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Project management books used in the course:

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK Guide 2000, by the Project Management Institute

Project Management by Gary R. Heerkens

Managing Your Projects

By Catherine Robinson

In the October newsletter; I wrote about the value of project management. Since I recently completed my project management course, I want to share with you what I have learned.

The course, offered by UC Berkeley extension, used two books:

• A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK Guide 2000, by the Project Management Institute.


• Project Management by Gary R. Heerkens.

The Project Management Institute defines project management as "the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. Project management is accomplished through the use of the processes such as: initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing" (p. 6).

I'll briefly summarize what I learned.

Integration Management

Determine your problem or opportunity, understand your new project, decide what you need to do (or not do), and then create your project plan. I decided to focus on my volunteer position with the newsletter, so I considered my managing editor role as I prepared my assignments. This approach helped me to plan properly and wisely to begin producing a monthly newsletter.

Four thought processes were involved in developing my project plan:

Project Overview

Create/maintain a project team and prepare for the September 2003 publication of the STC newsletter.

Project Approach

The project will take into consideration the feasibility, planning, development, and implementation of the project, and the project team resources.

Project Objectives

Major Deliverables

Scope Management

Make sure your project plan is in line with the expectations of your boss (in my case, in line with the needs of San Diego members). I had to define within my project plan the tasks that needed to be done in order to get contributor articles in on time, articles to copyeditors, copyedited material back for production files, production files to proofreaders, proofreader comments to the copyeditor, and then finalized comments back for final modifications of the production files.

Time Management

Manage your project's time, so that you can schedule the sequence of tasks that were defined when the project was scoped. Take into consideration the efforts of the resources available to work on your project. Are they experienced with the tasks involved, or are they learning in new roles? How much time will each resource need to complete the necessary tasks? From there, you can begin to anticipate the start and end dates of your project.

Cost Management

This is where you budget for your project's costs, trying to anticipate the monies needed for all aspects of the project in order to complete it successfully. The easiest way to begin this process is to look at previous project budget costs, and then begin to figure out if and how your costs differ, or if they actually remain the same as your previous project(s).

Quality Management

Focus on quality processes as you manage the project. I wrote up a quality process to help the newsletter team understand the flow of our monthly newsletter publication process. It explains why. how and when each phase of the process is supposed to happen.

Human Resource Management

Managing the staff of a project either means continuing to work with the same team or building a new team. If you are working with the same group of people, hopefully they are reliable and great team players who have worked well together in the past. On the other hand, you may need to hire a whole or partially new staff, which means those team members involved will need time and have to make the effort to get to know one another and learn how each can work well with the other team members. Sometimes hiring new staff members takes time for the project to get underway, so you have to take this into consideration in your project plan. New members also have to get up to speed on the products involved in the project, so training schedules should be taken into consideration.

Communications Management

Make sure you attend the right meetings, talk to the right people, inform those who need to know about the progress of your project, or lack thereof, and getting that information to the right people who may need to make decisions about how your project should continue to move forward.

Risk Management

An important part of the process, performing a risk analysis will help you to realize what the possible setbacks are and their solutions. From there you can be better prepared rather than being blind-sided. This task helped me to overcome my fears of the "what if's" and sensibly plan for those unforeseeable events.

Procurement Management

Some aspects of your project could entail having to hire outside vendors or contractors to get your project done on time. In my case, I have learned to plan to arrive at monthly meetings early to network and share the newsletter schedule and talk to our members about opportunities for them to contribute articles.

I hope you have found my learning experience helpful. If we carefully approach and plan for a project, we're more likely to be successful. I wish you all the best in your future project management endeavors.