Tom Mollerus' Weblog

All you technical, creative, get-your-hands-dirty bit-builders and pixel-pushers out there: make sure to participate in A List Apart's 2010 Web Design Survey. Results from past years have been very informative, and ALA's survey is probably still the only body of information we have about ourselves, web designers and developers, as an industry.

I want to give a shout out to Vertabase's Mark Phillips, who gave a fabulous presentation on project management to the Boston CFUG last night. I often find myself wishing I could manage the people who work with me on projects; but short of that becoming reality, a more realistic hope is that the people I work with learn more about project management themselves. Some of Mark's most memorable points:

• Project management is not operations: projects are temporary efforts, with defined start and end dates, to deliver something unique. A project should not be an ongoing, unending, maintain-and-upgrade, keep-the-lights-on constant effort. That's what your operations group is for.
• Don't do work just to make the client happy: do work to achieve the client's end goal, and they'll be happier as a final result.
• Designate a project manager and a project plan: have a clear idea of who is acting in the project manager role, and make sure you have a project plan with clear ideas of how to operate.
• Warning signs of failure: I really loved these, not only because they were shorty and pithy, but because they were displayed in a font face that reminded me of the demotivational posters from Despair, Inc.:
  • Aggressive Schedule = Certain Failure.
  • Lost of Change Requests = No Clear Plan = Certain Failure.
  • If You Are 20% or More Behind Schedule, You Will Never Catch Up. Ever.