Two months ago, I was working on a project that felt completely mismanaged and didn't meet the expectations. The project had an extremely tight deadline and we were using new technologies we'd never used before.
Plans were constantly changing and it felt extremely hard to keep up. It seemed like there was a lot of broken telephone. Re-delegation of tasks encouraged there to be more than 5 managers of the project making for an issue of "bubbling concerns" where concerns needed to be raised to multiple people and missing one could be catastrophic. I was exempted from meetings with decision-making including some that were only held in person, missing key details.
Our team of 2 had high expectations, but were still split into 2 teams of 1 to distrubute our efforts across multiple platforms, one of which we'd never used before. PTO also happened to coincide with the last weeks of the project for many key members.
A designer joined the mix late in the game and views were scheduled to be built within a day of being designed. The demo playbook was never publicized and expectations swung daily between everything should be perfect and just worry about polishing the demo. We were told not to use Jira, so every task had to be manually managed on a shared table in Confluence, furthering confusion.
At the end of the project, I asked for a month off unpaid to think through things and work on a side project. Because it was between projects, it was permitted.
Soon after I started on my side project, I hired some employees to handle the tasks. I quickly realized how fast projects can become hard to manage.
Things I learned to be a better employee:
- When you have concerns, bring them up right away. If you solve them, say how you solved them. Explain when you think you need to expand scope and why.
- Bring up all your questions, concerns, and tasks in a way that you and your manager can modify, for example microsoft teams planner.
- Update your manager every time something changes or you get through a milestone
- When priority is confusing, make sure you bring it up to your manager on the shared tasks board.
- Use spikes as a feasibility test paving the future of the company. Publicize and document every time you're spiking in a way that allows the company to plan. I wrote a blogging guide https://github.com/goatandsheep/goatandsheep.github.com/wiki/Blogging
Things I learned to be a better manager:
- If you want to make sure someone understands what you said on a call, ask them to create a task on a task board to paraphrase the details.
- Don't try to change tasks too drastically without a phone call to dispell any misunderstandings
- Establish strict roles. Designers decide the details of designs. A single manager per project. When you need to use a manager to submanage, make sure the submanager frequently updates you about progress and issues.
- If the goal is a demo, make sure everyone has access to it. The playbook for the demo should be God of what is priority.
- It can be useful to have people take meetings for you and manage others to save time such as with a project manager, but it only works if you consolidate any issues that have been brought up later with both sets of people. Project managers should facilitate discussion between team members with dependencies on each other if there isn't enough such that you don't have to spend time facillatating it. They should also gather information about concerns between you and team members where they aren't already coming back to you
- Keeping employees busy can be a lot of work. Set a time each week to double check the list of tasks and keep track of what has been done in the past week
- Keep a list of things that you need to get done and continue to manage them using kanban or other task management systems. Task boards are the best way to manage tasks and know progress on tasks.
- Suggesting technologies to use can be great and a huge time saver for employees, but can take a while to figure out the nuances. It's usually best to make a default scavenger hunt of questions and give employees a limited time to find the best for themselves. For example, make sure the technology is easy to setup, write tests for, document, lint, and maintain. It's important to figure out quickly if a technology is worth investing additional resources in
- With remote workers, sending voice notes is extremely useful to relay information over audio when schedules misalign
Although some projects are trickier than others, no situation is unbearable when everyone knows the expectations and progress are transparent.