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Are you a new Project Manager? Then you won’t want to miss these tips to get begin a string of successful projects!
Here are 25 essential tips for you new Project Managers!
- Where your budget allows, recruit the best, most experienced people onto your projects
- Play the role as ‘Project Leader’ too – inspire, encourage and create the best environment for success
- Take the heat for your project team, if you must
- If required, role up your sleeves and do the work that frees up your people to focus on what they’re good at – even if it’s getting the coffee
- Be a good listener to your team, and ask questions about their well-being, stress-levels and satisfaction
- Inject humour as well as discipline. Allow time for a little fun
- Sell the benefits of your project to all stakeholders constantly – you need to keep them focused on the result!
- Your project sponsors must always be involved in making big decisions
- Ask sponsors to assign or approve all experts onto the team, especially external people
- Ensure that your sponsors approve of (and physically sign-off) deliverables at each stage of the project
- Always ensure you have enough time to do the job, even if it requires a tactful challenge of stakeholders
- And allow time for rest. Don’t pile on the work!
- Don’t move onto ‘building’ the end result until you have a satisfactory set of requirements (what is being built) and a working design
- If you have to break rules, then break them. But get approval from sponsors first
- Communicate bad news as well as good
- Be brave. Be courageous.
- Stand up and do the right thing. Always
- Learn, consume and sleep your project life-cycle. Know each stage and phase off by heart!
- Plan, re-check, plan again. But don’t go overboard. A slightly flawed plan is better than no plan
- Hold regular reviews with sponsors, especially at the end of stages
- Hold short and regular team meetings
- When you’re in the run up to final delivery, hold (extremely) short ‘sun-up’ and ‘sun-down’ meetings (meetings at either end of the working day)
- Always, always, use your experience as a source of learning
- Don’t ever turn away an offer of help
- When you wake up each morning, read the business case/objective of your project. Never let this escape the front of your mind!
Bullet 24 & 25 are the ones that I think too many PMs lose sight of too quickly. Projects become personal, and they forget about what they are trying to achieve.