Your Mission as Project Manager: Create Transparency

The nature of your role, as a Project Manager, puts you in the center of everything. You see everything, the information that flows through you makes a you a lynch pin of any cross-functional project. How awesome is that! However, this also makes things more complicated as now everyone who needs to know something will come to you. This can often mean chasing down information for others or time away from tasks that are critical to the project. One option is to say “No” or “Ignore” these informational requests. That may come off as not being a team player but saying “No” is needed to carve precious time to generate output critical to project success. Then, what do you do?

Create Transparency

As information flows through you, make it available for stakeholders and members of the cross-functional team. Be proactive. That way, next time someone asks you “What about feature X Status?”, or “Did we get update on S?”, or “What is at risk?”, or “How do we triage bugs?”, you point them to this Central Information Exchange; you teach them how to fish.

Types of Central Information Exchanges:

• Dashboards
• Project Plans (GANTT, Checklists, Spreadsheet, JIRA, etc)
• Bug Management Tools with sorting mechanisms (keywords, lists, labels)
• Weekly Project Newsletters
• Kanban Trackers
• Scrum Lists
• Project Wiki pages with links to all information nodes (documents, PRD links, bug triaging rules, etc)