Transcripts
1. Introduction! : Hello everyone. My name
is yes, Benito County. And I am here to tell you a little bit about my experience
with project management. I know that there are so
many courses out there. There are project
management courses with foundations that are a lot
of prints, two courses, there are a lot of methodologies that different companies follow, but I am here to simply
give you a little highlight of my experience with project
management as a beginner, as someone in their
early careers. And for you to kind of have an idea for you to
apply it either at your university or anywhere in your project
that you may have. And what you will realize is that a lot of
these techniques are stuff that you
have been applying for the last few
months or years. You just don't call them
project management. I will just talk a little bit
about starting a project, about maintaining a project
and closing the project, and some tools and tricks along the way without
any background, a certification that I was
able to quickly understand, grasp, and learn
along my journey.
2. Key Concepts. : Some of the concepts that I would like to introduce you to, for you to do further research, for you to understand what needs to be done
within a project. Some of them that can be applied both for industry and for your general project
that you may have at university or at school. So starting off,
the first thing is, what is the scope
of the project? That's simply means, what
is the goal of the project? What is the entire substance of the project is made of what are the things that
you need to do along the way to achieve
that final goal. Second thing that is very
important for you to understand is the resources
required for the project. When you're planning
the project, what are the different
areas that you might need, people that you might need, materials that you might need, maybe certain labs, et
cetera, that you look into. This requires
additional planning in order for you to
understand what are the different areas you
need to tap into in order to achieve the end
goal of the project. Then another thing that's
also very important is finance for you to make sure that your project
is going online. How do you know if
it's going online? And one of the key
things that you need to look into here is finance. And this is often
measured by your KPIs, stuff like your CPI, SPI, et cetera, which I will
go into detail later, is more about understanding where is your project
in regards to your schedule and your cost that you've estimated at the
start of your project. Something else that you
can also look into is about ways of maintaining
your project. Let's say in case your project is not
going according to plan, what can you do in
order to bring it back? What can you do in order
to say that we will still achieve a goal
by a certain date that we've mentioned to
either a customer or if you have a deadline
to your professors. And this is something that is very important and often needs to be done without
compromising the end goal. Rather, looking into ways
of improving what you have. Maybe it could be looking
into altering your scope. Maybe it could be adding additional resource
depending on your situation. This is something you need
to look into as well. And another important thing
to know is closing a project. You need to know what
it means for you to say that closing a project, because a project
is something that has a start date
and an end date. So it is important to
know that you have an idea of when you can say that your
project is complete. Is it when we deliver
something to the customer? Or is it simply when we achieve a certain
goal within there? Or when we have a
prototype that is very important to define
at the very beginning. The last thing I would like
to mention is your team, the people that
you're working with, you need to be able to build
a relationship of trust and you need to work
with one another to achieve the final
goal for the project.
3. Simple Lifecycle. : Let's go through a
simple life cycle of how a project could
potentially look like. And I will do this both
in terms of industry and in terms of a university
project along the way. So the first thing is
receiving your brief, and in this case, it's more about what do they
require from the project. So this would involve
that we want to achieve. Let's take, for
example, a simple pen. They would say that,
okay, we want to, at the end of the day
have a pen ready and this needs to be done in
about six months time. So what do you need to do
basically at this point is you have an initial brief and you have an understanding
of what you want, you go away from this. You have an initial map where you try to understand what
does the project want? What is the end goal
of the project? What would be the potential
resources of the project? And can myself, in this case, if you're a student
or the company, if you're working for
industry, handle this project. Do we have the capability to actually execute this project? And that is what would be
your initial first step? This would be almost like
a very rough math that you have in front of
you for you to see what you are getting
yourself into. So this is a very initial step, but at this point you might have further questions
for the customer. You may be able
to go and look at different areas that you want to see as a project manager. And then at this point, once both parties agree
and you're happy with what you're going what
you're going to do. That is when you go ahead and use peak to other people
within your company, you make sure all your
budgets are done and you make sure that you are ready
for this project to begin. This is where your
team comes in. And this is a group
of people who are experienced in different areas who
have different skills. And all of you come together and you, as a project manager, it is your duty to make
sure that everyone understands what they
are supposed to do. And this is not for you to currently go into all of
the technical details. This is more of making sure that they understand
the end goal, how this would be done is based on their
areas of expertise, that is their job
to look into it. You are simply assigning
this duty and you're saying, this is what we're trying
to achieve and this is the end goal of the project. So this is where the team comes in and it's very important for you to make
sure that everyone is happy with what
they're doing. Everyone is looking forward to what they're
doing and keeping up morale within the team
and the overall project. Now once the project
has started, you will maintain
your project using either Microsoft Project
Plan or you could use different tools such
as roadmaps using Visio, it really depends on the
size of the project, depends on what you are most comfortable with
as a project manager. These are some of the
tools that I will talk about a little bit later. And we will go through
them and understand what would probably
be best for you. So looking into that, you are at this point
maintaining the project. Now your team is looking
at different things. How to get up, how
to get this pen out? What colors do we need? Maybe what is the end goal of the pen and how long does
it need to last, et cetera. Your team is doing all
of this and you're making sure that
they are meeting whatever deliverables
or milestones that they may have along the way before
they reach the end goal. So let's say at this point
everything is going smoothly. That means your job is almost nothing at this
point I would say, but that is never the case. There's always gonna be
something that comes up. Their team might require
additional resource. Your team might require
an expert to look into something or maybe
someone is off sick, etc. So this is where you start
to adjust your plan. Look into different
things that you as a project manager can do. Some of the questions
you can ask your team to be very inclusive
and to make sure that everyone is happy with
what they're doing is what is it that I
can do to help you? Do you need help in any areas? Is there something
that I can do that will benefit you and your team? Is there something I can do
to make sure that we meet our schedule or that we make sure that we stay within budget. These are some questions
you can ask to make sure you are in
line with your team. And let's say you are
not going according to plan and you are at this rate, not going to finish
according to the timeline. You said, this is when you need to start adjusting
your project. You probably look into
different areas where you can add a number
of people or you can remove certain number of
people who may not fit the exact expert role that
you require them to fit. And you need to understand this by speaking to
different people. You communicate with leaders, you communicate with engineers, et cetera, whoever you
have within your project. Or if it's university, you look into your team and say, okay, is there any other
areas that you can help in? And then you try to
move people around. At the end of the
day, the entire team is working to finish the goal. Let's say you've overcome
this and now you are looking at finally
understanding the end goal. And you're saying, okay, we've reached the end of our project. Now, how do you evaluate this as you look at the
requirements that were initially given by the
customer and you make sure that all of the
requirements have been met. And at this stage, if
everything has been met, you are happy and the
project is complete, so you go ahead,
you submit it to the customer and he officially
have to close the project. This is because as I said, a project has a start and
an end and you have to make sure that you follow all the procedures
along the way. Now this is the most simple
example that I have given you for you to just understand what a life cycle
would look like. However, along the way, you will find a lot
of difficulties, you will face a
lot of challenges. And all of these will
come to you depending on the situation and the people and the resources that you have
along the way to help you. So this is where additional
reading or certification or research might help you to equip you with tools for
you to understand, okay, for this, there might
be a certain procedure, there might be a certain way
that I can go along with it. What did people before me do in order to go
through this process? So this is a very
simple example, as I said, of the life cycle.
4. On track? Off track? : Some of the ways
to make sure that your project is either on track or off track for
you to understand this is by looking at KPIs. So there are a lot of them and different companies prefer
to use different ones. And one of the
things that I would like to mention is that
whichever ones you are using, make sure that it
is in line with what your company requires. Makes sure that it
makes sense for your project depending
on its size, scope, and the end
goal of the project. There are a couple of ones that I would like to
talk about today. And the most famous ones, SPI and CPI pop up the most. Cpi is cost performance index. This is actually dependent
on the earned value, that is the amount of work
that is actually completed by the cost that you are supposed to use for
that amount of work. Now this gives you an estimate of how well you're doing in terms of using the cost that you have budgeted for
that amount of work. This ratio is measured
and if it is below one, that means you have not achieved
the goal that you want. That is, the amount of
work that you've done does not match how much money
you've already used. And this means that you
will need to put in either extra time or effort into making sure
that this is achieved. However, if you
have it above one, in this case, that means you are performing above your scale. This is not always a
good thing because that means that you've
overestimated your budget. In some cases. This is something that
needs to be looked into if it's less or more, you still need to look into the drivers that are pushing
this and making sure that you stay within the bounds of whatever your
company requires. Not everyone looks for a one. You might be looking for
something right above 0.90 and that would
be good enough. So you need to look at
what you are looking for. What is your goal when
you look into your CPI? Another one that I would
like to mention is SPI, which is a performance index. Now, as the name suggests, and I think as you
can already guess, it is about looking into how
well you're doing against your schedule
according to what you planned or you actually
delivering what you planned. So it is again, an estimate of the value that is your progress that you have upon the progress
that you plan to have. So once again, it's the same
thing in terms of ratio. You need to understand that
whatever the number stands, you need to know if
you are going ahead of schedule or if you are behind schedule and what are
the drivers for this? If it's a large project, you need to look into
different areas. Is there an area that you
can push forward or is there an area that will be slow for the next couple of months
but will become faster. So overall in the
end, it will add up. Another one that I'd
like to mention is a thing called a risk reserve. Now no project is
complete without risk. You need to understand
that especially within the industry that
I'm in an engineering, there are constant changes and there are new
things that come up. So at this point, you need to understand and always factor in risk within your plan
and within your budget. You have a risk reserve that you can use when something comes up. However, it doesn't mean
that it's just there and you can use it constantly every time something
new comes up. You need to be able
to factor this and you need to be able
to say that when I run this particular
test or when I run this particular
part of the project, there is a risk
that this might go wrong and we might
have to do it again. So this is where your
risk result comes in and you are still
going to be according to plan because you have made the effort to factor it
in the very beginning. Another thing that people
look into is resource. So for every project you
have a certain number of resource that is
requested by a sub-team. Something that needs
to be looked into is, is the project being able to deliver that amount
of resources, that particular team, Let's say, as per a certain section
within the project, a sub team has
requested 40 people. However, the project is simply able to give them
only 20 people. On the other hand, we see that
they're SPI is about 0.6. So this is an
explanation where you as a project manager can
look into it and say, okay, so they've
asked me for 40, I'm able to give them only 20, which means obviously
they're not able to deliver the work by schedule because they're
not able to have the resource put into
that particular place. This is when you need
to go and speak to your individual APMs and then asked them about what you
can do as a project manager. You can ask them
perhaps by next one, if I can give you a 20
additional resources, is there a way that we
can push up our SPI? Is there a way that we
can push up our CPI? And this will add up to the
overall project SPI and CPI. Just so you know,
for a large project, each of the sub teams and all
of their people under them, they would be able to
give and KPIs as well. And this will add up to
the overall project KPI. And that is what usually your management or
people above you were paying for the
project would like to look at to make sure that
the project is on track.
5. Showing Progress. : Now that we've spoken
about some of the tools, another important thing that
people often want to see when the project is going is
how is the project going? But this cannot
simply be by, oh, it's going well, you need to be able to quantify this data. And this is where metrics
plays a very important role. There are different
ways you can show metrics, you can show tables, you can show numbers, but graphs are often very effective
in showing data. So something that I
found very useful where burn up and
burn down charts. Now, this is a representation of how much work you have done and how much work
you have remaining. So this is a great way
to show button up. So burndowns maybe for certain milestones
and deliverables. It doesn't have to be for your entire project if you
have a really long project. So this shows that you
are either on track or off track and what you're
doing in order to reach it. So you would have
something like a line where you are showing
what it's supposed to be. And then you will have a line if you are above it or below it, which shows your actual. Now this shows that if you
are on the line exactly, that means you're going
according to plan and you don't need any help. However, if you're below
or above the line, that is when you need to look at if you need to
adjust your plan, if you're above or
if you're below, then what can you do to make
sure that you are online? So this is about burn up
and burn down charts. And another great way to show your progress or what
your plan is as roadmaps. This is very similar
to what advice would I spoke about invisible. This is about showing
the entire road-map for you to reach the end goal. And this could be using deliverables or milestones
along the way where you say, Okay, so the first three
months we've achieved this. For the second three months we would like to achieve this and for the third three months
we'd like to achieve whatever. And then you show this using a little progress lines where you show we've done
60% of the work. We're on track to
finish by this date. This is a great way for you to show the progress
that you have along the way without completely
going off track at once. This really allows people to
look into it and say, okay, they do have an idea of what areas is that
they are looking into. Another thing that I'd like
to mention, our Gantt charts. Gantt charts are
extremely important in being able to show
your entire timeline and about showing your key
milestones are the dates that you would like
to highlight to anyone that you're
presenting to. So this shows the
progress day by day or month by month
or week by week, depending on how much
you want to show and what areas you would like to highlight within
your Gantt chart. But this is a great
way that can be used both at university. It can be used in industry and really allows you to
have an understanding of which area you need to either
focus on or which area is primary because you can highlight certain
ones with a star, for example, as simple as that, but you are showing that that is an important step
within your project. So a Gantt chart is
another example of a great way to show a visual
representation of your plan, of your schedule and how well
you're doing against it.
6. Conclusion! : That brings me to the
very end of this video. Thank you all for watching, and I hope that this has given
you a little insight and that you will take some tips and tricks and apply it
to different role, whichever you may be
in. Thank you all.
Yasaswini Edupuganti, Aerospace Engineer ✈️
