ManagementSubsection
Project leadership
Four things nobody teaches a project manager and everybody expects them to know: what to do about the things that have not gone wrong yet, how to say how long something will take, what shape of organisation the project has to live inside, and what to do in the first weeks on a project somebody else started. All four are the craft of running a project rather than a method for running it, which is why they sit beside the methodologies rather than inside one. Every page is written to be used on a Monday rather than memorised for an exam.
What is inside
Every page in this group, with what each one covers.
- Risk ManagementSix places risk comes from, four responses, and six public failures with the control that was missing from each.RegisterPre-mortemCases
- New Project ChecklistDays 1–30, 31–60 and 61–90 on a project you inherited — and the baseline you can only collect in week one.90 daysSTARSBaseline
- Estimation MethodsStory points, man-days, hours and T-shirt sizes side by side — what each one measures, and which decision each one fits.Story pointsMan-daysRanges
- Organisational StructuresLine, functional, divisional, matrix and project structures compared — and how much a project manager can decide in each.MatrixPMBOKConway
Where to start
- You just joined a projectThe checklist, and the baseline section first — those five numbers are the only ones you cannot go back and collect later.
- Your plan has no room in itRisk management — the section on sizing, which is about what to do when the honest answer is that you do not know.
- Asked for a risk registerRead the cases first. They are what makes the difference between a register that is a control and one that is a document.
- Asked for an estimateEstimation methods, and the section on ranges first: the number people say out loud is met about three times in ten.
- Unsure what you can decideOrganisational structures — the five questions in the first section tell you which structure you are really in.
Elsewhere in the section
- ManagementIT project management is the set of decisions that turn an intention into shipped software: what to build, how to cut it into work that can actually be finished, how the team runs itself week to week, and how the result reaches users. This section covers 25 topics in six groups — product management, decomposition, methodologies, the release process, the formal frameworks, and the craft of running a project rather than a method for running one — and each page gives the trade-off behind the choice rather than a summary for a certification exam.
- FrameworksThe two bodies of project management practice you will meet in a tender document, a certification requirement or a client’s process manual. They are not competitors: one is a body of knowledge describing what to think about, the other is a method prescribing who decides what. Both pages describe what the current edition actually says, and the comparison between them is the argument most people have without it.
- Release ProcessWhat happens between "the code is merged" and "a user has it" — which in a healthy team is a decision rather than an event. Three topics: how to plan a release when you cannot promise a date, which branching model your review latency can actually support, and how to write down what changed for the people it changed for.
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