Being a project manager involves of course a great many skills (which nowadays a great many qualifications presume to teach, and probably many other blogs discourse about). You're involved to a greater or lesser degree in planning, specifications, implementation, quality control and, most of all, a lot of people management of everybody in your project team.
As a project manager, I've always believed that the latter is best done through delegation and competent follow-up; charting that tricky course between not being a control freak arsehole barking up people's necks all the time but not allowing things to get out of sight and out of mind either. (Like most people, I've unfortunately met examples of both these extremes in my professional life, and commiserated with the unhappy individuals working under them.)
For me, that also means making sure that everybody in my project team is on-message all the time; reminding them of what the goals of the project are, what we want to achieve with them, and how we propose to achieve them; installing a work ethic and getting everybody working to best practice; and helping them to make their own decisions.
I'm very fortunate in having had very good project teams, who put up extremely well with all the pseudo motivational pep-talk moments that you can imagine follow on from the paragraph above. Out of many such moments we came up with Mr Ags' Nuggets of Wisdom: the one-liners (currently running at six) that we were constantly quoting at one another to keep ourselves on track. One of my project teams even had them printed out and pinned to the wall.
(And who is this Mr Ags?, you might ask me ... One of my alter egos, I must confess. He started life as a creation of my friend Jak Cloake's, writer extraordinaire, as a play on my initials. One day I hope we will collaborate and write Cloake-And-Ags tales.)
#1 - NEVER ASSUME or you may make an ASS of U and ME
This one comes courtesy of “The Silence of the Lambs” (the book, not the movie). It reminds us that we should never take it for granted that things have been done as expected, or work as expected, or, most importantly, that users fully understand the implications of the choices they make. Always test, and always check.
#2 - THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
Fleshing out a requirement in terms of its functional specification, let alone technical specification, often turns out to be more complex than anticipated and throws up unexpected difficulties. Correctly budgeting a project is not only about what’s to be done but how it’s to be done. Therefore always keep feasibility in mind when evaluating a requirement.
#3 - PERFECT IS THE ENEMY OF GOOD
As corroborated by Hollywood director Oliver Stone in the “Alexander” DVD. In other words, there is such as thing as over-engineering (the Germans should know). One should work to the aims of the project and produce a good implementation that achieves the aims. Do not leave ends untied, but also keep in mind that no implementation will ever be perfect or satisfy all users. And always keep an eye on the cost-benefit ratio.
#4 - THE BEST-LAID PLANS …
This is a variation on Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong …” No matter how well you prepare or how much you test, the real world of a production environment is always liable to throw up surprises and the proverbial spanners in the works. So be ready to double-back, find workarounds, and (most of all for developers) let go of beautiful, elegant implementations … that don’t actually work. We must all live in the real world where practicalities matter.
#5 - KEEP IT SIMPLE
This was the byword of my first CRM boss, Christian Lambillotte, one of the best project managers I know. If you try to do too much at once, you may end up doing nothing at all, or taking so long that your users will have lost all faith in the project by the time it finally gets delivered. You as well as your users must learn to prioritise, to accept compromises, and to clearly separate the “must have” from the “nice to have”. And when managers try to push their own priorities – which they will – it is your job as project manager to balance them with others’ priorities and resist when and where necessary.
#6 - COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE
When you’re working on a project you know what’s supposed to happen and when, but your users, who are far more involved with their day-to-day jobs, don’t. So remind them regularly; moreover experience shows that people don’t read their emails, and several attempts may be necessary to get the message through. Also a frequent failure of management is to equate thinking that something must be done with getting it done …people do need to be told for things to actually happen.
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