Manager’s Eleven

11 best manager’s friends that would help to r̵o̵b̵ ̵t̵h̵r̵e̵e̵ ̵c̵a̵s̵i̵n̵o̵s deal with a project (or three) in a smart and pragmatic way.

Sharing with pleasure my favorite eleven:

1. Agenda & Meeting notes. One who writes agenda and meeting notes owns the world! I don’t need to describe what agenda and meeting notes do, just want to remind that they’re extremely valuable. First, it’s respectful to colleagues. Second, it helps to stay focused during a meeting and to keep track of action points after it.

2. Project online board. Any project management tool that is shared with a team will bring value. I prefer Jira classic software projects. It allows to work with a backlog, do proper planning and track issues’ progress. Using a Kanban or a Scrum board on daily meetings helps to visualize the project flow, it’s current status and brings up impediments discussion.

3. Updated and available source of documentation. It’s always a compromise between lack of documentation and overdose of the latter. But it’s absolutely a must-have to provide the only place for all documents’ storage. Based on my experience the list of documents that are continuously updated and thus should always be easy to access is the following:

• Requirements specifications
• Project plan
• QA documentation (test plans and strategies)
• Definition of Ready and Definition of Done
• Release procedure
• Other important procedures that have to be shared to eliminate bus-factor

I like Confluence since it’s integrated with Jira and offers a lot of sexy templates

4. Follow-up emails with action points and tasks. Have you had a super productive meeting with bright ideas and strong decisions? Note them down and forward it to your team. Keep in mind that conclusions without action points assigned to specific people together with deadlines will turn into another “I remember we had that discussion once…”

5. Delegation. Do you trust your colleagues enough to share with them your pain? If not, don’t wait till your ToDos become a pain. Mark all your tasks as May Be Delegated, Must Be Delegated and Cannot Be Delegated. You will be surprised how little can be done only by you and not by anyone else.

6. Availability. The manager who is hard to reach or who answers emails a week later than it was required, is not a very big deal. The team will learn how to survive, make decisions on their own and will eventually become a separate independent body. Are you sure it’s what you need? Sometimes it’s good, but all unplanned goodies always have the other side.

7. Presence in meetings. The manager who suddenly skips meetings or is constantly late, demotivates the whole team demonstrating that it’s ok to treat meetings in such a way.

8. Milestones and reporting. Regardless of the framework, your project follows there are certain milestones with their own goals and success measurements. When the milestone is reached, making a short report would help to keep track of things on a higher level and see a big picture later. It may be a part of retrospective if you have those.

9. One to ones with team members. This one is not a must-have but I prefer to feel my team, to know about their concerns and well being. It helps to make their life better (and thus the project) and to avoid surprises with personal issues.

10. Decisive voice. I’m a big fan of team play and common decision making. But I strongly believe that the final decision should be made by the PM. It could be approval of what the whole team came up with, choosing one of the suggestions or the manager’s own way. It’s ok when team members have different points of view on the same things, it develops a team and a product. But if everyone is responsible for decision making, getting to a consensus might be a bit challenging.

11. Strong knowledge of product and customer. I met project managers who claimed their role was pure organizational from a schedule and budget perspective. It’s up to them of course, but I strongly believe that to juggle with cost, time, schedule and quality in a professional manner, a PM has to be well aware of product, domain, customers and users. It does help to prioritize tasks in both development and testing. I also cannot imagine proper risk management without a deep knowledge of product usage.

Was there anything you disagree with? What are your best friends in a world of projects?