外文翻譯項目管理的原則

1、the principles of project managementyouve already got an understanding of the basic project life cycle, and weve just talked through some of the underlying principles of project management. but i bet youre itching to actually do something. in this chapter, which is taken from sitepoints new title, t

2、he principles of project management, well talk about the work that comes before the project life cycle - finding possible projects, working out which projects are worth pursuing, and getting to know the different groups of people who will be involved in any project. finally, well discuss the process

3、 of actually initiating a project.in each of the sections that follow, youll find a discussion of what the process is and why it matters, followed by tools and best practices that will help you get your project off to a flying start.discovery: finding the projectsprojects dont just spring from nowhe

4、re. although many project managers only get involved when its already been decided that a project will be undertaken to achieve some end, there is, of course, a phase before this: discovery. discovery is the process by which the organization reviews the available opportunities and decides which of t

5、hem will become projects in due course.ideally, the discovery process should ensure that the best opportunities are pursued - not just those that were mentioned first, or those that have the loudest supporters. where this process is undertaken, its usually combined with some sort of portfolio planni

6、ng through which the potential projects are matched against the resources or capabilities of the organization itself. the eventual result is a list of projects that are truly the top priorities.the sad reality is that in many cases, theres either no process at all for discovery and portfolio plannin

7、g, or the process thats in place doesnt result in the selection of projects that will deliver the most value. its also true that as a project manager, your influence may be very limited at this stage - after all, in many cases, you wont even know about the potential projects until one is assigned to

8、 you!however, understanding what has been discovered, and how the project that youre managing came to be started, is very important. it can tell you whether the project is truly of high value to the organization for which youre working (either as an employee, contractor, or service provider) or whet

9、her its potential value still needs to be ascertained. it may also give you early insight into the complexities you might have to face during the project.if you find that little or no discovery work has been done, dont despair - do it yourself! find out why people in the organization think your proj

10、ect is important. understand what theyre expecting the project to deliver - try to focus on what it means to them, not the nuts and bolts of what will be built. if their answers suggest that they dont think the project matters, find out where they think the time and effort would be better spent.your

11、 first instinct will be to protect your project, but you might find an opportunity for another project that will deliver even more value. even if you dont end up jettisoning the original project and taking on the new one instead, bringing it to the attention of the stakeholders within the organizati

12、on will make you stand out as a project manager who really cares about the good of the company, not just your own projects.example 2.1. choosing the wrong optionsimagine theres a team at a company youre working with that deals with customer orders. the team members have identified a number of opport

13、unities:remove manual work from current processes.many in the team feel that they spend almost all their time shuffling paper, rather than actually dealing with the customers.speed up inventory checking.when a customer places an order, the team members have to call up the inventory team to find out

14、whether the goods are in stock or not. making this process faster would improve their efficiency greatly.improve tracking of customer orders, queries, and complaints.currently, all tracking of customer interactions is done manually. theres actually one person in the team whose full-time job is colle

15、cting the information and putting it in an excel spreadsheet!allow customers to interact in more ways.a number of customers have signalled that theyd like to be able to email the team as a whole, or to input queries and complaints online.as you might have guessed, the opportunities above are ordered

16、 in terms of importance. the team feels that reducing their manual work is most important, with the inventory tracking improvements and customer tracking automation coming a close second. once these fundamental issues have been fixed, the team feels that it can start work on items that will really b

17、enefit the customer - introducing a web site and email addresses so they can log orders, queries, and so on.when people from elsewhere in the organization get involved, however, they get very focused on the web site for the customers. marketing can see that this will be a real selling point and the

18、sales teams think that it will delight their contacts. they dont realize that in order for the customer web site to be successful, the team needs to have all the other opportunities addressed first.the first you know about any of this, however, is when youre brought in to build the new customer web

19、site. you get started working on it, but are finding that the people from the team who deal with the orders are very difficult to work with: they wont answer questions clearly, dont turn up to meetings that youve organized, and dont answer emails unless theyre reminded to again and again. youre sens

20、ing hostility, but you have no idea why - youve only been there a week. surely you cant have offended them already?you get in touch with some of the it guys that you know from the last project you worked on for this company and ask them whats up. they explain about the other projects that this team

21、identified . and that the team actually thought those other projects were more important. however, someone in the marketing team, having heard about the possibility of the web site being developed, promised one of the big customers that it would be ready soon, so management decided to prioritize thi

22、s project over the improvement of the systems.now you understand why the team is so unresponsive! theyre upset because their own needs have been ignored, and now youre working on the project that theyve been forced into prematurely.at this point, it can be very easy to get depressed or start panicki

23、ng. what if the team continues to sabotage the project and you get blamed when it isnt delivered? you dont have the power to go back and work on the project they really wanted to happen, so perhaps you should just give up now .the point, though, is that now you understand what was causing the team t

24、o be unhelpful and unresponsive. armed with that knowledge, you can do something about it!as weve already discussed, often the project manager wont be involved in deciding which projects will be undertaken. in this particular situation, however, you can try to mitigate some of the impacts of the web

25、 site project being prioritized over that of updating the existing systems.firstly, you have a discussion with pamela, the team member whos been the main cause of friction so far. you explain that you understand there were originally other projects on the cards, and ask her to clarify for you what t

26、hey would have entailed. as she talks, you realize that some of the elements of the existing manual process are going to be problematic for your project as well - for instance, it wont be possible to determine whether or not an item is in stock without someone making a phone call.in this particular

27、example, theres an obvious route forward - help to identify the modernizations of the existing system that are required for the web site project to be a real success. then push either for these to be brought into the scope of your own project, or for a separate team to be set up to deal with those i

28、ssues in parallel.however, even if you wont be able to influence the organization to work on the productivity improvements as well as the site, just having spoken to pamela seems to have improved relations immensely. she commented that you were the first one of the techie guys who had taken the time

29、 to really understand why the team is so frustrated. she has started responding to your queries and emails and even seems to have told the rest of the team that they should help you out as well.the point is that without understanding where your projects roots lie, youre flying blind. by investing so

30、me time to find out a little more about how the discovery work was or wasnt done, and how the decisions were made, you can gain a valuable insight into the challenges you might face, day to day, on the project. this approach can also give you an early warning of any office politics that might make y

31、our life difficult!picking the best projectschoosing the best projects to work on involves a three-step process:identify the opportunities.compare the opportunities.rank them and decide which to undertake.identifying the opportunitiesthere are many approaches to identifying opportunities, some of wh

32、ich are more sophisticated than others, so lets start by considering some of the basic tools that youll probably already have come across.the most obvious option is a brainstorm. get people in the organization together, and ask them to think of anything that annoys them, anything that could be done

33、better, or things that arent being done yet that could be started.the stop, start, continue approachone model that you can use to get people to focus called stop, start, continue. here, you essentially ask the people in the room to name one task they want the organization to stop doing, one task tha

34、t it should start doing, and one task that it should continue to do.if its obvious that a particular business process or set of processes is causing a lot of pain, manual work, or rework in the organization, it might be worth charting that process. you can do this using any tool - from the good old

35、marker and whiteboard, through to bespoke process-flow mapping tools or uml diagrams. (uml stands for unified modeling language, and constitutes a set of standard formats for creating flow diagrams of processes, data, etc. uml tends to be popular with usability professionals and software engineers.

36、as always, think carefully about the tools you choosethey need to be understandable and accessible to everyone involved.)once you have drawn out the business process, look at each step and ask, why do we do this? if there isnt a good reason to take the step, remove it! if the step is necessary but c

37、ould be done more intelligently, ask how. if the question of what needs to change isnt answered easily, a project to fully investigate the options and create a solution could spring from your analysis.example 2.2. innovate or improveone example of the need for innovation is made clear by the anecdot

38、e about an early 20th-century buggy whip manufacturer. the organization was focused on making whips (used on horses that drew buggies and carts) faster, cheaper, and better . at a time when horse-drawn carts were rapidly being replaced by motor cars. making the buggy whip cheaper was not going to in

39、crease sales, since price was not the problem.remember, though, that sometimes the opportunities that are the biggest - the projects that will make a huge difference to the business - might be those that dont represent incremental improvements. in many cases, the real way to make a difference may be

40、 to realize that theres a completely new direction to take, product to focus on, or way to operate.from： the principles of project managementby meri williams published: march 2008 項目管理的原則你已經(jīng)得到了一個基本的項目生命周期的認識，我們只是針對項目管理的一些基本原則進行了座談。但我猜你渴望確實做了些什么。在這一章中，哪一節(jié)是摘自于sitepoint的新頭銜，項目管理的原則，這是我們將談?wù)摰墓ぷ魇窃陧椖可芷诔霈F(xiàn)

41、之前的，我們可能尋找的項目，并且是制定哪些項目是值得追求的，而且越來越認識到，不同群體的人們將會涉及到不同的項目。最后，我們將討論這些進程是否能開啟一個項目。在后面的章節(jié)中，您會學到一個有關(guān)此進程是什么以及為什么它重要的原因的討論。采用合理的工具和最好的練習將會使你的項目有一個美好的開端。發(fā)現(xiàn)：尋找項目項目不只是春天的小草無處不在。雖然很多項目經(jīng)理只當它涉足的已經(jīng)決定，將采取項目達到某種目的，有，當然，在此之前一個階段：發(fā)現(xiàn)，探索的過程，是該組織審查，并決定哪些可利用的機會，他們在適當?shù)臅r候?qū)⒊蔀轫椖?。理想的情況下，發(fā)現(xiàn)過程應(yīng)確保最好的機會。不僅僅是那些被提到第一個，或那些具有最響亮的支持者。

42、這個過程是在哪里進行，通常結(jié)合一些組合規(guī)劃整理，通過它的潛在項目對資源或組織本身的能力相匹配。最終的結(jié)果是一個項目，是真正的最優(yōu)事項清單?？杀默F(xiàn)實是，在許多情況下，有或沒有發(fā)現(xiàn)和組合規(guī)劃或過程，有些地方對于選擇的項目沒有提供重大的價值。這也是事實，作為一個項目經(jīng)理，你的影響可能非常有限，在這個階段-畢竟，在許多情況下，你甚至不知道潛在的項目，直到被分配到你。然而，了解發(fā)現(xiàn)了什么，以及如何將你的項目管理啟動，是非常重要的。它可以告訴你這個項目是否對于組織所有你的工作（無論是作為雇員，承包商或服務(wù)提供者）是高價值的，還是它的潛在價值需要進一步確定。這也可能讓你早期洞察到您面對的項目可能有的復雜性

43、。如果您發(fā)現(xiàn)很少或根本沒有發(fā)現(xiàn)工作已經(jīng)完成，請不要失望-自己做！找出為什么該組織的人認為你的項目是重要的。理解他們正在期待該項目提供什么-盡量把注意力放在項目對他們意味著什么這個層面上，而不是螺母和螺栓將建成什么。如果他們的回答表明，他們不認同該項目的事宜，找出他們認為的，這一部分時間和精力花在什么地方將會更好。你的本能反應(yīng)將是保護您的項目，但你可能會發(fā)現(xiàn)另一個項目，將提供更大價值。即使你最終不會拋棄原來而用新的項目來替代，考慮一下組織內(nèi)利益相關(guān)者所關(guān)注的，并且不把自己當做項目經(jīng)理，誰真正關(guān)心公司，你要明白這不只是你自己的項目。例2.1。選擇錯誤的項目想象一下，在你的公司有一個工作小組正在處理

44、與客戶的訂單，該小組成員已經(jīng)確定了一些機會：手動刪除當前進程的工作 在團隊中很多人覺得，他們把幾乎所有的時間放在文件處理上，而不是實際與客戶打交道。加快庫存檢查當客戶下單，團隊成員必須調(diào)用庫存找到貨物是否在有缺。使用這個過程將更快提高其效率。提高客戶訂單的跟蹤，查詢和投訴目前，所有的客戶互相追蹤是手動完成的。還有的其實是在公司中有全職工作的人是收集信息并把它在excel表格中試算的人！允許客戶以多種方式進行互動一些客戶已經(jīng)表示，他們希望能夠有一個整體的電子服務(wù)系統(tǒng)，輸入網(wǎng)上查詢和投訴。正如你可能已經(jīng)猜到的，在重要性上，機會已經(jīng)被提供了。該小組認為，減少他們的手工工作的最重要的改進是庫存跟蹤和客

45、戶跟蹤的自動化。一旦這些基本問題已得到修復，該小組認為，它可以啟動項目，將真正有利于客戶的工作做好就像上面介紹的：一個網(wǎng)站和電子郵件地址，以便他們可以登錄訂單，查詢等。組織中的其他地方的人們積極參與活動，但是，他們會非常專注于客戶的網(wǎng)站。從營銷角度可以看到，這將是一個真正的賣點，銷售團隊認為這將滿足客戶最大需求。他們沒有意識到，在網(wǎng)站上成功的為客戶提供訂單，整個團隊就有其他的機會首先處理。然而當你建立新的客戶網(wǎng)站時，這是你首先要知道的。你開始工作，但你也發(fā)現(xiàn)，與團隊中處理訂單的人很難接觸：他們不會很清楚的回答問題，你組織開會時他們不會到這兒來開會，不回復郵件，除非他們被提醒了一次又一次。你顯得滿是敵意，但你不知道為什么 -你只在這呆了一個星期。當然，你不可能得罪他們。對于你在這家公司的最后一個項目，你與it家伙取得了聯(lián)系，并問他們?yōu)槭裁础Ｋ麄兘忉屵@個小組確定的其他項目.而且這個團隊還認為那些其他項目更重要。然而營銷隊伍中的有些人說，關(guān)于該網(wǎng)站建立的可能性正在開發(fā)，并且承諾其中一些大的客戶已經(jīng)準備就緒，所以管理層決定優(yōu)先在這兩個系統(tǒng)改善工作?，F(xiàn)在你明白為什么團隊是如此的反應(yīng)遲鈍！他們不高興，因為他們自己的需要被忽略了，現(xiàn)在你就被迫