Chapter 12. PROJECT MANAGER S WEEKLY ROUTINE

Chapter 12. PROJECT MANAGER'S WEEKLY ROUTINE

INTRODUCTION

SPECIFIC WEEKLY JOBS

INTRODUCTION

The monthly view shows what jobs have to be done each week for the project manager's projects to stay on schedule. The weekly routine involves extracting from the monthly view a week's worth of work. This should be done at the end of a particular week or at the very beginning of the next week.

To build a weekly schedule, the project manager reads from the monthly view the contents of the coming week, and schedules this over the five (or six or seven, but ideally five) days of the week. Let's illustrate this by taking a week from the example shown in Figure 11.1.

Week of 1 “5 August

The project manager will spend about half the week involved in routine work, but there is one big job, the integration plan, that is going to require two days' solid work. If this is the case, then the project manager might set two specific days aside for this, e.g. Tuesday and Thursday. On these days he would be saying that no routine work will be done, and anyone requiring these things will have to wait. Thus his week would look like:

Monday	Routine stuff
Tuesday	Start integration plan
Wednesday	Routine stuff
Thursday	Finish integration plan
Friday	Routine stuff

Again, if changes occur in the course of the week, or new priorities arise, the project manager can reschedule across the week, and if necessary, into subsequent weeks, using the monthly view as an overall context within which to make decisions.

SPECIFIC WEEKLY JOBS

There are two specific jobs that should form part of every project manager's week. These are Monday morning project planning meetings and producing a project status report last thing on Friday. These were described in detail in Chapters 7 and 8 respectively. We summarize them again here.

Monday morning planning meetings

Planning meetings should be held as close to the beginning of the week as possible. Their aim is to agree what proportion of the project schedule each person is going to bite off that week. Delays, people absences and unforeseen things occurring on projects can all be dealt with at this meeting. The project manager can use the PC-based model of his project to make sensible decisions about how to deal with unexpected events.

Friday project status report

The status report should be done last thing on Friday and the report itself, or versions of it, delivered to the customer, management and the project team. Where the Monday project meeting sets targets, the Friday status report records results.

These results should also be recorded in the actual schedule and effort columns of the project Gantt chart or on an estimating score card.

Chapter 13. PROJECT MANAGER'S DAILY ROUTINE

INTRODUCTION

Ultimately, whether projects stay on schedule or not will be determined by what the project manager does or doesn't do on a daily basis. The daily routine tries to ensure that those jobs which are key to the success of each project get done. The daily routine involves choosing those jobs which are going to get done every day. This should be done first thing in the morning or last thing on the preceding day.

Draw up a list of all the jobs that are contenders to be done on the particular day. To do this consider the following sources:
1. Projects will have generated jobs through the monthly and weekly routines already described.
2. Projects will have generated jobs through the project manager looking daily at the plan for each project under her control, and determining which jobs require some action to be taken.
3. Projects will have generated jobs through the project manager trying to generate more detailed task lists about parts of the project which still lie in the future and which have not yet been reduced to a man “day level of detail.
4. There will be other jobs “ in-tray , meetings, faxes, e- mails , mail, yellow stickers, reminders, phone calls to be made.
5. There may also be personal jobs.
Having developed the list of jobs, categorize them according to the following scheme:
1. Have to get this done today
2. Nice to get this done today
3. Not going to get this done today
4. Delegate this job
Now, do all the D s, and all the A s. Everything else can be moved to later in the week or month.

Note

Note that this approach only works where you have first done the monthly and weekly analyses. If you don't do these, then the only result will be that a great backlog of tasks will build up for later in the week or month.

As described above, if changes occur in the course of the day, or new priorities arise, the project manager can reschedule simply by categorizing the jobs again, and doing the A s and D s as before. If A jobs end up not getting done, then, by definition, they couldn't have been A ( have to get done) jobs to begin with.