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Why Project-Management S****s Can Make You an IT Hero |
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Why Project-Management S****s Can Make You an IT Hero
n the race for IT and business success, reaching the finish matters most. So it’s no surprise an important IT career path is project management.
"In American business, growth is associated with the ability to lead other people," says Sid Kemp, author of three books on project management, including Project Management Made Easy. "If you demonstrate an ability to lead teams, you're on your way to being an IT project manager. And good IT project managers can write their own ticket at a lot of companies." So why does the path to glory run by the Gantt chart? A number of factors make project management important to IT professionals, even for hard-core technical specialists:
Techies who lack project-management know-how may not be able to complete their work on time, leading to embarrassing snafus if not outright disasters. And in today’s unforgiving business environment, the business and career consequences can be severe. "We have to demonstrate some basic project/task management ability or someone else will do it for us," says D. Keith Casey Jr., CEO of CaseySoftware. "Currently that could mean outsourcing -- offshore or not -- or it could mean replacement." Project Management Starts with Self-Management With the increased attention on IT initiatives, all project members need project-management s****s, not just the designated project managers and team leaders. While team members can rely on project managers to keep the overall project on track, each individual must take responsibility for his own work as it relates to the broader project goals. "It is essential that everyone on a project team have core project-management s****s," says Kemp. "The core of project management is self-management, which leads to highly productive work. With these core s****s, each person can define deliverables clearly, estimate their own work time and then deliver on time. Then the entire team can build a realistic project schedule and deliver as promised." Technical S****s Are Not Enough "Hardly anyone ever says, 'Our software project failed, because our developers were technically incapable -- if only we had smarter developers who knew their technical stuff,'" says Thomas Myer, author of No Nonsense XML Web Development with PHP. "Most of the time, it comes down to eliciting requirements, communicating status, setting expectations, meeting goals and pushing back on clients who want to keep adding more and more features." Of course, it's one thing to gain project-management s****s and quite another to move into project management. Kemp, who holds a PMP certification, suggests following these steps to move into project management:
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