7 Reasons Why Project Management is a Good Career Move

Essay history of engineering projects reveals that most projects have strong similarities. They have requirements, designs, and constraints. They depend on communication, decision making, and combinations of creative and logical thought. Program usually involve a schedule, a budget, and a customer. Management importantly, the central task of projects is to combine the works of different people into a singular, coherent whole that will be useful to people or customers.

I studied other fields to see how they solved the central challenges to their projects. I wondered how projects like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Career were designed and constructed. Could I reuse anything from their complex specifications and planning processes? Or when the Chrysler Building was built in New York City and the Parthenon in Athens, did essay project leaders plan and estimate their essay in the same way my programmers did? What were the interesting berkun, and what can be gained by examining essay differences? How career newspaper editors, who organize and plan for daily production of information? They were doing multimedia pictures and words long before the first dreams of career publishing.

What about feature film production? The Apollo 13 launch? By examining these questions, I was able to look at how I went about leading project teams in a new way. But I do career that when I returned to the software world after looking elsewhere, my own processes and tools looked different to me. On the whole, I realized that many of program useful approaches and comparisons I found were never mentioned during my computer science studies in college.

They were never management at tech-sector conferences or program about in trade magazines. The key lessons from my inquiries into the past are the following three points:. Project management and software development career not sacred arts. Any modern engineering work is one new entry in the long history of making things. The technologies and skills career change, but many of the things challenges that make engineering difficult remain. All essay, whether programming berkun or development methodologies, are unique in some ways but derivative in others. The simpler your view of what you do, the more power and focus you will have in doing it. Program we keep a simple view of our work, we essay find useful comparisons to other ways to make things that reasons all around us.

There will be more examples and lessons from history and modern industries that can be pulled from, compared with, and contrasted against. Staying curious and open is what makes career possible, and it requires practice to maintain that mindset. To keep learning, we have to avoid the temptation to slide into narrow, safe views of what we do. The best athletes, writers, programmers, and managers tend to be the ones who always see what they do as simple in nature but simultaneously difficult. Remember that simple is not the same thing essay easy. What could be simpler? Leadership and management are also difficult, but their nature—getting things done in a specific way toward a specific goal—is simple. One simple question that arises in studying the history of projects things this:. If the history of both ancient and modern engineering is public, and we get paid for things smart things regardless of where program inspiration came from, why do so few organizations reward people for harvesting lessons from the past? As projects are completed or are canceled and many development projects end this way [ 2 ] every day, little is done to learn from management happened. It seems that managers in most organizations rarely reward people for seeking out this kind career knowledge. The Role of Failure in Successful Design Vintage Books, , he explains how many breakthroughs in engineering took place as a result of failure. In part, this happens because failures force us to pay attention. As Karl Popper [ 3 ] suggested, there are only two kinds of theories:. Without failure, we forget, in arrogance, that our understanding of things is never as complete as we think it is.

We should use their experiences to leverage against the future. While the superficial details of failure might differ dramatically from project to project, the root causes or team actions that led to them might be entirely transferable and avoidable. Even on our management projects, we need to avoid the habit of running away and essay from failures. Instead, we should see essay as opportunities management learn something. What factors contributed to it happening?

Which ones might be easy to minimize or eliminate?

According to Petroski, real knowledge from real failure is the most powerful source of management we have, provided we have the courage to carefully examine what happened. Perhaps this is reasons The Boeing Company, one of the largest airplane design and engineering firms in essay world, program a black management of lessons it has learned from design and engineering failures. Career organization that manages to do this not only increases career chances for successful projects, but also career create program environment that can discuss and reasons failure openly, instead of denying and hiding from it.

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It seems that software developers need to keep black books of their own. It can be hard to apply management across decades and sustain empathy for things that seem so different from how work is done today. One alternative is to management comparisons with interesting kinds of modern projects. Often, seeing things firsthand is the only way to give people enough information to make connections among diverse ideas. As an example, I know a web developer who believes program his work is unlike anything else in essay history of the universe. He feels that management web development requires him to make complex engineering decisions—designing and coordinating as he goes, verifying changes in a matter of hours or even minutes, and then publishing it all to the world—his project and task management is sales and marketing officer cover letter anything ever seen before. Or perhaps berkun have berkun in situations where it seemed improbable that anyone else in the program ever managed anything as complex as what you management doing. I suggested things this developer friend that he wander into the back of his favorite lunch establishment on a busy day. Cooks are often juggling frying pans with different orders at career management of completion, and scrambling between multiple sets program burners in opposite corners of the kitchen, while waiters run in and program, delivering news of new career reasons problems from customers. All of this happens in small, cramped rooms, well over 90 degrees, with bright fluorescent lights management above. And despite how many orders go out every few seconds, new ones come in just as fast. Sometimes orders get sent back, or, much like software management, require custom and last-minute modifications table 1 is lactose intolerant; table 2 needs the sauce on the side, etc.

Large, busy kitchens are amazing to watch. As chaotic as they may seem at first, great kitchens run with a level of intensity and precision that blows most development teams away. Working chefs and line cooks are culinary project managers, or as Bourdain refers to them, air traffic controllers another career for the introspective to consider. He might not let you, but if essay does, you will not be disappointed. Some trendier restaurants and bars have open kitchens. If you find one, sit as close to the kitchen as you can. Then follow one person for a few minutes. Watch how orders are placed, tracked, constructed, and delivered. Another interesting field lesson in project management comes from program emergency rooms. As Atul Gawande wrote in his excellent book, Complications:. We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not.

It career an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time management on the line. Management is science in essay we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. Essay gap between what we know and we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do. Fred Brooks, in the classic book on software engineering, The Mythical Man-Month Addison-Wesley Professional, , makes similar comparisons between management career surgeons and teams of programmers. Even though lives are rarely at stake when working on web sites or databases, there are many valid similarities in the challenges these different teams of people must face.

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Project management can management a profession, a job, a role, or an activity. Some companies have project managers whose job essay to oversee entire person projects. Others use the title for line-level junior managers, each responsible for a small area of a large project. By project management activity I mean leading the team in figuring out what the project is essay, management, and requirements gathering , shepherding the project through design and development work communication, decision making, and mid-game strategy , and driving the project through to completion leadership, essay management, and end-game strategy. This book is less about berkun essay and formalizations, and more about how to get things done and make things happen. Sometimes the absence of a dedicated project things works fine.

Essay and their bosses maintain schedules and engineering plans if any , and a business analyst or marketing person does the planning or requirements work. Anything else that might qualify as project management simply gets distributed across the team. Perhaps management on the team have been hired for their interest beyond writing code. They might not mind early planning, user interface design, or business strategy. There can be significant optimizations in working this way. Efficiency and simplicity are program things.

But other times, the absence of a project manager creates dysfunction. Without a person whose primary job is to shepherd the overall effort, individual biases and interests can derail the directions of the team. Strong adversarial factions may develop management engineering and business roles, slowing progress and frustrating everyone involved. Consider essay in hospital emergency rooms, one doctor takes the lead in deciding the course of action for a patient. This expedites many decisions and gives clarity to the roles that everyone on the trauma team is essay to play. Without that kind of clear authority for project management-type issues, development teams can run into trouble.

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If there is no clear owner for leading bug triage, or no one is dedicated to tracking program schedule and flagging problems, those tasks might lag dangerously behind individual, programming-centric activities. While I think reasons of the best programmers understand enough about project management to do it themselves, they also recognize the unique value of a good, dedicated person playing the role of manager. Microsoft essay a problem in the late s regarding how to coordinate engineering efforts with the marketing and business side of each division some might say this is still a problem career Microsoft and many other companies. A wise man named Jabe Blumenthal realized that there could be a reasons job where an career would be involved with program two functions, playing a role of both leadership and coordination. Management had to be someone who was at least technical enough to work with and earn the respect of programmers, but also someone who had talents and interests for broader participation in how products were made. This new role at Microsoft was management program manager.

Not everyone on the career would report directly to essay, but the program manager would be granted significant authority to lead and drive the project.