Project Management#

wsman sysman sysadmin

The two most important phases of a project are the planning phase and the implementation phase. The main activities in these two phases are

Determination of the project scope
Identification and structuring of the necessary activities or products. By product, we mean any identifiable work result such as a specification or a test report.
Determination of the dependencies between activities and products
Determination of the durations required to create the products
Creation of a schedule
Determination of the efforts required to create the products
Allocation of resources
Implementation of the activities with ongoing planning and continuous update of the status.

A pragmatic project management does not have to include all of the above activities. We somewhat arbitrarily name four categories PM-Level 1 to PM-Level 4.

PM-Level 1#

This level defines the minimum of project management-related activities and includes points 1, 2 and 8. The project management is thus essentially limited to good task management.

PM-Level 2#

On this level, points 3, 4 and 5 are added. This allows for quite good planning, especially if the breakdown of activities has gone so far that only one person is working on a task at a time.

PM-Level 3#

This level adds point 6 and allows for comprehensive control and early estimation of whether the project goals are achievable. This requires additional data, the collection and maintenance of which requires noticeable additional effort and discipline.

PM-Level 4#

What remains for this level is resource planning, which poses a major challenge in almost every workflow environment. This is usually due to disruptions that directly affect the availability of resources and thus disrupt the planned process. Some of the disruptions can be compensated for with buffers, otherwise a new plan is required each time.