Project Manager, Servant Of The Team

One fair day, one of our clients asked me over a coffee, what is your competitive advantage? Several answers started in my mind as a slideshow; Project Management, Requirement Analysis, bla bla bla… All jargons! But none of them could delight me, so I asked myself “Really???” and I got “Absolutely Not!” as a kickback. Then after self-examination, it finally alarmed in my mind that “It’s your team moron!”

Yes it’s my team, and without them I can’t succeed and as a project manager, it’s my duty to serve them. Every PM must understand that your team is human at last; they have emotions, aspirations, weaknesses, strengths, attitudes and so on. So while managing project, understand that you need to manage people too. 

More than a project manager perform like facilitator! Try to diagnose and expel all obstacles for your team e.g. Understanding requirements, explaining flows, any infrastructural issues that is hampering productivity of your team, avoiding unwanted long meetings where people are struggling to be concentrated. Do all possible things which will increase velocity of your team and automatically of your project. Serve their all valid demands or problems because your project’s success is built upon them rather than any Gantt Chart!

As people’s manager one should:

• Understand team very closely. Ask them for their ideas, issues etc. Note their inputs and operate on them
•  Understand their career aspirations. Become mentor rather than boss!
• Always give them unclouded views about entire project, vision behind the same
• Motivate them by providing proper appreciations. Performance of people increased when we started performer of the week awards!
• Always be keen about what is affecting productivity of the team
• Handle egos in team well

Nowadays, Agile project management approach gives you more resultant tools and techniques to handle your project, learn them! One of the KRA for project manager is to increase team’s efficiency and create healthy team environment in organization

"The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team" --Phil Jackson