The Unready Project Manager: Advice and Preparation for Project Success

By John Connolly

If you've just been assigned a project, you may not know where to start. You might be tempted to jump in and make things happen, or you might be overwhelmed with where to begin. If you don't quite feel at ease tackling your first project, you aren't alone. Many project managers are unsure of where to start.

In this book, you will find advice and techniques to establish good practices to prepare your project for success. You'll also find advice for your project management career, common terms used in the project management field, and techniques for getting your project up and running quickly. This easy, conversational guide will give you the tools to be confident in your first project and prepare you to take on many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Connolly
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005490065

John Connolly

John Connolly is the author of the #1 internationally bestselling Charlie Parker thrillers series, the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers, and (with Jennifer Ridyard) the Chronicles of the Invaders series. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, see his website at JohnConnollyBooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @JConnollyBooks.

Book preview

The Unready Project Manager

Advice and Preparation for Project Success

John Connolly, PMP

Copyright © 2022, John P. Connolly

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover Design: John Connolly

Cover Art: Don’t Look Down by Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash, licensed under the Unsplash License.

Salientian, LLC

www.Salientian.com

First Edition

For Melanie Mathewes

Thank you for your inspiring leadership

and friendship

Contents

Introduction

Give Yourself Credit

The Unready Project Manager

Keeping Track of Everything

Project Management Approaches

Preparing to Schedule

Bite-Sized Pieces of Work

Estimating Work Length

You Can Do This

Skills for Success

A Career in Project Management

Project Management Certifications

Priorities in Your First 30 Days

Building Your Project Management Expertise

Thank You

Additional Resources 1 - Project Management Vocabulary

Additional Resources 2 – Reading List

Online Resources

About the Author

Introduction

If you are a project manager who doesn’t quite feel ready to take on the role, then you are not alone. If you decided to read this book, it might be because you’ve just been assigned a project to manage and you’re unsure where to start. Maybe you’re exploring project management to see if it’s a fit for your career aspirations or you might be looking for an easier entry into project management concepts than picking up a comprehensive tome filled with technical language.

I’m here to help get you started. I’ve broken this book down so you can skip to the chapter you consider most relevant:

• Standing up a project as soon as possible

• Good practices for your project

• The process to get PMP certified

• Project management terms

• Additional project management reading

I’ll also encourage you to learn from several sources. Mentors and advice-givers are a critical component of learning. You could fill a library with the overwhelming number of books and articles written on project management… I’ll give you some ideas of where to get started on your reading, too. And there’s a growing number of online courses and training videos you can access for affordable prices (and even some for free). There’s limitless opportunity to get familiar with the vocabulary, principles, processes, and tools of project management.

I understand that at the beginning, you might not feel ready. I didn’t feel ready, either. Through relating my story, some starting guidelines, and pointing you toward more resources, my goal is to help you get ready and feel confident in your ability to manage projects.

Project management, in my view, takes common sense, problem solving, service to your team, and good record-keeping and organizational skills. I firmly believe that with a bit of practice anybody can learn to do it.

Give Yourself Credit

I spent 16 years working in libraries, but half of that time I was really a project manager. I had no idea. I put together project plans, maintained scope, worked with budgets, and directed teams to produce deliverables. It’s highly likely that you have some project management experience already, too! Giving myself credit for my experience went a long way to boosting confidence, and I know it will help you, too.

I think that many people don’t believe they have experience managing projects because they are murky about what a project is. Unless they’ve held a full-time title of Project Manager, many people discount the real project experience they have. If you take a close look at the official definition of a project, you’ll see that it includes many things we don’t normally think of as projects.

The Project Management Institute (the leading association that defines standards for project management disciplines) defines a project as a temporary effort to create value through a unique product, service or result. This expansive definition of a project includes many endeavors in a wide variety of industries. In fact, there’s no such thing as a project management industry; project management can be a discipline in any number of industries or organizations. Project managers work throughout the corporate world, in construction, manufacturing, software development, and also in the public and non-profit sectors.

What does this mean for you? It means any temporary endeavor, initiative, or process that produced a unique result to drive value is a project. And if you’ve ever managed one of those, you have managed a project! Did you manage the revision of a procedure? Did you lead a team to produce or revise a significant document? Have you planned an event? It’s likely that you have more project experience than you realize.

Nevertheless, you might be a little timid about taking on bigger projects with more responsibilities, a larger team, or a heftier budget. It’s possible that you were volun-told to run a new initiative or a new situation emerged and you bravely stepped into the gap. If you’re like me, it can sometimes lead to a private moment later where you wonder to yourself, why didn’t I keep my big mouth shut?

This book will be more like a survival manual than a textbook. I have a list of books to begin additional reading toward the end of this book, as well as a list of online resources that includes templates for project management tools. My goal isn’t to train you comprehensively on project management, but to get you up and running. And to do that, we’re going to draw on some of the projects I did as a librarian to serve as examples.

The Unready Project Manager

It’s time to start getting ready. A lot of work goes into preparing for a project, not the least of which is the determination about whether or not a project is needed. Often, an organization will prepare a business case document which outlines the goals of a project and the planned value the organization will realize when those goals are met. At this stage, an organization could also do a feasibility study or put together a proof-of-concept prototype. All this up-front work is referred to as Phase 0 of a project. It precedes the actual project planning.

I’m going to assume that, like I did, you know already that you will be managing a project. When I landed my first-ever job following graduation from library school, I was excited and didn’t know what to expect. What happened in my first month was a study in on-the-job learning: many different projects emerged from every nook and cranny in the building.

I won’t catalog all the issues, but there were many. We’re going to select one to talk about planning.

Library Storage Space Project

The library is almost completely out of storage space. As new books arrive all the time, the ability to continue growing and storing the collection is seriously hampered. In consultation with the library’s board, the proposed project will achieve the following deliverables:

• A more efficient use of shelf space will be adopted

• All books in the library collection will be stored accessibly on shelves

• New storage