Interviews and Case Studies

Improving Project Management and Increasing Its Perceived Value - Career Highlights and Favorite Techniques

Neil Love
Executive Coach, Coaching For Success;
Manager of Organizational Effectiveness, Adaptec, Inc.

Read about Neil's eclectic career path through project management, his opinions on dealing with the cross-functional challenges projects face, interesting executive coaching and PM improvement roles, and his opinions on why project management is not always valued at the top and what to do about it.

Is Project Planning Dead? Doug DeCarlo on planning in the midst of chaos and uncertainty

Doug DeCarlo
Founder, The Doug DeCarlo Group

A summary of comments made by Doug DeCarlo as part of the transcript of the roundtable discussion "Is Project Planning Dead?." F. Douglas DeCarlo is principal of The Doug DeCarlo Group and a project management "evangelist," as well as a frequent speaker at local and national project management events. Doug's specialty is "extreme project management": projects run in settings characterized by high speed, high change, and high uncertainty, where the rules of traditional project management no longer apply.

Implementing a Project Management Interest Group - Panelists Discuss Project Management Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Kathie Tennet, Jerry Williams, Jerry Wheeler, and Marc Lockhart, PMPs
Summarized by Kathleen Stehly, PMI Retail SIG Chair and PMI Central Virginia Chapter President Elect

When this company chartered a PM Interest Group "designed to increase awareness of, use of, and competency in Project Management," more than 70 people attended the first meeting to hear from a panel of expert project and program managers. In a five-page brief, Kathleen Stehly, PMP, not only summarizes the best practices and lessons learned from their first group of panelists, but also how they went about selecting the PMIG presentations and speakers their managers wanted to hear. Provided courtesy of the PMI Retail SIG.

Selling Executives, Planning, and Post-Mortems: Wisdom from software PM Barbara Zirolli of Hewlett Packard

Barbara Zirolli
Senior Software Development Manager, Hewlett-Packard -- NonStop Enterprise Division (former Compaq Computers, formerly Tandem Computers)

Interview with Barbara Zirolli, Senior Software Development Manager at HP. See what Barbara says about getting started in PM and her first project; the importance of selling project concepts to executives; her most important advice to new PMs; her definition of "planning"; running informal post-mortems; her biggest project challenges; and what it means to be a leader as a project manager.

Practical Knowledge Transfer for Professionals - an interview with the author of Teach What You Know

Steve Trautman

Getting a new team member on board and up to speed can be as hard on the new guy as it is on the manager. Should this issue really be escalated? What's our primary success metric? Where's my desk? Steve Trautman talks to us about practical ways to get new team members up to speed faster using simple tools and minimal time investment.

We're often asked how much project management is too much, especially for projects that range from just a few days to a few weeks long at most. (Many people would say "any at all," but we disagree!) We also know not everyone who uses our site is a titled project manager, or a full-time project manager. Some of you probably don't even want to be project managers, but that doesn't stop them from handing out projects. So, how much is too much? Can you use project management techniques on short or small projects without burying everyone in paperwork? This case study elaborates on how one of our non-PMs applied various PM techniques and tools to a time-bounded, mission-critical, ultra-small project -- her family vacation. (Yes, we're completely serious.) It's a fun take on what project management looks like when applied to something most people wouldn't even think of as a project, and proof that it really can be done without going overboard.

Conquering Micro-Management - An example of picking the right management tools for your environment.

How do you pick the right way to do "project management fundamentals" like scheduling and status tracking, for the size and culture of your environment? This mini-case study relates the experience of a small game company's founder and the decisions he made for making PM work for a fast-moving, bureaucracy-hating team.

Getting Process-Skeptical Teams to Use Project Management Processes and Development Processes

How a company with process-skeptical team members made their project management and development process adaptable and used by all. (Really!)

High-Speed Conflict and Scope Creep: A rapid web services development effort

There's nothing like a previous bad experience to taint an ongoing relationship. This case study explores an "extreme" project conducted in a strained atmosphere, where a dysfunctional team still managed to correct a critical business issue in just nine days. Focusing on project requirements - the critical success factors of the project - rather than the possible functional solutions, gave both project managers and their engineering and programming resources the flexibility and common ground to find the answers together. Communication and documentation smoothed the way for even discordant teams to find those answers quicker than anyone believed was possible.

How an ASIC Company Selects the Right Projects, Manages the Customer, and Always Finishes on Time

Sound like a pipe dream, to always finish on time? Read how an integrated circuit development company has honed their approach to project selection to take on ONLY those projects they know they can complete on time, on budget. From a 22-point go/no-go checklist to project management centered on customer management, this company has proven that PM truly can be a vital contributor to a successful business strategy.

What do you do when you're 6 months into a supposed 9-month project, and the team is still gathering requirements? Read this mini-case to see how the members of an IT department adopted new (for them) project approaches, to break free of their requirements thrashing and deliver million-dollar performance insights to the division's business analysts on the original project timeline.

Implementing an Enterprise Portfolio Management System for IT and Beyond

What does it really take to enjoy a successful PPM installation? Review one company's processes and lessons learned in this detailed case study, which reports on details like process requirements, training gotchas, and how to recruit executive support. Several ProjectConnections members and their associates also shared their experiences and best practices for this article, supplying broad coverage of the topic.

Software Requirements Management - not just for big companies

Anita Wotiz

Misconceptions about requirements management are many and widespread: That it is something government contractors impose on their Engineering groups only because the government demands it; that it's too expensive and too time-consuming for a small commercial operation; that the tools need full-time care and feeding; that engineers hate process and will resist it. Veteran software executive Anita Wotiz shares her experience shattering all of these myths by successfully implementing software requirements management with full buy-in ... and "on the cheap."

Selling by Doing - Delivering Fast PM value to Accomplish a Project Recovery

When a project is in jeopardy, and even the team and executive sponsor don't know what effective project management should look like, how can you possibly recover? Read this mini-case on how a medical information project conquered the challenges of moving requirements, a new project manager, and an outside development firm lacking full development processes, to deliver iteratively to key "leading edge" customers and the market after all.

When you've got critical deadlines approaching, but every step the team takes seems like walking through molasses, with nothing getting done on time.... How do you step up the pace and reach that goal? This mini case study examines the steps taken by one VP to meet a beta deadline on a project plagued by late deliveries, even though the team members really were working hard. Read how he and the project manager were able to turn it all around in order to meet the original ship date, and how the team learned that they could cultivate the necessary sense of urgency in their daily work when it was called for.

Spiraling In - An on-schedule medical device project that failed miserably anyway

Warren Craycroft
Vice President, Development, Tensys Medical, Inc.

This case study of a medical monitor design project illustrates the importance of periodically standing back to revisit the product vision and its critical, measurable requirements. This team's behavior was "by the book" - they followed their development process and solved critical problems in the high-risk design. However, the entire team (including senior management) forgot to monitor the project's "dashboard" - the key requirements without which the product will fail to achieve its business goals. Read how the team's heroic efforts and apparent progress missed the mark, resulting in a cancelled project, and some hard-won lessons relevant to any project.

Speaking Truth To Power - Leading from the middle to correct a troubled architecture

Randall Englund

You're just one project manager out of many, so how can you get anyone to change anything? This case study by Randall Englund details how one project manager managed the impossible by creating a compelling picture of the urgent issues, a definite plan to address them, and a clear vision of the final results.

Which Rev 2 Are We Building? - Completing a 3-month project in half the time, with twice the documents.

Ian Eddy

"It was a dream of a project, everything was well documented (I thought), everyone on the team knew that they were doing, it was all fitting into place so well, the video switching boards and software development were the only unknowns." Well, that, and whether the team could do three months of work in six weeks. It was all just a bit too simple...