How to Start project management

office:

Set the vision:

Identify the pain points in the project and
eliminate them, reconnoiter the business,
discover users complaints and eliminate
them.
Test the Environment:
Begin recruiting other to help with the
vision.
Establish objectives and plan :
Plan the strategy, how will the vision be
accomplished? Look for processes to
change , manage and identify issues/risk.
Create templates for status, metrics to
measure, a communication plan.
Agree on standards.
Identify a consistent approach for doing
business. Issue management is an easy

target to start with. Define a recording and

tracking method. Risks might be next. A
proactive risk management approach can
eliminate future issues. These targets
should not be difficult to approach.
Leave it flexible:
Be consistent and focus on culture change
and result driven way of PMO. Do not force
it.
Train Project participants:
Ask leading questions. Plant ideas. Lead
the team to do the projects in a way that
you want them to in a project
management way. Set reasonable
expectations and win the support of them.
Help others embrace the vision:
Create and use metrics and show
improvement , share the success and
approach . Share the vision and show
them how they can get involved to win
more people your way.

12 Steps to useful software metrics:

Definition of software metrics :The
continuous application of measurementbased techniques to the software
development process and its products to
supply meaningful and timely
management information, together with
the use of those techniques to improve
that process and its products.
Basic Measurement theory requires that
we select the entity first , the attribute or
parameter of entity and measure this
entity . The author describes the software
engineering as Input- Process- Output and
there are attributes related to each for
example people , resources etc for input .
Customer delivery, meeting requirement
etc for process and similarly many output

attributes. There is no standard mapping

process for this and the author tries to find
one .

Step 1: Identify Metrics customers:

Identify the customer for each metric, it is
important to understand who the
customer is to provide with valuable and
useful information.
Customers include:
Functional, project management, software
engineers/ testers, specialists.
Customers, users.
Target Goals:
The goals will change at each level of
organization , for example organization
want to be low cost provider , at project
level it is more about controlling budget

and time and at task level it is more of

criteria for entry and exit.
Ask Questions:
The next step is to ask question that stem
from our goals and gets them
accomplished.
Select metrics:
The next step is to select metrics that
answers the questions asked before step.
An individual metric performs one of four
functions. Metrics can help us Understand
more about our software products,
processes, and services. Metrics can be
used to evaluate our software products,
processes, and services against
established standards and goals. Metrics
can provide the information we need to
Control resources and processes used to
produce our software. Metrics can be used
to predict attributes of software entities in
the future.
Standardize Definitions:

The next step is to standardize the

definition and meaning of metrics, so
there is no misinterpretation by different
people.
Choose a Measurement function :
Ask these questions that can help you a
choose a proper function,
Does the model provide more information
than we have now?
Is the information of practical benefit?
Does it tell us what we want to know?

Establish a Measurement method:

Break the function down to its lowest level
to collect data that satisfies base
measures and then keep building on it.
Define decision criterion :
Decision criteria are the thresholds,
targets, or patterns used to determine the
need for action or further investigation, or

to describe the level of confidence in a

given result
Define reporting Mechanisms:
Decision criteria are the thresholds,
targets, or patterns used to determine the
need for action or further investigation or
to describe the level of confidence in a
given result.
Determine Additional Qualifiers:
The tenth step in designing a metric is
determining the additional metric
qualifiers. A good metric is a generic
metric. That means the metric is valid for
an entire hierarchy of additional qualifiers.
For example, we can talk about the
duration of unplanned outages for an
entire product line, an individual product,
or a specific release of that product. We
could look at outages by customer or
business segment. Alternatively, we could
look at them by type or cause.
Collect Data

The data "owner" is the person with direct

access to the source of the data and in
many cases is actually responsible for
generating the data
Benefits of having the data owner collect
the data include: Data is collected as it
is being generated, which increases
accuracy and completeness Data owners
are more likely to be able to detect
anomalies in the data as it is being
collected, which increases accuracy
Human error caused by duplicate
recording (once by data recorder and
again by data entry clerk) is eliminated,
which increases accuracy

Achieving Successful PM in a functional

organization

There are many reasons project fail in functional

organizations and this article explains the different
factors related to it.
Unlike a project management organization there is
no specific PMO to manage resources and projects
in a functional organization with set of different
functional departments like legal, technology etc.
Some of the reason projects fail in functional
organization include:
Poor Business Case:
The business cases fail to capture the relation of
project objectives with the objectives of the overall
organization. They might also have poor financial
projections with little knowledge about the project
until the planning stage.
Poor requirements Gathering:
This happens because not all the stakeholders are
identified initially in the project, this poses a
challenge whenever there is a need for resource
from another department because of lack of
interest in devoting resources.
Poor Planning:

Project are abandoned because they did not meet

final customer requirement. This could be for many
reasons but mainly lack of proper planning which
happens because of urgent request for something
without understanding impact on cost and
resources.
Poor stakeholder identification, Buy-ins &
Engagements:
Not giving priority to get buy-ins from important
stakeholders and ignoring them could lead to
failure of the projects
Poor risk identification & Planning
It is necessary for project to have risks identified
first and planned ahead to eliminate a chance of
becoming issue. So this is not done properly in this
kind of organization making projects bound to fail.
This leads to conclusion of having PMO helping the
organizations in delivery of successful project. It
helps in streamlining projects and resources with
focus on developing proper business cases.