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 employ full-time project managers. That’s OK, too. Those organizations may have the skills on staff to ensure that projects run smoothly, or they may experience organizational hiccups (read: missed deadlines, projects going over budget) and recognize that they need some better practices in place around the PM.
NOTE PM SKILLS FOR ALL!
Solid PM skills will prove to be valuable in many situations—both personal and professional. Whether you’re planning a move or have to estimate a new website redesign project, you’ll find that you’re doing some level of “PM work.” So, if you’re reading this thinking “not for me,” you’re likely wrong. Pick and choose the tasks and values that complement your existing qualities, and apply them. It will strengthen your work overall.
If you find yourself in that situation and still cannot justify hiring a full-time project manager, you can work to sharpen your team’s PM skills to help keep their projects on track. Designers, developers, illustrators, strategists, and anyone else on a team can be multitasking PMs on top of their regular jobs. It’s just important to keep in mind that adding project management on some folks’ plates could make them uncomfortable, especially if it’s with a client. Sure, we all manage our own work somehow, but that doesn’t mean we’re also good at managing other peoples’ work, budgets, timelines, and all of the other stuff that goes along with being a PM.
Again, you will need to consider what taking on project management responsibility will mean to you, your clients, and the people who need to make time for it as part of their full-time, non-PM role. Review the qualities and tasks listed earlier and decide which of those translates to project management for your organization. From there, you can think about the qualities that are needed and the type of person you want to fill the role. That will lead you to success not only in matching the role to an individual, but also with matching the role to your organization.
Once you do assign the role, be sure to check in and make sure that your new PM/designer (or whatever other full-time role they hold) is comfortable with the responsibility. It can take a good nine months for a full-time PM to feel comfortable with the job, so you’ll want to make sure that you’re giving this person enough training and resources as well as time and space to settle in.
What It Means to Be a Project Manager
by Dave Prior Agile expert and Certified Scrum Trainer
Nobody really ever wants to be a project manager. If you ask a group of kids what they want to be when they grow up, you might hear things like fire fighter, rock
