Mostly harmless, conspicuously useful
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Becoming an IT Project Manager
An IT project manager plans and coordinates technology projects, keeping scope, schedule, budget, and people aligned from kickoff to delivery, which is a perfectly reasonable ambition until you recall that the Gantt chart is a work of optimistic fiction, that the scope change is "just one small thing" said by the person not delivering it, that the status report is green until the project is not, and that the risk register lists every credible catastrophe and is reviewed quarterly in a meeting no one attends. You learn to translate "we will be done by the end of the quarter" into a schedule, a budget, a scope baseline, and a risk register that survive contact with a stakeholder who has had an idea. The grand objective is a project that delivers what was committed, when it was committed, for what it cost; the daily evidence is usually a status report that names the risk early, a scope change that was assessed before it was accepted, and a risk register that is reviewed by people who attend. This guide travels from reading a project plan to governing project portfolio strategy, with practical stops at scope, risk, agile delivery, and the recurring discovery that the schedule is the first casualty of a scope the schedule was not told about.
Level 1 · Novice
Read the Gantt before believing it, then ask who wrote it
You observe project plans, scope baselines, and stakeholder lists without changing them, learning how a Gantt chart can be a work of optimistic fiction and a scope baseline a suggestion.
You begin with read-only artifacts: a project charter, a work breakdown structure, a Gantt chart, a scope statement, a stakeholder register, and a status report expressing recent opinions in green. Project planning is the practice of breaking work into schedules, milestones, and resource plans; scope management is the practice of controlling scope changes and keeping delivery commitments realistic. A Gantt chart is a work of optimistic fiction, and the schedule it depicts is the schedule the project believed in at kickoff, which is not always the schedule the project will keep. You sit with an experienced project manager, read the plan, and ask who wrote each line, so you can distinguish a commitment from a wish before the project is measured against it.
Suppose you read a project plan that promises a launch in eight weeks with no contingency and no named risk. You ask the project manager what the schedule assumes about a vendor deliverable that has not started, a dependency on a team that has not been asked, and a test phase that has been allocated two days for a migration that takes five. The plan is a work of optimistic fiction, and the fiction is the contingency the plan does not contain. You record the assumptions, the missing contingency, and the unasked team. One brisk review is an anecdote with good posture, not a project plan; but it prevents the team from committing to a launch that has been scheduled for a team that has not been invited.
Words from the spaceship manual, translated
- Project charter
- The document that authorises the project, names the sponsor, and records the objective, scope, and constraints. It is the difference between a project and an idea, and the difference is a signature.
- Work breakdown structure
- A hierarchical decomposition of the work into deliverables and tasks. It is the list the schedule is built from, and the list the scope change is measured against, when the list is not a suggestion.
- Gantt chart
- A bar chart of tasks against a timeline, depicting the schedule the project believed in at kickoff. It is a work of optimistic fiction, and the fiction is revised by the scope changes the chart was not told about.
- Scope baseline
- The agreed scope the project is committed to deliver, against which changes are measured and approved. It is the suggestion that becomes a commitment when the sponsor signs it, and the commitment the project is measured against when it does not.