Reading References for Project Managers

Adler, Nancy J. "International Dimentions of Organizational Behavior", McGill University: South-Western College Publishing, 1997

Amason, Allen C., Wayne A. Hochwarter, Kenneth R. Thompson, and Allison W. Harrison. "Conflict: An Important Dimention in Successful Management Teams", Organizational Dynamics (September 22, 1995)

Archer, Clark and Michael Stinson. "Object Oriented SOftware Measures", SEI/CMU Tech Report CMU/SEI-95-TR-002, ESC-TR-95-002 (April 1995)

Badowski, Rosanne. "Managing Up: How to forge an Effective Relationship with Those Above You", New York Currency, 2003

Barkley, Bruce T., and James H. Saylor. "Customerizing Project Management", Project Management Journal (September 1995)

Bennatan, E.M. "On Time, Within Budget: Software Project Management Practices and Techniques", New York: John Wiley & SOns 2000

Bennis, Warren, and Burt Nanus. " Leaders: The strategies for Taking Charge", New York: Harper and Row, 1985

Cleland, David, I., and Lewis R. Ireland. "Project Manager's Portable Handbook", New York: McGraw Hill, 2000

Druker, Peter F. "Management: TAsks, Responsibilities, Practices", New York: Harper and Row, 1974

Frame, J. Davidson. "Managing Projects in Organizations: How to Make the Best Use of Time, Techniques, and People", Rev. ed. San Francisco: Jossey -Bass, 1995

Goleman, Danniel, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. " Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Performance", Harvard Business Review, December 2001

Katzenbach, John R., and Douglas K. Smith. "The Wisdom of Teams", New York: McKinsey and COmpany, 1993

Lientz, Bennet P. and Kathryn P. Rea. " Breakthrough Technology Project Management" San Diego: Academic Press 1999

Meredith, Jack R. and Samuel J. Mantel, Jr. " Project Management: A Managerial Approach", 3rd ed. New York John Wilely and Sons 1995

Parker, Glenn M. " Cross-Functional Teams" San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994

Pinto, Jeffrey K. and Dennis P. Slevin. " project Implementation Profile" Tuxedo, N.Y.: Xicom, Incorporated

Project Management Institute. A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge", 3rd ed. Newton Square, Pa: Project Management Institute, 2004

Rue, Leslie and Phyllis Holland. "Strategic Management: Concepts and Experience", New York: McGraw Hill, 1989

Schmidt, Warren H. and Barbara "BJ" Hateley. "Penquin Index: Assessing Management Proactices and Diversity Acceptance in Your Organization", Tuxedo, N.Y.: Xicom, Incorporated, 1995

Top 10 List for Initial Project Planning and Review

1. Who are the project stakeholders?
2. Describe the project organization and reporting relationship
3. What are the design goals and are they clearly measurable?
4. What are the project milestones?
5. What are the top three risks to the project and how are these risks being mitigated?
6. What are your planning assumptions?
7. Is the Quality Management Plane complete?
8. Do preliminary specifications exist that are agreed upon among the project stakeholders?
9. Is there a Configuration Management Plan to control changes?
10. What is the Communication Plan for the project?

Team Leadership

Ability to build productive teams and maximize the team's peformance; to develop individuals and teams to achieve or exeed stated project goals; and to foster an environment that supports innovation and creativity

• Use negotiation and facilitation skills effectively to gain agreement on common project and team goals, work through conflict, and minimize uncertainly with all

• Develop and communicate a project vision to the team to help motivate anf focus their efforts throughout the porject life cycle

• Devlop a project team structure that ensures that the right people are assigned to complete each task in the project and helps the team memebers obtain the appropriate training

• Continously find ways to recognize team memebers' successes and celebrate accomplishments

• Evaluate team memebers performance against agreed upon criteria and provide feedback to team memebers and to their managers

• Educate team memebers on how their project work directly contributes to and impacts organizational goals and strategies

• Create an open environment in which all team memebers are encouraged to ask questions, offer ideas, and collaborate freely

Communication

Ability to clearly articulate ideas, concepts, decisions, and direction to foster a common understanding and commitment of all stakeholders

• Effectively utilize the appropariate commmunication method(s) to convey the desired intent and result

• Plan, facilitate, and manage meetings effectively and follows up as necessary

• Keep the project team, customers and other stakeholders informed on project status at all times

• Listen actively and ask questions to clarify understanding when receiving information from others

• Effectively demonstrate a high degree of skill in verbal and written communications

Personal Effectiveness

Ability to focus your personal drive and initiative, along with the flexibility to foster positive attitues and behaviors both in yourself as well as others

• Build trust and confidence among customers and co-workers

• Demonstrate integrity, ethics, and corporate values in all interactions

• Support diversity and treat all people with respect and courtesy

• Consider alternative solutions, root cause, and other pertinent information before making decisions

• Approach problems and issues in an innovative and creative manner

• Set and demonstrate high standards for personal and team memeber performance on all project work

Organization and Industry Acumen -

Ability to align the project to your company's organizational strategy; to make sound business decisions in support of the organizational strategy; to seek out, find, and use industry best practices and appropriate technoologies to support the project; and to successfully navigate the environment of the organization.

• Adhere to regulatory constraints, legal constraints, and all organizational policies and procedures in managing all project work

• Establish project objectives early in the project that are clearly aligned with the organizational strategy and vision

• Project plan includes interdependencies and other potential changes in organizational processes and capabilities that will (or should) occur during project implementation

• Indentify and use best practices in project management and/or the industry that will benefit the project and the organization

• Be current with business/industry and project management trends that may have an effect on the organization, its projects, and its customers

• Constructively challanges existing personal and organizational beliefs and paradigms in light of the organization's vision and strategic direction - alway looking for a better way

Customer Focus

Ability to use negotiation, conflict mangement and other interpersonal skills to maximize your customers' participation, value, and satisfaction to achieve long-term customer realtionship.

• Work together with the customer and other stakeholders to properly elicit, analyze, and conconsicely document their requirements, expectations, desired project outcomes, and level of project participation early in the project

• Solicit and obtain buy-in, on the project plan and all project documentation, from all identified stakeholders through regular communication of project information to ensure on-going support for the project

• Monitor customer satisfaction on a regular basis and follow through on customer inquiries, requests, and complians in a timely manner

• Manage customer and other stakeholder relationships and expectations by appropriately manage conflict and other issues throughout the project life cycle

• Negotiate effectively with stakeholders that have resource responsibilities to manage budget constraints and resource availability for the project

• Obtain formal approval from appropriate customers and other stakeholders on all deliverables and change requests

Project Management Process -

Ability to implement and apply project management processes, best practices, and techniques within the framework of the organization's methodologies throughout the project life cycle to ensure project delivery on budget, time, and with highest quality.

• Identify, manage, and escalate project issues thtoughout the project life cycle

• Conducts ongoing analysis to identify and forecast budget and schedule variances, identify trends early, and efficienctly devlope appropriate responses to achieve project objectives

• Manage suppliers and contractors to complete work that will satisfy relevent time, cost, and scope baaselinee and quality standards

• Evaluate overall project performance periodically to ensure the project will satisfy relevant time and cost baselines and quality standards to move into the next phase

• Develop, and keep up-to-date, a formal and commprehensive project plan that integrates and documents the project work: typically includes the work breakdown structure, project deliverables/milestones, acceptance criteria, schedule, budget, communication, risk, and procurement plans

• Select the most appropriate risk management methods, tools, and techniques to analyze sufficient information, evaluate multiple options, and determine preferred risk response strategies within the overall project environment

• Use the approved project methodology and defined change management processes to appropriately and completely document and manage project objectives, decisions, and key deliverables

• Use approved procedure to facilitate administrative and finanacial closure on projects, including effectively communicating lessons learned to relavant stakeholders

• Meet all project requirements on time and within budget, and to the acceptable level of quality as determined by the project documentation

Top 10 Reminder for New Project Managers

1. Understand the project scope and stakeholder expectations at the onset of the program
2. Get yourself a mentor as quickly as possible
3. Recognize that relationships will change
4. Manage change rigorously
5. Know the people, not just the resources
6. You are what you measure
7. Talk to stakeholder everyday
8. Talk to staff everyday
9. Lead by example
10. Have fun

WAN OPTIMIZATION - case study

Blue Coat's SG is the only product tested that can decrypt, optimize and re-encrypt SSL traffic--an increasingly  important capability as SSL is used more and more in internal networks.

To enable WAN optimization, a number of proxies are defined. Specific proxy, such as CIFS, is configured by enabling ADN and defining the listening port  on which the device would intercept traffic. To make the connection transparent, the IP address is set to "reflect". In Blue Coat terms, reflecting the IP means that the original source IP will be applied to the outgoing packet, rather than the SG's IP address, like a regular proxy. Once that  was complete, the CIFS proxy rule is enabled by setting it to Intercept.

Some proxies, like CIFS and FTP, had more detailed options, such as defining read-ahead and write-back options for CIFS and how long objects should be cached.

Although the Blue Coat's SG could be configured as a transparent proxy using the IP reflection feature, it's the only entry that let us shape traffic passing through the appliance, which is useful for ensuring that no one application can overrun the WAN.

With the SG, we could reserve bandwidth for UDP traffic, albeit in a somewhat convoluted fashion, by using classes. If we wanted to reserve 25 percent for UDP traffic, for example, we would create a class that encompassed all the traffic we thought we had, then create a default  class, which would be everything else including UDP, and set that to 25 percent, thereby guaranteeing some bandwidth if the WAN becomes congested. It's a bit complicated and, quite frankly, if you can define QoS in your WAN router, do it there.

While services can be tailored for different WAN optimizations, this takes a bit more effort than with Blue Coat SG because the process is not particularly streamlined. An application and a classifier is defined which is applied to a device group. Classification is simple and based on IP addresses and port numbers. An application is just a name used for reporting and assignment. When we created a policy, we could define optimization settings, from none to full optimization, and add any application acceleration. Unfortunately, only 20 applications can be defined for reporting--that seems like an arbitrarily low number. Once policies are defined and applied to groups, they take effect.

Essentially, optimization can be set for memory compression, data reduction or none on a per-service basis. TCP optimization occurs on all services. Services are defined by source and destination IP address  and destination port. Multiple ranges can be defined per service. IM service is pre-defined with three port ranges, for example. Services are used for both reporting and optimization configuration.

QoS marking lets the network prioritize packets on a hop-by-hop basis. Tunneled traffic hides original markings, making them ineffective. Silver Peak's answer is to manually map QoS marking on incoming packets from the LAN and  place those marks on outgoing packets. The NX Appliances don't automatically use the QoS marking on incoming packets, but Silver Peak says it will add this capability in a future release. For now, you'll have to add a process to keep the NX Appliance updated if you change QoS markings. Although that took some time, it wasn't difficult.

Ref:http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/review-wan-optimization-appliances.php?p=5