William M. Hayden Jr. is chief operating officer for Wendel Duchscherer Architects and Engineers P.C. and adjunct assistant professor in the School of Management. Hayden teaches project management and total quality management courses in the MBA program.

	Hayden

What, in a nutshell, is project management?

What do the new Buffalo-Niagara International Airport and your daughter's wedding have in common? They both meet the simple definition of a project: complex, unique, constrained resources, budgets, schedules and a known beginning and ending point. Many work tasks do not fit neatly into a business-as-usual mode. These unique tasks need the assignment of point responsibility, authority and resources in order to achieve the intended goals and objectives. We call this type of work a "project," and the person who owns the care and feeding of the project's work team, as well as the charge to get the job done, a project manager. The key attribute of work that qualifies it to be titled a project is its uniqueness and complexity when compared to the routine operational needs of daily work. What gets managed is time, money and performance. Project management is the planned actions of a project's manager to assure that the requirements and expectations of the project's key stakeholders are met-on time, on budget and at the level of quality expected, e.g., having a caterer promise to provide chocolate-covered strawberries at an affordable price for 350 wedding guests is great, as long as they are served before the guests have left the reception hall!

What are the most important aspects of project management?

Everything; there is nothing about managing a project that can be considered a "silver-bullet" factor for success. But if you insist, I can think of two aspects that are attributes of a successful project manager: Be a proactive information gatherer and rapidly share it with all team members, and get the job done within an imperfect world-no excuses. One of the early challenges for a project manager is to seek understanding of the customers' and other project stakeholders' expectations of the project's outcome. "What is it," the project manager asks, "that is not documented in the project work plan that is visible only in the mind of the customer, relative to his interests in this project?" Other key ingredients to project success include the purposeful transformation of a group of individual experts into an expert team, willingness to escalate unresolved conflict immediately up a notch to a level of authority that can make the decision, the identification of risk to the project's objectives being met and the assignment of a person to monitor the risk-drivers until such time as they no longer pose a risk, the ability to more reliably estimate the value of the work remaining to be done at any time in the project's work and a level of comfort to adapt your personal style of conflict management to an approach others on the team would be more likely to respond to.

How do you go about selecting a project manager and team?

Not infrequently, project managers do not get to select their team members. As a matter of fact, the very process to select what the next project will be can be a conundrum. Despite our ability to use complex mathematical models and statistically derive ranking criteria, frequent project-selection techniques remain: the executive's "sacred cow" project, the "operating necessity" project and the "people's favorite" project. The assignment of a project manager and the project's team varies, depending on the experience and project-management knowledge of the executive who makes that call. The desired attributes of an effective project manager include credibility, trustworthiness, sensitivity to others, ethics, integrity and leadership. OK, so I left out "walk on water." The desired attributes of project team members include their technical competence, sensitivity, problem-solving orientation, goal orientation and level of self-esteem. And most importantly, this is the point where the group-to-team building initiative is to begin, i.e., they are led to collaboratively craft the project's mission and team's charter, identifying what risks or constraints are perceived as barriers to achieving the project's objectives.

What methods should a project manager use to make sure the project is staying on track?

In order to assure that a project is where it ought to be, one has to first ascertain where it really is. To obtain useful information on this point, one has to go to the project team members and ask to see evidence of the progress they assert; not measurement data, but view the actual work product itself. Then, go to the customer and ask him how he believes he is being listened to, what he has seen of the work to date, and his perception of actual progress made toward the objectives. What supports the effort noted above is the early development of a project work plan wherein the major tasks, e.g., provide chocolate-covered strawberries to wedding guests, are decomposed into still smaller work breakdown tasks such that the simple addition of the effort for each of the individual subtasks delivers what was expected. One last early step is the preparation of a project responsibility matrix that lets each project team member know, for each task of the project work, what they can expect from each other and what will be expected of them. By the way, while the documents discussed are important, what is more important is the way the project-planning process itself will begin the transformation of the group into a team. An effective project manager is a problem-seeker, proactively searching for and communicating what he learns to the customer and project team members.

Where can members of the university community go for more information on project management?

The Project Management Institute, formed about 1969, has at least three reasons why you ought to go to its Web site at http://www.pmi.org: It allows the non-commercial downloading of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), it has an open email discussion and Internet-wide project managers' listserv and it has developed SIGs-special interest groups-that are small groups of experts that are accessible to you for questions.

What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?