Project Management - How to get started
In this blog, I will talk about the minimal skills, activities that you must learn to get started with project management.
Project Management continuous to be vital in any organisation. Without project management many things will go wrong.
Many young managers who come from being an individual contributor role, struggle initially with project management due to lack of training.
Many make an assumption that project management is just assigning tasks and checking whether it is complete or not. Well unfortunately, it is not.
Project management is much more than that just assigning and checking. There are so many things to do as part of project management.
In this blog, I will talk about the minimum skills and steps that you must perform as a manager.
Skills
Following are the 3 main skills that you need to develop for project management.
▸ Skill#1 : Story Telling
Learning to share information verbally is very important in project management. You must develop a way to make sure your ideas or thoughts are easy to understand by the stakeholders.
The best way to present a plan or progress is to tell in a form of story.
Many managers make a mistake of directly jumping into the tasks and delays and efforts and so on and so forth. This will not help you to send the right message to the stakeholders.
Simple thing you can do is,
- start with the purpose or importance of the milestone
- then, break down the milestone to functional blocks
- then, break down the key functional blocks to tasks
- then, mention which tasks will make that milestone a success
▸ Skill#2 : Preparing slide decks or PowerPoints
One of the most ignored skill by younger project managers is not learning to create a slide deck for presenting the information.
Learning Microsoft PowerPoint will help you to tell the story with visuals. When you have clean slides and a story to tell, the information will register in everybody's mind.
One of the biggest mistake young managers make is to use dark colours everywhere. The dark colours hurts the eyes, so people will ignore your visuals. Use light colours or combination of dark and light colours to make the content appealing to the audience.
The other biggest mistake young managers make is to put lot of text with low font. The slides are not documents; they should to be used for your narration in a structured way. Think about it!
▸ Skill#3 : Co-ordination
Let’s take an example of driving a manual transmission car. The way you apply a gear by pressing the clutch and then gradual release of the clutch and slowly pressing the accelerator to move the car, is a skill.
The amount of co-ordination happens between hand and both the legs is equivalent to how co-ordination should occur while executing a project.
In a project, there will be gears, clutch and accelerators and there should proper co-ordination among them.
When you loose focus for a moment and miss the co-ordination between these, the car will get a jerk. In the same way, if you miss the co-ordination between different teams, then project will start getting those jerks.
Basic project management steps
The above 3 skills will set the right foundation for you as a project manager. Now, let’s talk about the steps you must perform while executing a project.
▸ Step#1 : Centralising information
Any type of project or any magnitude of project, information should be centralised. The first and foremost step should be to collect all the information or artefacts and place it in a central shared folder.
The plan, allocation, customer presentations, internal presentations, scope documentation, list of risks, list of issues, list of open items etc. should all be present at central place which is easily accessible by the project team.
As a project manager, if you are able to achieve this and maintain the hygiene of all the artefacts, then it will give a good start.
▸ Step#2 : Preparing detailed updates
In the sync up meetings which has a cadence of weekly or biweekly, it is important to provide updates on all areas.
The update should not be limited to what was completed and what didn’t. It should also include items related to learnings, risks, issues or concerns.
By covering all the areas in the project, the important action items, next steps, how to approach issues or concerns can be discussed. This way things don’t slip to the last moment.
When providing updates, use the story telling and presentation skill to effectively deliver it.
▸ Step#3 : Monitoring the progress regularly
Having a keen eye on how things are progressing is a step that must be performed every day. If there is any dependency on other teams, monitoring their progress and delays is also important.
If you monitor the progress regularly, then you can spot any delays and the impact early on. When you see any impact, then communicate about it and take precautions to mitigate the impact.
The regular monitoring and taking precautionary measures on any delays will make sure there is transparency about the progress with the stakeholders. This will make you earn the trust of the stakeholders.
Final thoughts
With the 3 skills and 3 basic steps, you will be in the path of bringing transparency about the progress of any project.
With transparency, you will always get the required support from the stakeholders as they will start trusting you.
With the required support and trust, the project will succeed and in-turn you will get the recognition.
This recognition will help you to grow in the organisation.
Always make sure to keep improving on the 3 skills as it will help to become better at what you are doing.
Happy management!
