NOTE WRITE BRIEF, INFORMATIVE STATUS REPORTS
Status reports keep projects alive! And in order for them to be effective, they need to be brief, readable, and full of relevant information. Learn more about writing great status reports in Chapter 9, “Setting and Managing Expectations.”
Plan Your Team’s Time
Team staffing can feel like a giant game of Tetris when you’re working in an organization that handles multiple projects. For example, you work to keep your project moving on a positive path so that you can keep your teams intact for the course of a project, because you know that delays could create gaps in availability for those people who might get pulled onto other projects. As part of a larger PM team, you must work through new assignments and reduce the risk of impacting current assignments by talking through the best-laid staffing plans (see Figure 1.4).
FIGURE 1.4 Your team will love you for considering resourcing plans. Learn more about how to create solid staffing plans in Chapter 6, “Managing Resources.”
Motivate Teams
Times can get tough on projects: feedback can be brutal, meetings can get tricky, and clients aren’t always easy to please. As the PM, you act as the cheerleader and motivator to get your team to do the best job possible (on time and within budget, of course). Whether you pick up pizza for the folks who have to pull an all-nighter or give someone props in front of the entire company for doing a great job, you have to be a motivated PM who is genuine and feels like part of the team. There’s nothing more uplifting than being motivated by someone who actually cares.
Monitor Scope
Every project comes with some idea of scope and cost, whether that is documented in a formal scope of work or presented to you by a project stakeholder in a meeting. As the PM, it’s your job to understand the overall size and shape of the project and to make sure that you stay within those boundaries. In order to do this, you must keep a watchful eye on project requirements, deliverables, and project progress. Perhaps you’re watching hours spent in your time-tracking system, or maybe you’re keeping an eye on requirements met or goals achieved. Either way, you have to keep a keen eye on making sure that you have quality work, which falls within the scope of what your team has set out to do.
NOTE MORE INFORMATION
Check out Chapter 10, “Scope Is Creepin’,” for more tips on managing scope.
Wrangle Calendars and Meetings
Scheduling meetings can be a nightmare, particularly with large groups. As the PM, it’s your job to keep an eye on client and team availability and schedule meetings far in advance to ensure that important parties can attend. You should also prepare an agenda in advance of the meeting so that everyone’s time is utilized properly. The worst thing you could do is to call a meeting and have no plan for a discussion or a solid outcome. And, when you’re in those meetings, you’ll want to take good notes to communicate decisions and action items as outcomes of the conversation.
Facilitate Communications
The foundation for healthy projects is built on great communication practices. As the PM, it’s your job to make sure that your team and clients are collaborating and communicating about the details. That means playing an active role by setting and managing project expectations, keeping your team communications consistent and transparent about progress and blockers, and sometimes helping your client understand your process, deliverables, milestones, and any other thing that will impact how they experience the project.
And Much More
There’s a heck of a lot more that PMs do on a day-to-day basis, but this list covers the most necessary tasks. You may find that you’re doing some really basic stuff like ordering lunches (to make everyone happy), scheduling one-on-one check-ins, reminding people to submit timesheets, and other menial tasks. Those are the things that make your life as a PM easier, so kudos to you if you’re taking them on.
The PM Is the Backbone
As a PM, it’s important to know that you are critical to your team’s—and your client’s—success. While some of your tasks may seem repetitive and sometimes thankless, know that the team would fall apart without you. And if you’re looking to make your job more fun and exciting, do it. How you interact with your team is in your hands, and the more invested you seem to be in your projects, the more your team will trust you to help them and the project.
Embrace the Role
There will be times as a project manager where you contemplate the value of your role, and you might see others doing the same thing. It’s easy to do, because the role is varied, and a lot of what you do can go unseen by many. If that is the case, be sure that you’re aware of the expectations placed on your role. Are you holding up to that? Then ask yourself a few difficult questions:
• Am I contributing to the project in a positive way?
• Do my team and my clients/stakeholders know what I do with my time?
• How active am I on my projects? Am I watching things happen, or am I driving them forward?
• When was the last time I actually spoke (with words, in-person or by phone) with my team?
If you’re a good PM, you are an active member of the collective project team. So, if you are answering these questions and finding that you’re really not showing that you are (or want to be) an active part of the team, you’re headed down the wrong path. In order to gain any respect, you have to display an investment in your project, or the rest of the team will lose respect for you. You can’t just throw a plan together, schedule and check off the to-dos, and call it a day. You must engage in the project and know everything about it and your team.
Stick to Your Guns
Whether you’re working with a project manager by title or performing PM-like tasks by role, you’ve got to know that the tasks are contributing to the success of your project. Define what a PM does at your organization and even spell out how it can be done well. Be open to the conversation and the ideas that your team puts in front of you, and you’ll find that both you and your team will be happier. As a result, you will be set up for project management success.
Make Space for Project Management
Usually, you’ll find a project manager embedded on a team, or working on several projects, who is responsible for all of the things that make projects profitable and pleasurable, and sometimes more. Full-time PMs are dedicated to their craft and work hard to be a good project manager. But not all organizations