begin a few days later without delaying the october 1 launch. There is some white space between development and test tasks, called window time, which is primarily used to provide buffering and risk aversion, a concept that is mentioned again below.

That is, both asap and alap have specific usage scenarios. it is important to note, however, that neither applies to situations where certain tasks need to start on a specific date. as the above example shows, the test task violates the alap principles if it is required to start on september 10.


In fact, whether in Project or in our daily real work, we recommend the principle that ASAP is chosen as soon as possible. The reason is that the ALAP principle presents a very troubling problem, the infamous Parkinson's Law.

parkinson's law emphasizes in project management that "any task is delayed until all available time is used up."

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