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

Let Your Software Development Happen With Minimum Meetings

How many of you have ever faced situation like you are doing something productive and manager calls for meeting. “Let’s have a meeting” is an often response for any situation in many organizations. Although scheduling meeting may be a right solution in many cases but not best fit always!

It has been observed that person takes about 15-20 minutes to get back from interruption and focus again. This means unnecessary meeting for 15 minutes will waste developer’s 30 minutes actually and this may create stress and frustration. As a project manager it’s your duty to avoid unnecessary meetings if possible & for that you need to decide whether the meeting is really necessary or not. I generally use following simple flow chart to decide whether meeting is needed or not.

Following should be quick pointers for meetings

• Check Availability: Always check availability of people, room etc. well in advance before meeting to avoid wastage of time.
• Avoid Informal Communications: Generally try to avoid informal communications during the meeting period. You can have them prior or after meeting. 
• Don’t discuss solutions: Even though meeting is the place to point out problems and issues, generally don’t spend time in finding and discussing solutions in meeting. Let concern people sit together and create solutions later. 
• Don’t go off the topic: Many times it happens the people start diverting meeting topics to something else (knowingly or unknowingly), as a facilitator it’s your job to avoid such scenarios and get back on the road
• Time: Don’t let your meetings run out of time! We all have fixed deadlines for all tasks and hence don’t let your meeting hamper them.

Understand, many times people may not want to attend meeting, just because they might be really deep into something really important e.g. some piece of code, some architectural flow design, some analysis etc. Keep in mind meetings never write code!

As explained in Agile Methodology of software development, try to conduct daily SCRUMs. 15 minutes stand-up meeting is usually enough for planning a day. You should ask 3 questions to team:

1. What happened from last daily SCRUM?
2. Are there any impediments?
3. What the team is going to handle till next daily SCRUM?

So if you are meeting oriented software project manager, it’s not bad but try to limit your meetings where they are really necessary