micro.p3.express
A1 - Understand and distribute the hats
This is the first management activity in the Project Initiation activity group, which is a group for creating a foundation for the project and deciding whether you will execute the project.
First, it must be clear who is a member of the project team and that all the necessary people are assigned to the project. Then, their relationship with the project should be made clear. There are four sets of concerns in any project. To make sure none of them is neglected, we consider the following leader hats, each representing one set of concerns:
Concerned about the way of work, coordinating, facilitating, problem-solving, ...
Concerned about the return on investment and opportunity cost
Concerned about the technical feasibility of the output, applicable standards, ...
Concerned about the needs and expectations of end users and their behavior
While multiple people may share some or all of the concerns in any of these groups, only one person wears the leader hat each time. The hat doesn’t give them more authority in making decisions, but only the responsibility for ensuring those concerns are addressed.
When needed, a single person can have multiple hats (e.g., if it’s a single-person project). In that case, the person should virtually switch hats without neglecting any.
The hats only belong to the internal project team members and not the external stakeholders.
Distribute the hats for Project Initiation activities by considering the team members’ skills.
Can we change hats after Project Initiation?
Some teams have people with skills that match only one of these hats. In that case, the single qualified person will always wear that hat. Otherwise, we prefer to swap hats frequently, as pointed out in C4 and F5.
A2 - Select tools and create a project repository
At this point, we need to set up a well-formed repository for storing all the management and technical documents of the project.
What type of repository makes life easier for the technical team members?
What type of repository is best for the managerial needs of the project?
How can multiple users access documents from multiple devices?
How can we have automated backups?
How should we organize and name our documents?
Your repository can be a directory on a cloud storage platform that is synced and available offline on your computer. Alternatively, computer-savvy people can use git and similar technologies to set up their repositories.
When using cloud services, make sure you’re not locked into their services, and you can keep your freedom to move to other platforms and use alternative tools to open and edit files.
Depending on the project, there may be other concerns as well:
How do we ensure the security of the platform?
What can we do about versioning (having copies of the old versions of files)?
If the person wearing the Project Manager hat is not sure what to do in this activity, they should seek help from colleagues or friends, or hire a short-term consultant. In the case of IT projects, the person wearing the Technical Leader hat would be skilled enough to help in this activity.
Finally, the team has to think about and select their tools:
Which tools should we use for the managerial work of the project?
Which tools should we use for the technical work of the project?
If you don’t have a versioning feature for your management documents, remember to take daily snapshots and store them in the repository.