I spent Friday morning in the first of several one-on-one meetings with staff finalizing objectives for the fiscal year. That’s got to be the best part of managing!
Last quarter, one of my teams had an important project to deliver by Q-end. It seemed impossible. We were half-way through our Fundamentals of Project Management book club as a team. That put us through the project definition, initial planning, and WBS conversations. The team had already had lots of “ah-ha” moments.
Then the project got serious as we realized there were conflicting demands for the team’s time. The team agreed to adopt some of the PM principles and processes we’d just studied at a high level. One team member took over as PM and consolidated the team’s knowledge about the project into a WBS and rough time line. Instead of resisting what might have otherwise been perceived as an overhead, administration, “just let us work” exercise, the team went with the flow and realized some important benefits.
Among these was focus. With two important projects running simultaneously, using the WBS let them quickly figure out how to divvy up responsibilities and made deadlines clear. There was a sudden focus in the team that had been missing. Then their natural talent kicked in as they were able to focus on the work and not on panicking about time line and “are we forgetting something.”
The team recognized that change, and ever since, they’ve been asking to repeat that experience as new projects with conflicting resource demands start to weigh down on us. So I spent the morning shifting some team responsibilities to support more targeted work, more focus. We begin next week defining one of the projects together, then we meet with leadership to prioritize a stack of projects the following week. It hink we’re on our way to repeat that really exciting experience of focus that was the result of using project methodologies.
One of my other staff members seems to always possess that kind of focus. She manages a program all on her own, and some of the projects she has to drive with IS&T and other departments take quite a long time. She always knows her current status, her next steps, and even past decisions taken. It seems to always be at her fingertips. I don’t do it that well. I’m sure she follows some sort of methodology to do that, in addition to possessing a natural ability to organize details. But I think the methodology is not defined; she does does it naturally and has done it for a long time. I asked her today to see if she could identify her method, even if it’s really low tech (maybe even better if it is really low tech) and to share it with the team in an upcoming meeting. I’m intrigued to see what she comes up with.
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