Wil Selby

The “Project Management Foundations” course is one of many Project Management focused courses provided by Lynda.com. Lynda.com is an online learning platform which focuses mainly on software, creative, and business skills. LinkedIn offers a free 1 year Premium Subscription to veterans through their LinkedIn For Good program. This course is the first in a series of courses focused on Project Management.

I used this course as I was preparing to transition out of the U.S. Marine Corps and into a job in private industry. The majority of my job as an officer was to plan, execute, and assess operations. While the process was the same, I didn’t fully understand the lexicon of civilian project management nor some of the nuanced differences between running a military operation and a business project. This course helped me identify and understand the process and individuals involved so that I could better articulate my military experiences on my resume and in interviews while applying for project management related opportunities.

I thought this course was efficient in providing a high level overview of the key steps involved in project management. This course can also be used to prepare for the Project Management Professional certification which covers similar material. The process is broken down into the following steps, which I’ve summarized below.

1) Initiating a Project

This step focuses on identifying the key stakeholders (individuals or organizations who have a vested interest in the success or failure of the project), identifying the problem to solve, and specifying the broad level goals and objectives of the project. The goals and objectives are further broken down into requirements, deliverables, and success criteria. Risks and assumptions are identified as well as their potential impact. This step concludes with the development of a project charter and scope statement.

2) Planning a project

Once the team agrees on the purpose and scope of the project, a Work Breakdown Structure is developed. This document details the specific tasks that need to be accomplished as well as their estimated cost in people, time, and resources. They recommend breaking the tasks down into units that can be accomplished between status update meetings to ensure appropriate supervision of progress. The frequency of those status meetings is determined in the communications plan. Along with the communications plan, a budget, risk management, and quality management plan are developed. This is based off of a development plan which provides a timeline, identifies key dependencies between tasks, and outlines milestones. Lastly, since all plans will be modified as they are executed, a change management plan is created. This step ends when the project is approved.

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Andy Grove was the former chairman and CEO of Intel. “High Output Management” is consistently listed on reading lists for business, management, and entrepreneurship. Andy gives his perspective on building and managing a company by focusing on effective management processes. The book is broken down into three core areas:

1) Managing is the Work of a Business Perused by Teams

Andy claims that the output of the manager is the output of the teams under the manager’s control. I found this interesting since I often heard it in the service. As a leader, I was primarily judged by what my team accomplished or failed to do. I was ultimately responsible. This is most evident to the public when an incident occurs on a Navy ship and the leadership is fired.

The author also recommends a manager have no more than 6-8 subordinates. I can empathize with wanting to keep team sizes small and manageable. At some point, there are diminishing returns when growing and scaling a team and more delegation of decision making authority might be necessary. In the Marine Corps, the magic number is 3. The smallest unit, a fireteam, has one leader and 3 subordinates. This scales all the way to the top where the Marine Corps maintains 3 Marine Divisions on active duty.

Andy also talks about achieving managerial leverage. In order to increase your managerial productivity you can speed up your rate of work by applying production principles (like lean principles for individual workflow) or re-prioritize your activities to focus on those with the higher leverage (looking for nonlinear activities where a small input to a team has a large output)

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Book Overview

The book “Venture Deals” is co-authored by Brad Feld (from the Foundry Group and TechStars) and Jason Mendelson (also of the Foundry Group). Prefaced by the tag line “Be smarter than your lawyer and venture capitalist,” the book aims to provide a general overview to the venture capital fundraising process for startup founders and employees, lawyers, and other venture capitalists.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book. I read this book coming from a fairly limited understanding of finance and the basics of venture capital fundraising so I felt this book provided a solid understanding of the key players, vocabulary, and issues while also serving as a good reference document for the future. The book is fairly short, including a fairly extensive Appendix with example documents such as terms sheets and letters of intent. It was a relatively quick read and I’m sure I will re-read specific sections, if not the entire thing, again in the future.

A significant portion of the book focuses on various aspects of the term sheet, while the remaining sections detail topics such as alternative fundraising options, venture capital fund operations, negotiating tactics, and basic legal guidance. The book gets fairly technical in some portions in order to reinforce key concepts with detailed examples, however, these details aren’t overwhelmingly complex. In addition to the author’s perspective on the fundraising process, they also added comments from Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path in separate text boxes called “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective.” These are pretty useful as a summary of the key points and have some valuable additional insight.

Book Notes

For the rest of this post, I’m just going to highlight some of the quotes or concepts I found interesting or relevant as I progressed through the book. Some commentary is added where I felt it was relevant, but a lot of the content can stand alone.

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