Читать книгу Your mom’s best friend’s project manager! Key skills for a successful career in project management and management - Семён Колосов - Страница 18

The goal is clear – to ensure that the team works efficiently and comfortably so that project, team and company goals are achieved. Managing roles and assigning responsibilities in a team contributes to more efficient work, better communication and reduced risk. But to do this, you need to realize that a team is not just about the roles needed to achieve results. There are people on the team. With their values, experience, cockroaches, expertise, strengths and weaknesses, attitude to you, to the company, etc. It is not possible to describe roles and assign tasks to everyone. Everything is much more complicated. A team of ordinary specialists can achieve super results, while a team of stars sometimes can’t even start doing something. We are dealing with human nature and efficient processes. The ideal PM knows how to bring these things together. He knows how to lead the team according to Bruce Tuckman’s model and not interfere with the work, so that everyone in the team reaches his goal and gives 100% for the overall result.

Atmospheric management

Kurt Cobain said, “You can survive anything if you pick the right song”. I’m saying that any difficulties on a project can be survived if you find the right PM. And if he picks the right meme, the team can survive anything. No kidding. Maintaining a cool atmosphere in the team is a tough task. The PM should definitely eliminate all the problems and blockers that depend on what the PM and the team can affect. Uncertainty, bad processes, problems, etc. Everything else is an art that allows ordinary people to do incredible things. It could be the culture, the atmosphere, or the PM’a leadership skills. Everyone finds their own approach. A key metric for me is how people on the team relate to each other. PM will explain the goals, plan and organize the process, but if there is no atmosphere of support and mutual assistance in the team, there will be no unified mechanism. And neither the values on the company website nor supervision will help. The people you saw at the interview, where they told you how they want to grow and do good for society, disappear on the first day of work. The work is done by other, real people.The ideal PM understands this. He creates a positive environment where every team member feels comfortable and important. He maintains open communication where people can express ideas and opinions and resolve conflicts and disagreements constructively. Where no one is afraid of making mistakes and doesn’t make the same mistakes twice. Atmosphere is closely related to culture. Together they allow PM to create an environment and positive social pressure. Where you don’t have to specifically motivate someone or be demanding. Where you don’t look for blame or reasons, but decide what to do. Where everyone understands each other’s strengths and weaknesses, comes to the rescue and helps you grow. Doing cool results should be fun. For everyone, not just PM.

Infrastructure and teamwork

Once roles and areas of responsibility are assigned, processes, approaches, principles, rituals and communication are aligned, the ideal PM needs to provide the infrastructure and information sharing, i.e. create the physical part of the system that the team will work with. This can include folders in cloud storage, accesses, a task manager, a financial model, collaboration services, and so on. The team should be provided with everything they need to work. Then you have to build the interaction with the system and between team members. It’s cool when a project is done and someone goes on vacation, but the work doesn’t stop. Because the vacation is accounted for in the plan, everyone knows where the necessary artifacts are and where to put new ones. Anyone has access to where they need to go, without too many questions in chat. An ideal PM doesn’t build big systems, he looks for a balance so that there are no services for services’ sake. He also skillfully divides the system into parts and divides responsibility between team members. Everyone keeps the system running, simplifies and fixes it if needed. An ideal PM has a backbone of basic artifacts and solutions for organizing the work of the team under his cloak. He does not reinvent the wheel every time, but adapts proven tools.

Facilitation

There is always a lot of communication in a project. The ideal PM doesn’t mind discussing pets and talking about any topic. He is not a douche who interrupts a smol-talk with the words, “Colleagues, let’s get down to business already.” For every meeting, he has a purpose, an agenda, a lineup of attendees, and the materials needed. But when the discussion starts drifting away from the purpose, he can non-toxically bring everyone back to the purpose of the conversation. This kind of PM knows how to make meetings effective. So that there is no discussion for the sake of discussion, and the amount of uncertainty, tasks and questions after the meeting is reduced, not increased. And if he does everything right, but participants still don’t talk in the right direction, avoid solutions and the next steps are unclear, then it’s a difficult topic. The ideal PM will always ask the right and uncomfortable questions so that the substance becomes easier to talk about. And problem identification and decision making was done through constructive discussion.

Task setting and delegation

Management is the art of doing other people’s work. In a good way. There is no way to do it without task setting and delegation. An ideal PM sets tasks so that no one has any questions about the purpose of the task and the expected result. He makes sure that the task is understood and accepted correctly, taking into account the overall context, workload and the peculiarities of the performer. The ideal PM does not have a situation where a task is set, done, and on the day of the deadline it turns out that the wrong thing was done or nothing was done at all. If you need to delegate, the PM doesn’t fight fear or micromanage. He has a well-established process for smooth delegation and monitoring the transition of responsibility. For some reason, for many, it’s easier to burn out doing everything themselves than it is to delegate and give corrective feedback. It’s important to learn people skills to understand who you are tasking and delegating to. Someday there will come a point when you just have to trust, and the cost of making a mistake will be high. By understanding people, you will be able to better assess the risks and not lose out. And don’t forget about the support of the people you delegate to. They are more scared than you are.

Resources inside and out

The ideal PM manages internal and external resources, and his prime version always knows in advance when everyone on the team is on vacation. He always knows the actual and planned workload of the team. He keeps track of deviations from the plan, allocates resources to project tasks, accounts for vacations, rotations and onboarding of new specialists. He communicates important changes and plans to the resource manager of the company. There is no such thing as a team suddenly being abruptly released or work extending for several months due to his fault, but no one knew about it in advance. Otherwise, managing expectations is simply not possible. If there are not enough resources and external specialists or services are connected, their load or costs are also taken into account in the project. Usually the main resources are team hours and money. They are never infinite, so the ideal PM controls them to make the best use of them. If resources are shared in a company, conflicts are inevitable. Communication and willingness to help each other to agree is important here. The better a PM works on load predictability, the less such conflicts will occur. For this to happen, this is what every PM should do, not just one PM.

Feedback and motivation

Feedback is a very cool and useful thing. Many times I have seen teams where they decided to give honest feedback. They have a culture and honesty is one of the most important values. As a result, half of the team ends up with feedback like “this is shit, we need to redo it, can’t you do it properly, do I have to do everything for you?”. It’s fashionably called toxic. In a perfect PM, feedback is part of the atmosphere and culture. He doesn’t have toxic feedback. He has honesty used to build trust, adjust behavior, get in sync, and help grow. He knows when and how to give out feedback. Negative feedback is given out in person and praise is given out publicly. He has no favorites, celebrates employee accomplishments and objectively evaluates the contribution of each project team member to the success of the project. This process is called “feedback” for a reason. Communication works both ways. And it should have a supportive, corrective and developmental function. It’s like WD-40 for the social mechanisms in the team. The right feedback can have a tremendous impact on a team’s self-esteem, and motivation will be a natural side effect. You don’t need to look for motivation externally, you need to create the conditions for it to appear internally.

Knowledge sharing

Given what I said earlier, you’ll have a team of “sweet cats”. In this situation, knowledge sharing between team members is inevitable. An ideal PM encourages such processes and at the end of the project he will discuss with the team who has learned what. He is a professional mentor himself. He helps people to systematically pump up their skills. Not only with tales from the field, but also with the help of a development plan and mentee support. He can turn an ordinary PM into an ideal one in a clear time frame, and enrich the team with managerial skills that will increase its maturity. Such a skill makes the ideal PM very important for the company as he is the custodian and dispenser of the right culture and knowledge in the company. And if the company has a knowledge base that will store all this and provide people with information through easy search, then it is a fairy tale in general.