Red Warrior's Journal: Coming along (PM junk)

I'm a natural at this shit.
sigh.
(Which is to say that work is going well.)

Finally got executive feedback on my first draft project plan[1]. All 27 pages of it. All of the comments/suggestions were of the verbage type (Will^WMay, etc.). This was quite a difference from the Project Charter, whose draft was awash in red ink. I made sure I understood the reasons behind the red ink, and it paid dividends. Not only in logic, but in the agendas of the stakeholders.

We have had MOST of the expected issues, and a couple of unexpected ones. But there was "unexpected issue" slop built in. We are a month in, and comfortably ahead of schedule. Which, of course, was the purpose of the schedule as written. ;->

The contractors have two very different styles of work, and thus need to be managed very differently. One needs a lot of attention, and the other is basically "fire and forget." I had to have a "straighten up and fly right"[2] discussion with one of them the other day. Has a disturbing tendancy to have doctor's appointments that conflict with our Thursday weekly status meetings, and a tendancy to not mention said fact until Thursday. Now, I happen to believe those are legitimate (and pre-existing) obligations, but not with no notice. And a tendancy to forget the weekly status report that's due early enough for me to review before the meeting. I think that's been resolved. Time will tell.

The Project Management Office (which is tasked to assist/ensure that our IT projects follow best practices) has been consistently awed that someone actually completes "required" documents, and to "standard". And has made comments to that effect to my manager and upper management. A very cool thing.

My manager (as well as upper management) has made comments indicating that they expect I will probably move into the next vacant Project Manager position. Which COULD be as early as July, depending on how we do in budget roulette. I think that would be somewhat too soon, but I wouldn't turn it down.

The main thing I've noticed, is that the job is disturbingly like a cross between an Executive Officer of a military unit and an S/G-3 (Operations, Plans, and Training) staff section[3]. Both things that I have done in the past, and was good at. Just different terms and paperwork. And you can't shoot anyone.

We had two emergency outages with my application[4] on the week before Christmas. In both, senior management (My boss's boss, and his boss, and the application business area owner) were impressed with my quick, effective, and efficent handling and resolution[5] of the problems. Which basically translates to "he can quickly write clear emails and include the right people on the CC line, and manage to not assign blame." ;->

Yeah, I'm bragging on myself. Bite me. :-)

[1] Which is pretty much everything EXCEPT the Gantt chart created by MS Project. In this case, it is composed of the following sub-plans: Communications, Scope Change Management, Issues Management , Risk Management, Quality Assurance, Staffing, Contractor Management, Test, Implimentation & Transition, Customer Training, Maintenance & Operations. Oh, and the Project Charter (previously approved and incorporated by reference) and the Project Schedule.
[2] Recently was on the receiving end of one of those myself. Something about showing up for work somewhere in the vicinity of my alleged start time, IIRC. ;->
[3] Which in a unit of company size or less, the XO is.
[4] Except that in both cases, my application was not down. In one case, there was a system deadlock (probably wrong terminology) on the mainframe, on the other, the statewide secure access portal was borked. The catch being, both items are indistiguishable to an end user from my system being down. :-(
[5] Contacting the people whose systems were broken, and saying "I think your systems might be broken. When you have a sec, could you look at fixing it? Thanks."

Better error

[ryanr]

[4] Except that in both cases, my application was not down. In one case, there was a system deadlock (probably wrong terminology) on the mainframe, on the other, the statewide secure access portal was borked. The catch being, both items are indistiguishable to an end user from my system being down. :-(

Sounds like you need to have a better error that appropriately passes the blame, if at all possible.

Re:

[Red Warrior]

That's definitely the case in the mainframe situation. They got an "error code not in translation table" message. Not exactly helpful. Something along the lines of "We're sorry, but the system is currently experiencing difficulties...." blah, blah, blah. :-)

Need a better error in the other case, too. But that needs to be done on the security portal side. 'Cuz they didn't even get TO our app.

Don't necessarily want to pass the blame, because then you get internal bickering and people digging in to "protect" t

Re:

[turg]

The error message doesn't need to assign blame. The three different error messages can be three slightly different ways of saying the same thing. Only your boss needs to be able to recognize the difference :-)

Hm

[turg]

he can quickly write clear emails and include the right people on the CC line, and manage to not assign blame.

Isn't that pretty much the job description of a project manger? :-)