What I’ve learned after moving from projects to operations

6 months ago I changed my role from PM team leader to a PMO team leader. What does this additional O mean?

Previously I managed web and mobile development projects and was a team leader for other project managers. There were different projects: small and large; with a tight deadline and without one; web, cross platform, design and mobile. I worked with some of my clients for couple of years and the best thing what I felt is that we’re doing the awesome stuff together. But at some point I understood that I want to make the next step and start working on shaping the processes and building the company.

That’s why I became a leader of Project Management Office or PMO. In short, PMO is the part of the organisation which supports delivery process. My PMO is dealing with: talent management and capacity planning (you can find some cool practices here), internal products development and information security.

So what I’ve learned after the first half a year:

Projects vs Operations

I thought it will be completely different to lead the operations as there weren’t any specific deadlines. We have some repeatable activities and our goal is to perform them better, faster and smarter. We just need to track the right metrics and make sure we have constant improvements, right?

Wrong.

After a few unsuccessful and successful attempts to provide some bigger improvement I understood that we need to treat the changes as a mini-projects. We have to define some clear goal, scope, stakeholders, MVP and start working in iterations. Only this mental trick helped me to start planning and executing the operational improvements.

Business vs Delivery

Previously, I was mainly focused on the delivery side of the project. It’s when we have some scope, or we help to define it, then we’re working on bringing the maximum value in the shortest time. Of coarse with the best quality.

When I switched to operations which are tightly connected with a business side of the company, I understood that we always need to take the global picture into account.

Previously I was managing couple of projects, but now I’m supervising some of the processes for the whole company and there are much more variables to consider. Each choice on the scheduling side will influence the current projects and the new ones. And it’s damn hard to understand which requests has higher priority and which solutions will bring benefit to each side.

Those choices and issues are hard but very fulfilling when solved successfully.

Leading full-time

It’s a big difference between doing the work and leading for part time and leading for full time when others are doing the work. I still have the bad habit of involving into the work too much, when the smarter move will be to coach my team to do the work better.

I see two main issues with involving too much in the work the team is doing:

1. The team won’t learn how to deal with issues by itself.
2. I won’t have time to do what I should do: strategy and execution.

Key Takeaways:

• There is always a project. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing ongoing product development, operations or. just leading people. You will deal with timeframes, scope, execution and results evaluation. You can use different approaches for management — scrum, lean, OKR’s or nothing (😱), but considering the changes in operations as micro-projects will help you a lot.
• Think globally. The result of your work will influence others. The wider operations the bigger the outcome. You need to understand dependencies and make choices wisely.
• Become redundant. Don’t do the work for your team (don’t interrupt the progress). Instead — generate vision and strategy and create conditions for execution.