How to be a great team member:
Project Management is about early visibility so the right people can make the right decisions and remove roadblocks. You, the team member, make the difference. Projects are successful when the team knows what is important to the Sponsor, Stakeholders and end users. Projects take time and effore to complete to Customer's quality.
To build a common understanding of what's expected and general terms, the following concepts are outlined.
| Why? | What? | How? When? | On Track? | Ready? | Complete? | Others | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Status/Phase of a Project: |
Potential | Analysis | Plan | Build | Deploy | Closure | Cancelled or Hold |
| Deliverables Required: | Project Request; Form project | Project Charter; Risks/Issues | WBS; Schedules; Risks/Issues | Risks/Issues | Go Live; Risks/Issues | Sponsor Approval to close; Lessons Learned | Lessons Learned |
| Additional Deliverables depend on the Project's Size, Complexity, Risks and impact the users: | Business Case | Requirements; Alternative Issues Log | Design; Change Requests | Configure SaaS or build docs; Change Requests; Unit test | UAT; Training; Support | Documents to hand over to Support / Help Desk |
Tips and Hints for being a great Team Member:
Gems from your Project Management Team
| Project Managment Knowledge Area: | Great Team members know and accomplish: |
|---|---|
| Sponsorship, Scope, Time and Quality | Know what value the project has for the customer, know the customer’s milestones and go live dates. Understand customer’s busy periods and avoid for user testing and go live. Most of this should be captured in the Project Charter. |
| Time | Fully participate in estimating and building the Work Breakdown Structure for the project. WBS organizes the schedule to achieve faster results and insure nothing is missed. |
| Purchasing, Cost | Identify any items to be purchased in the Analysis phase and update your Project Manager. Include Training needs. |
| Scope, Resources | Never work on projects without a place to put your hours to … ask your Director or Project manager to add them. |
| Quality / Issues | If an issue comes up, put it in TDX as an Issue asap and tell your Project Manager the day you find it. No surprises right before go live please! |
| Risk / Issues | If you can predict when something might go wrong, call out this Risk to your Project Manager. Mitigation actions now could prevent the risk from becoming an issue later causing project delays. Issues have happened, Risks have not yet occurred. Add both to TDX project documentation as needed. |
| Integration, Time | Do your tasks on time. Keep up with Milestones. Once a week, look out a month on the project schedule and update your Project Manager with any tasks you now know. |
| Time, Resources | Tell you Project Manager all vacation and training days as soon as you know them. Once approved by your Resource Manager/Director and PM, enter them into TDX. |
| Time, Cost | Update TDX every day or at least weekly on Time keeping and accomplishments. Look at all your tasks and tell your PM if you are over allocated and can’t make a deadline. |
| Communication | Show up for team meetings on time and be prepared. Update your PM with any new tasks plus any tasks running late or issues. |
| Communication, Integration | Help document the lessons learned during a project so the next phase and future projects execute better. (Lessons Learned – use the simple format of What is going well that we should do next time? And What can we improve on the next phase and project?) |