As a project manager within a small organization I am being entrusted of delivering projects on time, within budget, and with all scope requirements met, but it is mostly up to me to decide how I get it done. There may or may not be a process in place. There may or may not be enough resources to get the job done. And there’s never enough time, so that’s out the window right away.
But through it all, a pattern emerges that slowly repeats itself from project to project. The below account is a true tale of project management tips that we at GOVECS call Project Management FACTS as they deal with Friendship, Agile, Collaboration tools, Team identity, and Sharing.
Friendship
Partners, suppliers, or clients. These are just a few types of stakeholders within a project. But they require more than just a cold place on a stakeholder register. They require friendship. The type of bond that allows projects to move past any and all hurdles that come its way. Treating a supplier as a friend, for example, opens up new avenues of collaboration. When things go terribly wrong on a Sunday night, hours before releasing your product, your supplier, whom you’ve called many a time just to update on the progress of the project, may go that extra mile to see you and their work flourish. Or if your product brakes down thousands of kilometers away, your supplier just may get on a plane within hours of your phone call to help in any way possible. Because no friend wants to see you fail, right? The same principle may be applied to clients. Sure there are deadlines, contracts, and penalties. But if you treat your client with the same respect and consideration as you would your friend, deadlines may move, contracts may get annexed, and penalties… well, those seem to always stick around, but the point is that if you treat your client fair, they will help you deliver your project on cue.
Photo by Anna Kopeć Sławomir Kortas presenting Schwalbe scooter project during 4th Project Management Conference in Wrocław. Fot. Anna Kopeć
Agile
What does it mean to be agile in a world where everyone expects your project to be agile anyway? „Agile won’t work in my project, you can’t build a roof of a building without building its foundation first”. Or can you? Expanding on that thought, you could most certainly build a roof of a structure on the side, maybe even at an entirely different location, and then simply lift the roof to the top by a crane, right? You shouldn’t force agile only because your boss expects it from you, but agile comes quite naturally to most project managers. When forced to take an unplanned split second decision, agile is what allows us to take one path and not the other. Doing the unscripted is agile. Adapting quickly to unforeseen situations is agile. Responding to your known unknowns… is agile. A common thread linking the aforementioned scenarios is empowerment. A project manager must know that their decision, whatever it may be, won’t be ridiculed or met with horrible repercussions. Every project has a level of empowerment that should be made clear to its PM, and it is that seal of approval that allows agile into any project.
Collaboration Tools
If an artist is only as good as his tools, could the same be true for Project Managers? While there’s no doubt that a project is only as successful as the project team behind it, it does help to add some collaboration tools into the mix. Slack, for instance, is a tool that aims to bring your entire organization together to one common place. Surely e-mails have done the trick, with Copy and Blind Copy on hundreds of threads. But Slack creates a community where distance once reigned. Because your project channel may include anyone you wish to add to it, your online conversation with a supply chain specialist, visible to all within your project, might ignite a slow moving fire of ideas throughout you project team eventually leading to a solution so far fetched, so out there, and so never before considered… that it just might work.
Basecamp, on the other hand, is great for task assignments, decision making, and project status updates. Converting your Work Breakdown Structure into an interactive To-do list with commenting, file attachment, and completion status has never been easier.
One tool that has slowly crept up the list of engineering projects is Google Photos and its ability to quickly share hundreds of pictures without jamming e-mail servers with megabytes of files. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a link worth to a thousand photos?
Team Identity
A lot has been said recently about Millenials invading our workplace. The generation of young adults that shows up at 8 sharp, leaves at 4, doesn’t do overtime, doesn’t share personal phone numbers, and by no means thinks about work as soon as they’re out of the office. And while it is easy to blame this behavior on a brand new generation of workforce, the problem can’t surely be as simple as being born in the ’90’s. The problem is the absent sense of belonging.
Create an atmosphere of pride and ownership in your projects and your project team will thrive no matter what generation label they may fall into. Giving your team satisfaction from the project may be as easy as getting a project t-shirt or a coffee mug, or as challenging as modifying the project altogether to their liking. The key is that your project team knows why they’re doing what they’re doing and see a personal benefit of completing their part in the project. They need to feel it, show it, talk it, and defend it. Their positive personal relationship with the project, the project team, and you, the project manager, will make your organization thrive.
Photo by Anna Kopeć
Sharing
One of the most difficult parts of the project is creating lessons learned in a way that will benefit the entire organization and prevent future projects from repeating the mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, this paragraph won’t provide the silver bullet for you to take away as yours truly is still trying to figure that out. But what has helped time and again is some form of sharing your results with the group and the organization at large. Just as it is important to share with everyone the goal of the project at the beginning, it is important to share the results at the end. Even if results are less than flattering, it is beneficial to acknowledge them, learn, and move on. Make it fun. Order pizza and have a sit-in lunch to get as many people as possible in attendance. After all, who doesn’t like pizza? When project after project presents their results in a forum setting, the outcome is a community that helps one another and steers each other away from future project icebergs.
The above FACTS may not work for all and they definitely won’t work in all settings. But perhaps slightly modified on a larger or smaller scale they just might help out with your next project.
Project Manager at GOVECS, Europe’s largest electric scooter manufacturer. He is a certified Project and Product Manager with a passion for self-improvement, fo- cusing on the human side of projects, and good old GSD (getting stuff done). Brought up in California, he brings an open mind to every project, often asking too many uneasy questions. A volunteer within the PMI PC Wrocław Branch as well as PMI global