Project management - pharmacists know how to do project management but here are a few additional tips and specifics about it to help you personally and professionally.
I have my student pharmacist on rotation with me, Dustin Chandler who’s a 4th year at Belmont to help me out with this one.
What is project management
Project management is generally the way in which one person or team manages their resources in order to complete a project. These resources can be anything from time, money, personnel, or physical resources like materials needed to build houses.
So then why do you need to be good at project management?
Project management is can help people, teams, or organizations complete task effectively and efficiently. By this, I mean if one keeps track of your project, your progress, your goals, what you start with or end with; you can reduce the total cost by planning ahead and analyzing your current resources. As for time, being able to balance all of the projects that you have on your plate along with when they are due is crucial to having them done on time. Like a good chef, you would be able to work on multiple dishes at the same time to have them all come out hot, fresh, and ready for your customers.
Role of PM? PM is to define, document, and keep everyone on task with these seven…
1. For any project, what is the Problem?
2. What is the Objective?
3. What are the major Steps in getting to the objective?
4. Who is responsible to complete each step?
5. When is each step Due to be completed?
6. What is the Deliverable(s) for the project?
7. What is the Budget and have we stayed within budget?
· The five roles in PM - https://hbr.org/2016/11/five-critical-roles-in-project-management Written in a way that is intended for major projects. But still applies to more discrete projects such as my definition of the 7 items above.
How do you achieve good project management?
One major thing you need to have is clear understanding of where you are and what your goals are. If you know where your current resources are allocated and where you need to spend them to accomplish your goals, then you can do better forward thinking. If you goals are clear, there will be less last minute adjustments as you try and get a better picture of what you want out of a project toward the end.
This leads to you needing realistic and achievable goals. One thing that I always heard is that your goals need to be SMART: Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Another important aspect that you have to consider is that someone has to be taking stock in how well you are progressing. If you just continuously work on a project without taking a step back every now and then to make sure you or your team is on the right track, you could get to the end and realize you never hit your goal. But that’s not necessarily bad, you’ve gained experience working on this type of project and you’ve attained some value from this failure.
Part I: Define the Problem Define the problem, not the symptoms. Avoid rushing to solutions.
Part II: Identify Stakeholders What are their goals
Who has a stake in the outcome
Who are the key players in Projects?
Sponsor: Person at the head of the project who helps get everything available to use. This person is usually the one who either has to approve, fund, or collect your budget/resources. They generally have SOMETHING to gain out of the project
Project manager: this individual (or individuals) is generally the head operator and reports to the sponsor. They can tell how much the budget is, what needs to be done, set timelines, goals, and milestones, along with many other tasks.
Team Leader: while most of the time the project manager takes on this role, this is not always the case. The team leader is the one who facilitates the other team members. Do they have complaints or problems? He listens to them and reports to the project manager. He also does work on the project as well, setting a good example for other members.
Team Members: these are the people who do most of the work on the project and with the project team. These members need to have some sort of skill or area they excel at that would help the project. Have someone who is really good at IT? Great for a project focused on technology, not so great for ones focused on manual labor. Generally skills are either technical, problem-solving based, interpersonal, or organizational. Each team generally needs a member who excels at atleast one of these skills to be balanced. Over the course of the project, you may find that you need to increase your skill balance by adding or subtracting members from your teams. For instance, if you have a team member who never communicates what they are doing, it might be a good idea to replace them with someone with better interpersonal skills.
A project is: a set of interrelated activities, usually involving a group of people who are working together toward a common goal over a period of time.
Getting everyone on a project team aligned behind the project’s objectives isn’t easy. How to surmount this challenge? Ask for help from team members who object to the project goal. Invite everyone’s input during project meetings. And explain the thinking behind your decisions.
- Gain trust
- Ask for help
- Listen to opinions of others
Part III. Define ObjectivesSMART—specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-limited.
Part IV: Determine Scope, Resources, Major Tasks
Part V. Anticipate Trade-offs conflicting demands of your stakeholders? What trade-offs can you anticipate in terms of quality, time, and cost?
What "scope creep" can you anticipate? What additional problems might stakeholders want the project to solve? Clarify what lies inside (and outside) the project's scope.
Phases involved = Planning, Buildup, Implementation, Phaseout
The Four Phases of PM - https://hbr.org/2016/11/the-four-phases-of-project-management . Very corporate and written in a way that is intended for major projects. E.G. building a reservoir and hydroelectric dam in Bolivia. But still applies to more discrete projects such as my definition of the 7 items above.
1. Planning: Set up what problem you are trying to solve, who needs to be involved, and what you want to have done. In this phase you are making estimates about time, resource, and monetary requirements. This is also the phase of a project that has the most fluidity. Nothing is set or is being set in stone yet. Think the scope of the project is to big? Separate it down to smaller ones or trim some of it down on the current one. Have budget concerns? Cut down in other areas to reduce the budget. The major factor in this phase is trade-off. If you want to accomplish everything in a big project then you have to be able to put in the time and money to make it work. Quality = Time + Cost (includes money and personnel hours).
2. Build-up: At this stage, all of those estimates become concrete. Budgets must be set, schedules must be stuck to, and teams should be formed. Roles and duties need to be assigned. Smaller tasks and goals are generally set for each member of a team to help complete the objectives.
3. Implementation: At this point, all of the planning should be complete and you move into working on the project itself. You need to have feedback and re-tool aspects that either aren’t working or are behind schedule. Identify the issues and adjust to help the project continue moving. It’s helpful to hold team meetings where you report your progress on your assigned tasks and make sure the goals that you set out are still the goals you’re working on. Has your project about increasing profits in one of your divisions shifted to a meeting on restructuring another of your divisions (might be time to make a new project for another time). Problem solving in this situation is a whole other topic but the main concern is to make sure each of your tasks and processes relate to the main goal and work toward accomplishing the project.
4. Closeout: While some project seem to be everchanging and evolving, all must eventually come to a close. Project leaders have to end the project at some point, usually by evaluating how/if you’ve accomplished your goal and debriefing the entire team.
Dealing with unknowns - http://www.projectinsight.net/project-management-basics/basic-resource-management Part of the fun of work for me is doing things for which I have no idea about ½ of the variables and 30% of the outcome! That is where smarts and creativity and personal skill come in. If we know everything that we are working on, work would not be nearly as fun. This article is nice in that it acknowledges that you will not have all the information as a PM. Embrace that. It makes the work more fun! You learn as you go, and you pivot when needed.
Planning and what to do when you hit a roadblock
Having a schedule that is fully filled out with each step, task, and follow-up to your tasks is a great help to your project manager. If a project manager has all of the details and steps to a project first, he can make better time requirements, budgets, and help to smooth out the bumps in the road for your project.
So what about the road bumps? There are two major types: ones that you plan or could plan for and ones that you can’t. These known problems are obstacles that some member of your team could feasibly guess could happen. For example, imagine that you have to perform a delicate process as part of your task. One small mistake could make you have to start over, therefore the project manger (understanding how difficult this task is) budgets extra time and resources into the schedule incase of errors. On the other side, we have problems that couldn’t reasonably be planned for or assumed would happen. These include the obstacles boarding on ridiculous such as an airplane crashing into your supplier’s warehouse. At this point, your project manager may need to contact someone to acquire a different supply or resources or change the scope of the project as a whole to accommodate these issues
The question now is, how much time and effort do you spend on planning for errors? The two examples I gave are pretty far ends of the spectrum but your project manager has to select some stopping point for road block planning. If you spend all your time in the planning phase, you risk never actually getting started.
Some tools for PM
Manage projects adaptively
- Staff project with people who have a talent for learning and adapting
- Deliver early wins
Many of the online tools are great, but are corporate and are way way broader than the definition I need you to have. No need for now to get into budget arithmetic, online tools, or IT solutions. That said, some online sites that address PM are useful. Please review the following in advance of our time together, and come prepared with ideas, questions, and thoughts. This is your time to learn so don’t feel like you need to know everything.
Project Scheduling is important. This was a cool explainer - http://www.projectinsight.net/project-management-basics/project-management-schedule
How can you help yourself manage your project?There are several free programs that exist to help your organization, team, or yourself successfully project manage. Each of them usually has some sort of free version but they also have their own special limitations to consider:1) Trelloa) Unlimited numbers of boards, checklists, attachments, users, and task listsb) Attachments are limited to 10 mb in size so larger pictures and videos would not work well.c) Only style you can use is the Kanban style boards.2) Asanaa) A very simplified version of project managing toolsb) Several users love the fact that it is so easy to use and pick upc) Allows use of a built-in calendar, timeline, task list, Kanban board style, the ability to set who is assigned to which project and what the due dates are, some app integration as welld) Draw-back includes the limit of 15 team-members only. Larger teams might not find the free version as helpful.3) Click-upa) Click-up is very customizable as far as the others are concerned. You can alter the basic fields as well as the way you use it (calendar, timeline, boards, lists, boxes, etc).b) Can set individual priority levels for different tasks if that would help youc) Can set goals as well as track their progress (using numerical values or otherwise)d) Drag and drop features lets you customize which members are on which tasks and you can assign comments to make them into new tasks.4) Meister Tasksa) Kanban board only but an unlimited number of task members, users, tasks, and projectsb) Allows for use of comments, tags, checklists, tasks, and time tracking featuresc) File sharing on this one is up to 20 mb per file.d) Users claim that this one is very easy to use.5) Targetprocessa) While not as robust as some of the other (limited to 1,000 tasks, projects, etc) it does come with one feature which most others don’t: Diagrams.b) This allows the creation of charts and graphs to help visualize your tasks.c) It does offer unlimited users and milestone tracking
Final tips - Important skills/tips shared from a colleague from her past experience: Clear communication – I’ve found you can never over communicate to a client or team members.
Setting clear, realistic expectations with clients and team members.
Continuously discussing risks
In the past, I would review past projects (if we missed deadlines or had major budget issues) and see if/how we could improve it for future ones. “
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