Successful Project Management in the Digital Age: Learn simple steps to succeed within a day

By Natarajan Thangaraju

'Learn Successful Project Management in the Digital Age in a Day!’ is a real-world, practical and hands-on guide for new as well as experienced Project Managers who are expected to deliver projects in this dynamic digital age navigating effectively through rapidly changing and disruptive business environments. There are key insights for project managers who work across multiple industry sectors.
It's a quick reference guide for new project managers with inputs on key focus areas to ensure successful project outcomes while building their personal brand and skills.
It provides proven tips and techniques for experienced project managers to enhance their probability of project success with a ‘methodologies agnostic approach’ enabling them to adapt to any of the methodologies without losing focus on customer value.
This book can be read within a day (or two!) to enable the Project Managers to hit the ground running effectively
Learning practical project management in this ‘Digital Age’ has never been this simple!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664100688

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Natarajan Thangaraju.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/15/2020

Xlibris

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AU Local: 0283 108 187 ([phone] from outside Australia)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

What You Will Get Out Of This Book!

What This Book Is Not About!

Make The Instant Connection!

Understand Project Stakeholders - Who’s Who In The Zoo

Define The Project Success Criteria

Identify Or Build A Core Team

High-Level Integrated Milestone Plan

Simplicity Over Complexity

Look For Options To Chunk It Down

Estimation - Work On A Range Rather Than Specifics

Understand Organisational Politics - Be Savvy

The Digital Age

Learn About Organisational Agility

Virtual Project Office And Collaboration

Ability To Work With An Evolving Digital Ecosystem

Emergence Of Artificial Intelligence And Automation

Knowledge On Information Security In The Digital Age

Global Sourcing And Global Delivery Model

Continued Scenario Planning

Understand True Customer Needs - The Customer Is (Not) Always Right!

Don’t Get Bogged Down By Project Management Methodologies

Be Brutally Honest In Business Value Assessment

Build Credibility - Quick Wins

Build A Personal Brand

Build Key Metrics For Self-Improvement

Reset Your Mindset!

Effective Communication

Stakeholders’ Expectations - Set And Manage (Never Abandon!)

Move Away From Jargon And Technical Speak

Project Summary Status On A Page

Project Management—Is It An Art Or A Science?

Avoid These Common Pitfalls

Look Out For Interdependent Projects

Knowing When To Call ‘Time Out’ Or ‘Stop’ Is Also Crucial

Unmitigated Risks/Uncertainties Are Extremely Expensive!

Organisational Change Management—Not An Optional Stream!

Follow Through - Post-Delivery And Support Transition

Continuous Learning And Skills Development

Work-Life Balance

Enhance Positive Impact Through Expanding Sphere Of Influence

Adapt, Learn, And Win!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T here are so many people without whom this book would not have been possible.

My heartfelt gratitude to my parents, Dr P. Thangaraju and Mrs T. Nagavalli for their love and support and I grew up watching my Dad finishing his PhD as well as guiding many university students to finish their PhD theses which inspired me to write this book.

Thanks to my wife Premila for always believing in me and for continuing to be my amazing pillar of support. Thanks to my awesome children Adithyan, Apsara and Aparna for their inputs in finalising my book cover design and to my sisters Meenal and Kavitha for their kindness.

It has been an amazing ride wherein I had excellent opportunities to work and successfully deliver projects and programs in eleven countries leading extremely talented global cross-functional teams. I’m extremely grateful to all the team members and senior stakeholders from whom I have learnt a lot which has been instrumental in finalising this book.

Thanks to the Xlibris team for their work in publishing my book.

PREFACE

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Alvin Toffler

T he above quote is far more relevant to project managers than anyone else in this digital age. Given the plethora of disruptive technologies and rapid delivery cycle expectations project managers have to deal with, it’s even more important for PMs to keep themselves updated with the emerging trends, to effectively adapt, plan, and deliver any project, with emphasis on delivering the highest value to customers within the shortest possible time frame.

Also, based on the invaluable learnings after burning midnight oil and getting numerous scars over many years from my personal programme and project management experience (wherein I realised these additional efforts weren’t needed at all if I had used some simple techniques), I have tried to summarise these personal learnings and techniques for a simple read within a day. I’m also humbled by the great opportunities and the sheer luck that enabled me to travel and deliver projects in eleven countries, working with a global cross-functional and multicultural team. I have attempted to crystallise my key learnings in this book. Most of these inputs, in my view, are not typically taught as part of traditional project management courses.

This is a culmination of varied experiences gained from programmes and projects with business outcomes ranging from excellent to challenging and even dreadful ones which were put on hold, as well as terminated at times. My acknowledgement goes to every team member, various customers across multiple industries, business partners (vendors), leaders, and senior stakeholders, including three CIOs and a CEO whom I had the great opportunity to work with directly. I learned from everyone throughout my journey.

Though my experiences are primarily of business outcomes focused on IT programme delivery, project delivery, and business transformation delivery, as well as enabling organisational agility, I hope there are a few tips and tricks that any project manager can take away as a generic project management professional even if they work in other industries.

INTRODUCTION

I t was a very cold morning in Melbourne (early July), and I got a call from my then CIO, who summoned me to his office at 7.00 a.m. The call came when I was still relishing the success of a great programme of work which went live a week earlier, wherein I was fortunate to lead an awesome and collaborative team which worked tirelessly across three countries and successfully rolled out warehouse management solutions for one of the largest distribution centres in Australia. The business stakeholders were extremely pleased with millions of cartons of goods being shipped out without any hitch from Day 1, and I wasn’t expecting an urgent early-morning meeting request from the CIO!

I entered the CIO’s room and could see three other senior directors sitting with him. After a brief introductory session, the CIO smiled and said, ‘Nat, you are aware of Programme Phoenix [name changed], which has been plagued with so many challenges historically over the past two years. We want you to work with the current programme director and key stakeholders and come up with a recovery action plan to fix all the issues within the next two weeks.

‘We also want you to come up with a pragmatic approach to turn this around, covering the holistic programme. You can have the required resources at your disposal to finish it within the next two weeks.

‘The reason for the three senior directors attending this meeting is to highlight the criticality of the turnaround needed, as they pretty much manage $18 billion in business a year for us, and this programme is impacting their business functions and strategic capabilities needed over the next few years.’

(For the reader’s context, Project Phoenix was a big programme of work which was in flight and had a long and chequered history and had been burning millions of dollars, with schedule delays and multitudes of challenges over a period of two years that didn’t have an end in sight.)

I just responded that I would work with the programme director and key stakeholders to come up with an approach. Troubled projects recovery was not new to me, but this scale was literally daunting and I had so many parallel threads of thinking going through my head at that time.

The seed for this book was planted after completing a number of workshops and myriads of discussions with multiple stakeholders across the business units over the next two weeks and the pragmatic approach we had to take to turn the big ship around and avoid it hitting further icebergs and to ensure the programme was navigated safely to the desired destination. During the turnaround process, unfortunately, I could see that many of the simple and key steps needed to manage a large programme of work with multiple streams, a.k.a.