Archive for February 2008

One of the big considerations when you are planning your project is whether or not you will outsource (or out-task - topic for a different post). As I’m sure you know, outsourcing is the hiring out of work. This is done primarily to free up your time to work on the more important parts of your business, such as the marketing.

Many things can be outsourced, including content creation, web site design and management, security, and the list goes on. But why are we discussing this here?

When you are planning your projects, you need to know who will be doing the work. Not necessarily the exact “who”, but will it be you or someone else. If it is someone else, this is another resource you need for your project, and should be accounted for in your resource list.

Actually, the way I prefer to do this is to list out all the resources you need anyway, and then assign jobs to the resources, whether me or someone else. This way I can more easily reuse parts of my plans in future projects.

To explain another way, if you are the writer, and you are the web designer, and you are the graphics designer, and you are the script installer, and so on, you fill each of these roles. However, that doesn’t mean that your project didn’t need a script installer resource, or a graphic designer resource. Do you see where I’m going? You might be the chief cook and bottle washer, but all of these jobs still require a resource, even if that resource is you.

And often if your just starting out, they are all you. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take each job into consideration separately in your plan. Besides re-usability, there is another good reason to do this.

If, in the middle of your project, you determine you can’t complete the content in time. You can make the choice to hire this out. You have these tasks separated in your plan, so you can easily determine what you need him to do. On small projects, like what I’m showing you in the case study, it may seem obvious what is needed from each resource, but in a larger undertaking you might not find it so easy.

Anyway, just wanted to throw out this topic. Remember to always define each resource based on the job performed, even if you are the only actual human resource involved.

Cheers,

Chris

I feel like I’ve been all over the place. As I was sitting down tonight to write up some posts for this blog, it occurred to me that I wasn’t listening to myself. I love to teach, but I don’t have much experience in teaching. I realized that someone coming here to this blog would be inundated with an enormous amount of information, without any logical order to it, and without an overall cohesive message.

This got me thinking. In my day job as a project manager, I would never dream of starting a project without having every duck in a row. This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect there, but it means that I have a better vision of where we should be, and I can adapt, correct, report and do all the project management tasks more efficiently.

So, what does this mean for you, and for this blog? Well, good things are coming in the near future. First, however, I need to stop for a few days and regroup. One of the big mistakes I’ve made here is that I failed to treat this blog as a project. Actually, the blog itself, since it should be around indefinitely, is not really a project. However, things like the case study being presented, and presenting the things you really need to know as a project manager, need to be treated as projects, and need to be planned and worked as a project. And that is exactly what I intend to do.

By this coming weekend, I will have a plan laid out for the case study. Not just the revised and update plan for it, but also my plan for reporting status and for using what I’m doing there as a teaching tool. I expect to have regular status reports to go along with the other posts of what I’m doing for this project.

Well, that’s all for now. The next post should be on Sunday, February 24, 2008, and should give you a much better picture. I’ll lay out everything related to initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing the project.

Cheers,

Chris

Most people consider risk to be a negative thing, or at least have negative connotations. However, when considering risk in a project, you have to consider opportunity risk and other possibly positive risks as well.

Lets say your project is to build 1000 content pages, based around a single theme. In planning this project, one risk you identify is finding decent PLR content on this theme. This is a risk because now you have to consider modifying your project to incorporate this PLR content, and change the project plan, and the schedule, and even the budget.

Often times project managers get stuck in the thinking that risks are bad things that could happen outside of their control. The reality is that risks are anything that could happen outside your control which could impact your project, whether good or bad. Therefore it can be beneficial to make a point of trying to think of potential positive risks for every project. Even if there aren’t any, thinking this way will at least help you to find these positive risks when they do exist.