Project management: the first steps
Project management is no joke. It consists of the fine art of leading, organising, coordinating, communicating and adapting without losing the cool and the resources needed to start, run and complete a project. The skills you need to be proficient in this field are many: patience, common sense, perseverance, collaboration, organisation, leading, empathy and many others. Some are innate within us, or they only need little training, but others may require a lot of time to be refined.
This is Francesco and this article will follow my first steps as a Project Manager in-the-making, covering what [in my opinion] is the best set of actions a beginner should undertake. While I am at it, I will also share bits of my personal experience. This will not be a guide where you can learn how to use the Agile approach (or any other) and I will be generic on the topics on purpose, because I want to focus more on the attitude than on the content of what I have done. Of course, — at the moment I am writing this article — I must point out that I still have to get better as a Project Manager and I am noting down the lessons learned to do some introspective and retrospective.
Project management is not something I was aiming since the beginning, but I gradually embraced this role because the situation was required. It all starts with a personal need to organise something in your life: for me, it was my curiosity and the urge to travel around the world from a very young age, which I can track back to when I traveled by myself at 16 to do my first summer job. If you take a minute to think about it, our lives (and not only our jobs) can be divided into a set of processes and projects which in turn can be divided into subtasks, and we are the managers of ourselves! The Project Manager takes it a few steps further and plans something for… others, whether they are a small group of friends that want to travel on a budget or a big company that is investing millions for a breakthrough innovation. Now, follow me in the process of managing your first (or latest!) project.
1. Visualise
Usually, the Project Manager is left with the task of initiating a project from the vision. While it’s true that they set the project constraints, including the scope, the resources and the time frame, it all doesn’t start without an idea. The best solution to tackle the beginning of a new project is identifying a problem that a group of people is facing and brainstorm some of the possible solutions to that issue within a team. Research revolves around end users and should include interviews and surveys to better understand what your target users need, empathise with your possible clients and remove all biases and prejudices towards them. If the project is open-ended, research should start from a broad audience that shares a problem or a sense of uneasiness, where the team itself is invested emotionally, and then narrow down the scope.
Once your idea is set, it should be written down as a project vision statement. Your aim is to guide, inspire and motivate all the people that are going to work on the project. The vision statement is not supposed to give directions on how the team should act in any situation, but instead relays the core values and the end goal. It will be both meaningful enough to help your team make the right decisions and essential enough to transmit the fundamental idea of your project to your stakeholders, without giving directions on how the team should act.
2. Innovate
Market research can be very helpful to find out if there is any competitor working on that same group of users. Reverse engineering the solutions others may have had will guide you identifying the gaps that are currently left uncovered. Innovating is not always needed to effectively complete a project, but it definitely will help your venture to stand out among all the others, and could ultimately bring more clients towards your final output. Innovative thinking can help you predict the market and keep up with customer needs. Successful Project Managers take inspiration from existing products and redesign them into new shapes and uses.
Eventually, the most innovative products come downstream of brilliant ideas or successful research. If there is a problem to solve, most certainly there is a solution somewhere to be created and to be put into the market.
3. Plan
Planning is one of the most important aspects of a project, since it requires clear alignment with the stakeholders and within the team. Once your idea is set, you will need to draft your own project charter and calendar and share them with the team, in a transparent, consistent and efficient manner. While your team shouldn’t be directly involved in the planning, it’s best if they know how the approach you are using works, because every approach has a different workflow. Project charter may be hard to tackle at first, but it will exponentially increase your productivity once you get going. Information about the project scope, budget allocation and time schedule should be included in the plan, because it makes it easier to identify potential risks that may arise during the timeframe of the project and ultimately lead to delay or failure.
Another big part of planning is the task division among the team members. You should assess the competencies and potential of your colleagues and distribute the tasks accordingly. At this stage I find it better to be flexible and let members whose expertise overlaps decide how they would prefer to contribute, because it reinforces the harmony of the team and motivates people to work on what they like. Once done, you should prioritise fundamental tasks from those that have a lower priority, noting down what are the crucial milestones in your project path. If you have meetings with your stakeholders, your should set the deadline of those milestones at least a few days before. This will help you have some buffer time to test your product and to find bugs and pitfalls, and be prepared in the conversation with higher ups.
4. Fail
Failure is a needed step in the growth of a good Project Manager. Missing deadlines or abandoning tasks that were deemed crucial is something every team faces and more often than not is a learning experience, even if it directly impacts the quality of the work delivered.
Another unavoidable pitfall lies in dealing with people. While it’s true that teamwork makes the dream work, a perfect harmony is utopian even in small teams. A good Project Manager knows this and has the role to act as the “glue” of the group and goes far and beyond to negotiate and mitigate the tension within his work group. Angst is not always expressed with words, that’s why observation and common sense are fundamental to identify the signs of division and prevent any argument.
One of the best advices I was given shortly after the beginning of my latest work experience was that we should learn how to accept failure and celebrate it. This completely shifted my point of view on things, it’s truly game changing! This attitude helped me cope with failure during my first Project Manager experience, I’ll briefly explain: I was working in a team, putting my skills to the test, and I ignored some clear sign of division among my teammates, thinking they wouldn’t matter. And matter they did when it resulted in accusations about a serious drop of productivity from one team member to another… just minutes before [and after] the final presentation of our prototype! Luckily our stakeholders didn’t notice the rift and praised us for the good work we had done, but unfortunately that project had to be left unfinished to avoid further arguments. To this day I still consider that one of the best projects I have worked on just because it failed the way it did: it helped me open my eyes on who I want to be. I feel less content about what made us fail, communication.
5. Communicate
It’s good practise to learn quickly how to effectively communicate with your team members, stakeholders and clients. Simply listening is one of the most powerful things you can do and is the first step to become an effective communicator. With some good sense, listening will also help you read between the lines, understanding what is not being told, and lead you to your position as risk preventer/mitigator.
When speaking with your team members, you may want to use an informal tone: people tend to form barriers with others when different linguistic registers, and you definitely don’t want that in people you have to work with for weeks, months or years! An habit you should adopt is to have daily or weekly stand-ups to catch up with task completion and avoid the elephant in a room that is task creep.
When communicating with your stakeholders or clients, you may want to stick to a more formal vocabulary and attitude. Especially if you are preparing a presentation, remember to structure your speech and try to listen to it from different points of view. To do this, try to answer to some of these questions:
- What do I want to transmit?
- Is the vision clear and meaningful enough?
- Why should I say this and not something else?
- Is it engaging enough?
- What is their level of knowledge about this topic?
- Am I being too specific or too vague?
- Are they already expecting what I’m going to say?
In brief, adapt your choice of words according to your audience and you will be ready to deliver a great presentation.
What I find very helpful when I want to practise my communication skills is communicating my vision and my solutions with colleagues that manage other projects: an external point of view from professionals will guide you into ideas you hadn’t considered before. If you can, you should also take the chance to go back to one-on-one interviews with your target users in the various phases of your prototype testing: at the end of the day it’s them that represent your end clients and their feedback can guide you to a better product.
6. Succeed
Alas, projects must come to an end! It’s both a blessing and a curse, because, while it’s true that you advanced in your proficiency as a person and as a professional, you will also leave behind a part of yourself, something you invested time and resources in. However, project closure should always be a moment to celebrate and understand how the process changed you. Even “bad” endings will teach you a lesson and should be considered successes in a way. After the final deliverable and the meeting with your stakeholders, it’s good habit to gather your team members and discuss together what is yet to come, better if in front of a drink!
Going back to the story I was telling about failing and why I considered it a success nonetheless, I was later approached by the same team member that had been accused of performing poorly and was told that they liked how I managed the situation before the fall. We even worked together on a new project and delivered it avoiding all the mistakes we had done previously, overall achieving an outstanding result.
7. Iterate
After finishing a task, you will always be asked to go back and start again. Finishing a project is no different, it was your only task to begin with! At the end of the day, you have gathered a new knowledge, new connections and resources you didn’t have when you began. Take your time to reflect and assess what you have learned and then think about what you want to learn next. If you have read everything up until this moment, it’s time you get ready and dive back into action!
That is basically it. Of course you don’t learn how to deal with people or projects in a matter of months, let alone a few minutes reading an article: you need to go through many years of experience and many mistakes before you can consider yourself a proficient Project Manager. If you want to jump on this train, arm yourself with patience, learn to listen and communicate and embrace failure, and you will eventually get through. Good luck, you will need it!
