Scoping the Project

To begin my capstone professional experience working with the information and organizational needs of project managers I gave myself a crash course in project management. My nonprofit background has always been more committee meeting minutes than Gantt charts so I wanted to educate myself on the process. I started with Wikipedia, looked at some process diagrams, then I explored a project management professional association site, and read some chapters from James P. Lewis' Fundamentals of Project Management. I also talked to a friend who used to be project manager at a software company and called up my brother, a civil engineer working on road projects as a project manager.

One of my initial impressions is that project management really formalizes something that has to happen in every successful instance of people working together to complete something complicated. I see that there is a balance to find between over analyzing and proper planning/monitoring. In some ways it seems like the dream job (you mean people get paid to plan and communicate progress) and in others I can see how it can be a professional nag. I anticipate that I’ll have to prevent my own project from becoming too meta as I essentially examine the process of examining a process.

In my initial information gathering period with my supervisors at the company, I found that the problem I am working on is that clients have expressed dissatisfaction with some of their interactions with their project managers. As I explored this problem further, I learned that the company is experiencing a lot of movement among project managers due to new hiring and internal personnel shifting. Clients got accustomed to one project manager (PM)’s way of gathering requirements, communicating status, and such. Then when the clients began working with a different project manager on another project, they felt like they were back at square one. Before I began interning the project management team had already began to tackle this problem. The solution they came up with is to provide some documentation and samples to communicate the best way to interact with clients. After my evaluation, we are continuing with this plan and also pursuing some training options for project managers as well as some quality assurance measures.