Over a 30-year career in IT, Ms. Cole has spent 20 of them as a project manager. She has served as a Software Delivery Lifecycle instructor where she incorporated project management principles for her students. She is currently an instructional designer (ID) / Project Manger (PM) for proprietary IT software applications. Ms. Cole is a member of Project Management Institute (PMI) nationally as well as her local Chicago Chapter. Ms. Cole also serves as a mentor to young professionals pursuing their PMP.
I’ve had a 30 year career in IT, with the last 20 years including the use of project management. I can’t image my IT career would have been so rewarding without including solid project management skills. Below are what I have found to be key benefits:
- Availability of up-to-date information regarding budget and timeline
- Risk and issue monitoring
- Resource Planning
– Availability of up-to-date information regarding budget and timeline
Tracking a project’s budget and tasks help keep a project on schedule and within budget.
When I inherited a project that was running behind in schedule, having up-to-date information regarding the timeline allowed me to “fast track” the project. I was able to get the budget increased by documenting cost issues and presenting the current state of the project to senior management.
This provides you awareness of potential problems. Having contingency plans in place provides the ability to address issues before they turn in to a crisis, or to prevent them from occurring.One of my projects had a risk that could have caused a “show stopper” had I not designed a contingency plan. The company was selling the application overseas. The online help for the application being built needed to be translated in multiple languages. I was able to design a contingency plan to code the online help files that allowed the text for online help to be extracted and compiled separately in multiple languages. This saved the company approximately $400,000.
Planning for the people and skills necessary for project success is essential.On a high level project, I realized that I did not have a resource with the necessary skillset. Working with management, I was able to get the needed skillset. If I had not effectively completed the project resource planning upfront, it may have been too late to get that resource when I needed it.
Project management is time well spent. I have found the old adage to be true.
I hope you find success by implementing project management principals to your projects.
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