Project Management Skills — Simple 13 Steps to keep your project on track

“This is your new project. We are counting on you to deliver it”.

That’s how it starts.

Photo by Stanley Dai on Unsplash

Great,” you say, “I’ll have a proposal by the end of the week!” But what you’re really thinking is, “Oh my, what now?” Because here’s what you know you’ll need to do:

  • Talk with a gazillion different teams
  • Plan then justify a budget to your manager
  • And, of course, get under the skin of the project so you actually understand what it means.
  • Oh, and don’t forget to water the plants.

Getting a complex project to get to the point of a successful delivery can be daunting. But it’s okay, relax. You just need to remember that all complex things are made up of simple steps.

So, let’s get to how we can make a complex project simple.


Step 0. Before even starting a new project, ask “What happens if we do nothing?”

Why is this important? Sometimes it’s easy to do the shiny, exciting thing and not the right thing. So we need to get ourselves on track and make sure that at the end of the project we won’t come to the conclusion that we just spent three months building an app that will never get used.


Step 1. Understand the need

Take time to understand what it is you are solving. Remember that if you get as close as possible to a full understanding up front, you’ll make better choices are your progress through the project. In other words, good preparation will save you time and money later on.


Step 2. Gather all information from all parties

Ask. Ask. Ask!

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Get context, log dependencies and research history. Speak to everyone involved. This will help make sure you are not repeating things that have already failed.

But, above everything, make sure you know what drives the teams — what are they trying to accomplish and how will this help them?


Step 3. Understand requirements VS nice to have

Requirements. I cannot even guess how many times you’ll hear that word when running a project. Let alone how many times we hear from the dev teams from our customers and partners that misunderstood requirements are the cause for projects delay, and sometimes even failure. This is something that is universal for all areas.

Let’s dive a little bit further into this.

Who has been in the situation when you are trying to scope a project and end up with a list of 67 requirements? It would be great if we had unlimited resources and time, but unfortunately Einstein didn’t get us a solution for that.

So we are left with doing it phase by phase. You will receive too many requirements, features — but catch’em all. After that, you can start prioritizing it.

Have you MSCW’d? Well, now you can.

MSCW stands for:

M — what MUST be done

S — what SHOULD be done

C — what COULD be done

W — what we WON’T do

Take the 69 requirements and break them down. You will understand some of them aren’t real requirements, but nice to have. This allow you to move one to the next step.


Step 4. Define requirements and deliverables

Really drill down on what matters. What are you gonna deliver no matter what? What does this project need to solve?

(Of course, even these might change down the line, but for our sake let’s assume everything critical will remain the same)

You can start by defining a MVP (minimum valuable product) of what you want to achieve. This should illustrate the quickest time to value and will help you stir in the right direction.


Step 5. Define requirements again

Just to be safe, make sure to go over everything again. I’m serious. Understand the impact of delivering the requirements — what is the core end value that will come from these.

A little tip: when you are crafting the final version of the proposal, check if you have your requirements worded in the same way they were said by the person asking for them — this will help you get things approved and moving along faster.


Step 6. Involve stakeholders AND get commitments

Get together with your stakeholders — understand their concerns, their pains and expectations. If you get this, you are setting yourself for success.

Ultimately, you are delivering the project for them, so it needs to be absolutely aligned with what they expect to see in the end.

The other half, which is often wrongly forgotten, is to align responsibilities and get commitments.

Most of the people you will work with are extremely busy, and you will need things from them. Some of them, you already know at this point — an introduction, budget approval, allocation approval. Get down a date from the beginning to when they will deliver this to you. You need to be in control of all the variables in your project that might slow you down and ultimately become bottlenecks.


Step 7. Analyse risks (ASAP!)

Where could it go wrong? What would be the impact?

Craft a plan B (mitigation, acceptance) that you can fall back on if things go wrong. Have your own contingency plan.

There are some risks that you have the power to diminish. There are others you will have to live with.

Again, be in control of all the variables (especially the ones that leave you uncomfortable). Someone once told me “surprises are only good for birthday parties”.


Step 8. Talk with everyone that will be influenced by the project

There are two important reasons why you need to do this.

Reason #1. To ensure that everything goes smoothly, you need to understand a few things:

  • Are they positive?
  • Are they a blocker?
  • Are they actually involved?
  • What do they prefer?

This will make you give the right importance for who says what.

Reason #2. To ensure that you have as much context as possible. There are people that might not have any influence in the business or as stakeholders, but that might have context that could be extremely useful.

Feel free to skip the next paragraph(s) (the part below only!) but there was an example that exemplifies this perfectly and that stuck with me:

A village was divided in two different areas of action for ambulance service — A (on the left) and B (on the right), and these acted as separate areas. For simplicity sake, let’s assume the area is in the format of a square, and equally divided.

People started complaining that some of the waiting time was too long, and the management team took it upon themselves to right this wrong! Rather than having ambulances respond to area A vs area B, they decided that if an ambulance would respond to a crisis based on distance, the waiting time would quickly reduce. After all, shorter distance = shorter travel time, correct?

Wrong. As soon as they established this new process, drivers that were initially from area A were driving in area B, and they were completely clueless of where to go. They did not know the streets by heart, which shortcuts they could count on, as they did for area A.

Result? Waiting time actually increased. The drivers were not working in the area they were most efficient.

Anyways, long story short — you don’t know what you don’t know.

There is context from the field that might actually make a big difference but that you might have no visibility over.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Step 9. Make sure you have an important decision maker

More often than we wish, there will be crisis and urgent situations. And in these situations you won’t have time to gather together all your stakeholders to run through what is going on — so someone must be able to have the executive power to decide when needed.

Ideally, everyone agreed and knows who this person is.


Step 10. Things will change, so keep yourself honest

It’s a given — things will change. But sometime in the middle of the chaos and stress we forget to question if these changes actually make sense.

So, ask yourself:

  • Should we still do it?
  • What’s the impact?
  • What is the cost?

Step 11. Align expectations and reporting

Make sure you are constantly aligned with your team on what is going on — status, milestones, roadblocks, changes. You need to be on top of this. Make sure you get all the information that you will need to do a great job, and make sure you also know what information your stakeholders need in order to be comfortable with this project (and not be shooting you an email every two days asking for the status).

One suggestion is to create a reporting model that will fit the way you work. Do you review your work and adjust it on Mondays? Or do you do this Friday’s afternoon? Whichever it is, it is a good idea to have a consistent and expected communication of what is going on with your stakeholders (and this might be a simple status green/amber/red with 3 key highlights).

Remember, consistency and coherence are key. Reliability is the key to expectation management within a team.


Step 12. Prepare transfer of knowledge when necessary

You won’t always be there — I mean, hopefully you can take one week (or two if you are rebel enough) off and truly go on vacations — so you need to have everything documented so that anyone can easily gain context and pick it up.

If you are working in a team that is growing, this will also be extremely helpful.


Step 13. Party

It is important to celebrate our victories — so celebrate them! When a project goes well — do the banana dance and rest your head for a little bit (let’s say 5min given that there are managers reading this…)

But, seriously. It’s reason enough to be proud.

In a nutshell: Define! Do! Adjust! Do again! Learn and improve! Party!


P.S. Did you realize that you can actually do this while having fun and without having to resort to tools such as Project and endless Excel spreadsheets? Follow these steps and you might just end up having a good time (and bringing in some results!)

Note: These 13 steps were made from my own notes and experience — the process is in fact more extensive and detailed.


Want to discuss this further? Would love to hear your experience and thoughts. Connect with me on Linkedin.

Carla Sofia Teixeira

Written by

Passionate about helping developers find a solution to their problems, to connect them to the technology that will enable them to become the best they can be.

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