From programmer to project manager (26): Project management cannot fish in troubled waters
What does it mean to be a qualified project manager? The most fundamental point is to be confident, otherwise managing the project is like fishing in troubled waters, and the final result is a dead fish!
Successful project managers have a common characteristic, that is, they are confident. Failing to do this means that the project manager lacks an overall plan and can only take one step at a time. How many detours the project will take depends on luck.
1. Being confident is a sign of a project manager's competence
As the name implies, having a good mind means that a painter has an image of bamboo in his heart before painting bamboo. What a painter does is just copy what he thinks on paper. Of course, he can do it with ease and ease. .
Being confident is a requirement for an excellent painter, and it can also be seen as a sign of the competence of a project manager. To put it simply, knowing what to do is knowing how to do it from the beginning. Only in this way can you do it well. If you don't know how to do it, isn't it a chance? This principle is very simple, but many people do not realize it, or dare not admit it, it is really a mentality of fishing in troubled waters.
The project is not a training ground
Some people will say: "No one can be confident from the beginning. Failure is the mother of success. Which project manager does not grow up gradually? How can I know how to do it if I don't practice?" Thought: A project manager cannot grow into a qualified project manager without screwing up several projects.
In reality, this idea is indeed practiced over and over again. Most project managers are trained from the quagmire of the project - to be precise, they have made the project into a quagmire, and then slowly climbed ashore. It's like the primitive accumulation of capital. Behind every rich capitalist, there is an unspeakable original sin. Behind the growth of every project manager, there is a shadow of the failure of several projects. While there are legitimate aspects to the existence of each phenomenon, it is clearly not a virtuous circle.
Managing a project is like leading a soldier to fight a war. If you don’t understand the art of war, then you should feel at ease as a soldier, not a general. You can't say that when I go to the battlefield and learn how to form an army, I have a flash of inspiration and a plan, which may cost my life. Similarly, you can't expect to start learning project management after bringing a project, to exercise your thinking, and to cultivate your own mind. It's too late. Although it is not a loss for the project manager, it is not for the boss. Said, but to pay a price of hundreds of thousands or even millions of RMB. Woohoo, poor bosses!
So from the perspective of being responsible to the boss, if you can’t be confident, it’s better to retreat in spite of difficulties, and don’t use the company’s projects as learning courses and guinea pigs. It's the real responsible approach to let someone who can do it.
How to be confident
Being confident requires the project manager to know what to do in the early stage of the project, and to have a comprehensive consideration of the work of the whole project. So specifically, what do project managers need to consider?
The core of a project is nothing more than three aspects: what to do, how to do it, and resources. If you feel that you have a clear understanding of these aspects and are within your grasp, then you will generally be confident. If you're still not sure, well, let's revolve around these three centers and try to ask yourself six more questions, think about these questions, can you answer them?
If you feel confident about these 6 questions, then you, the project manager, will do your part. On the contrary, if you feel guilty, it means that you have found some potential problems, give yourself three days to understand it, solve it, and then come back to these problems, if you still don't feel at ease, it means you are not ready. , basically you can let Yin.
It should be noted that knowing everything is not about knowing everything. These three aspects of the project are like the trunk of bamboo. The six questions we ask ourselves are the branches of bamboo. Once the trunk and branches are clear, it is enough. It's as if no painter has thought about the color, position, and size of each leaf before starting a brush. Being confident means that the project manager builds a picture of the project in a very short period of time. Although this picture is imprecise, it does not matter, because the project manager with good confidence will update this picture as the situation changes during the project execution process.
2. How to be confident
Why are some project managers able to do it with confidence? As the saying goes: Frozen three times, not a day's cold. In fact, being confident is just a superficial phenomenon, just like the part of an iceberg that sticks out of the water, and there is a huge support below the water. For project managers, the underwater part is their thinking, knowledge skills and experience, as shown in the following diagram:
●Experience
Experience is the most direct support factor for being confident. If you have seen bamboo, you will naturally know what it looks like. If you have done similar projects, you can copy the previous practice and save the process of groping. This is the value of experience. Why do many companies only hire experienced employees? This is because with experience, you know how to do it, which saves the cost of training for the company and can create benefits faster.
●Knowledge and skills
Knowledge skills are reflected in their breadth and depth. With breadth, we can draw inferences from other facts, draw parallels by analogy, quickly understand customer requirements, and discover aspects that have not been considered in the project. Only with depth can we detect potential problems and discover the difficulties of the project. These are important supports with confidence.
●thinking
For those who have never seen bamboo, there is another way to draw bamboo, which is to listen to other people's descriptions of bamboo and form the appearance of bamboo in their minds, which depends on a person's thinking ability. Likewise, even if we have no experience with similar projects, our leaders and clients will tell us what to do, depending on how well we can understand it. If you rely on your own thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, classification, comparison, induction, deduction, abstraction, generalization, etc., and through learning, communication, summarization and other methods, you can break through the problems that you are confused by, and you can also become a confident project manager. .
Therefore, being confident is by no means learned overnight, nor by an epiphany, but requires continuous learning, exercise and accumulation in three aspects: experience, knowledge, skills, and thinking. Specifically, do the following:
to learn more
Learn project management knowledge, business knowledge and software development design techniques. Before becoming a project manager, learn from the dead, turn yourself into an expert, and don't express the emotion of "you will hate less when the book is ready".
to observe more, to think more
Look at how your project manager manages, think about what he does well, what problems exist in the project, and if it is you, how do you plan to solve it? The so-called "hard work pays off", keep this habit, and you will be able to manage projects in the future.
Do everything with your heart
Project management is actually not a mystery, it is just a way of doing things, and almost everything we do can be regarded as micro-projects. "Come on. On the contrary, if these little things are not always done well, it is safe to say that managing a real project is harder than reaching the sky.