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Every day I work with customers helping to put project management in place.  Every other day I work with our Engineering team building a project management plug-in for SharePoint.  A minority of the customers I meet have mature and well defined project management processes in place through-out their organizations.  These processes are based on well defined industry project management approaches such as the PMI, PRINCE2, MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework), Scrum, SEI-CMM, etc.  While these models are excellent and well though out over years by project management professionals they can be a bit on the heavy or formal side for many projects.  The majority of the customers we meet have a few people well trained and versed in project management processes and techniques but that knowledge is not widespread through out the organization.  The rest of the people are excellent at what they do (engineering, marketing, finance, software development, etc.) but they are not trained in project management.  The customers we meet are at pains to tell us that they do not have the time or the budget to train the folks in formal project management.  They want an approach so simple that it is obvious.  Over the years we have been helping customers develop such a simple approach.  More recently we have been working on a process that can be described and always decomposed into three steps.  Why three steps every time?  Why not?  Three is an easy number to work with.  It is a bit quirky and fun.  It is easier to remember and manage.  It forces us all to be concise rather than long-winded.

A piece of the draft model is then as follows:

1. Manage Single Projects
   1. Initiate the Project
   2. Manage the Project
      1. Plan the Project
         1. Define the project
         2. Assign the work
         3. Notify team members
      2. Work on the Project
      3. Track and Re-Plan the Project
   3. Close the Project
2. Manage Many Projects
3. Evolve Project Management

As you can (hopefully) see the objective is to make the process/steps of project management as simple as possible.

Download …

… you can download a first draft of the 1-2-3 model for Managing Single Projects

The above file is a pdf generated from Microsoft PowerPoint.  I do need to find a better way to visualize the process.  I actually used Microsoft Project to build the first version as it has the expand / collapse and tree views.  I tried the Visio WBS Modeler – and while it is good it does not do what I am looking for here.  Maybe I need to use something like RoboHelp.  If anyone knows of such a tool – please do let me know!

In the next few posts I will add the "Manage Many Projects" and the "Evolve Project Management" processes and I am sure I will improve on the "Manage Single Projects" started here.