How to Survive Your First Year as Project Manager?

A guy, who’s going to start his new job as a project manager, asked (in LinkedIN Answer) on the major pitfalls for beginning project managers. He got 66 genuine replies. I went through all of them and felt that it’s a waste for the advice to be bury in the archive.

Therefore, I have listed some of the better replies here. Or you can read all the replies in LinkedIN Answer

To summarize, here are the key points that are mentioned

• Communication (the most-mentioned)
• Delegation
• Politic
• Planning & Milestones
• Objectives & deliverables
• Ethics
• Attitudes

I have worked as a project manager and the transition from being an engineer/individual contributor can be easy if you remember the following guidelines (dos/don’ts)
1. Delegation - Remember to delegate. You cannot do everything and that is not your job. Helping out is different than taking ownership of the tasks.
2. Rewarding - Reward your team, could be formal or informal depending on your company. Recognize the team’s hardwork. Give credit where credit is due.
3. Planning & Milestones - Use softwares like MS project / Primevera Planner to establish and follow up on milestones, action items.
4. Presentation - Hone up your presentation skills. You will have to present to your team, senior management and other departments. Tailor each presentation to the specific audience.
5. Listen - You are responsible for the succesful execution of the project. Listen to your team, customer, vendors, etc. It is important that you understand the concerns.
6. Closure - Make sure you close on action items. Initiating is project is easy, but ensure timely and successful closure.

I would add a few things to the answers already provided.

- Have a sense of humor .(VERY IMPORTANT)
- Learn who is and who isn’t on your side
- Always have a back up plan
- Recognize factors that are out of your control/influence
- Recognize when people begin to lose interest in the project
- Change tactics chairing meetings/calls to keep things interesting
- When you hear contradictory information, be patient
- Have good follow through. Don’t be shy to pick up the phone
- Leverage offline meetings and hallway conversations to gain clarification or drive the project forward
- Vent (Only occasionally)

Methodology - don’t follow any PM method slavishly, adapt and use the bits which work for you on the size of project being used. Especially do not rely on Gantt charts too much or at too detailed a level. Use them to get your thoughts in order, but if you can get away with it use a spreadsheet for tracking.

Vision, Focus & Promise Management - you need to be clear about what you are trying to achieve, keep focussed on things which deliver value and ensure that you are the only one who promises what will be delivered - otherwise the project will wander all over the place and suffer scope creep.

Communication - its one part of “the people problem”. Regular forums for communication at sponsor and team leader level are needed, with formal documentation, so you track work and remind everyone of issues to be resolved, risks to be attacked, opportunities to be pursued, management actions to be fulfilled.

Honesty & Openess - another issue with the “people problem” - never lie or hide bad news. Always try to surface potential problems. Make sure your team knows its a “no blame culture”…

Agendas & Trust building - you never know what the stake holders really want and some people just need to go through the pain of being obstinate or negative. Try and get team building (especially with non core team people) as early as possible in your projects.

You have received a lot of good advice so far. I would say Project Management is 80% relationship management and 20% technical knowledge. Anyone can learn an SDLC and work the process its how you relate to people that will undoubtedly be matrixed to your effort that count.

Here’s my top 6 (worth maybe a penny):
1. Communicate, communicate, communicate! Its better to over communicate than not at all (this should be obvious).

2. Be humble, but persistent. Don’t hesitate to ask questions and don’t stop until you are satisfied with the answers: “ask the next question”.

3. Know the “politic” that surrounds the project. You may not like the “Koolaide” being served, but you need to understand who’s making it.

4. Praise your team, publicly…..when you acheive successes. A good word goes much further than negative karma and takes less energy.

5. Learn from your mistakes, everyone makes them, don’t be afraid to execute a well-intentioned, well-thought course of action. You won’t be the first or the last, we’ve all been ther.

6. Make sure you have solid sponsorship. Many a good project has died on the vine due to lack of senior management support.

You have many Major pitfalls including one of my favorites: Thinking that project management is an end in itself. Or forgetting that PM is a business tool.

My addition is; Identifying deliverables as Objectives. The deliverables are means to achieve a Business Objective. An example.

The deliverable is to develop a new system to make widgets. The business objective is to increase profits by reducing operational expenses in the production of widgets without causing delays in current orders.

In the above (over simplified example) this will also lead to questions about quality, environmental impact, jobs, etc.

A project that forgets, or never understands that it is driving toward a business objective will fail at some level. By keeping the business objective in top of mind, you can easily decide if a task is contributing or missing.

1. PROJECT OBJECTIVE!!! Remember that Project Management is a MEANS to delivering the project’s objective within scope, time and cost, but is not HE objective of the project.

2. PRODUCT!!! You must focus on acquiring a thorough understanding of you industry and project product (you did not say what kind of project). The most tightly managed project from PMI prospective that is based on wrong/incomplete project assumptions can lead to no good result.

3. PROACTIVE! You must actively seek out what ever information is needed. “No one told me” is not acceptable. If you are not fully versed in your product, then the team can leave you holding the bag for failure.

4. COMMUNICATIONS!!! Keep talking to the project team and become very good at presentations to Management team. Always talk to the SOURCE of the potential problem FIRST & ask THEM how it will be resolved.

5 TRUST!!! Present FACT, maybe recommendations but never criticisms. Make both (team & management) your friend. …..Yeah, that’s easy to say.

Four biggies, and they all come from inexperience, though it seems many experienced PMs do not outgrow them:

1. Confusing management with leadership…. Team members are not going to be impressed by the title “project manager”–it’s pretty synonymous with “bean counter” in my experience. They will, however, be loyal and cooperative with a benevolent leader who can overlay the management administratrivia with passion, vision, and direction.

2. Failure to exercise adequate scope control…. Stated a bit more bluntly, the customer cannot have everything s/he tries to add to the scope without sacrificing time, budget, quality, morale, and/or success. Too many PMs attempt to “suck up” to a customer by giving into demands without explaining the consequences, then having the customer sign for the change. Even small changes need to be aggregated into clear scope change decisions.

3. Too easily accepting work estimates….. Or, as my ex-mother-out-law was fond of saying “Everybody lies!” Developers, analysts, and testers swing from projecting superhero-like abilities** with low estimates to utter slugs with unduely long predictions. PMs need to acquire such estimates from multiple human sources, including past projects, and even heuristic tools like function point analysis before commiting an estimate to the project schedule.

4. Waffling on ethics….. This runs closely with points 1 and 2, and I strongly suggest reading the PMI Code of Ethics as a guide. A PM’s goal of heading a successful project is secondary to the requirement to represent the project accurately and faithfully. It may appear attractive to under-bill a client, under-report hours worked on tasks, or short-circuit change control; however, one is then producing an untrue representation of the project with inaccurate metrics. How would you like to rely retrospectively on such numbers in planning a new project?

And here’s a reply which I think is one of the best. It raise questions not only on the skills that a project manager must have, also on the organization itself.

Whether you can do your job well depend largely on the support you have from your company. You will need extra efforts if the company do not have a good foundation on project management. Extra efforts like educating your colleagues or direct report on the importance of what have been discussed in this post.

I would say these questions are also good questions to ask before/during your interview with companies that you would like to work for as a project manager.

There is a lot of good information here, but how you apply it also depends on your experience before you started as project manager.

• How familiar are you with this new company?
• How familiar are you with what they do or create?
• How well accepted are you at the new company?
• Who sought for this position from within the company?
• How long has this company been using project management?
• What type of support has the project manager received in the past?
• What type of organizational structure does this new company have?
• Functional, project, or matrix organizational structure?
• How many projects do you have control over?
• Do you have a well defined project development process?
• Do you have clear, well documented project charters?
• Are team leads and team members fully engaged?

There are so many more questions I could ask you about your new organization and how well they accept or reject project management. Therefore, the suggests I would have for you are simple:

1. Learn everything you can about your new company as quickly as possible.

2. Learn everything about the personnel within the company as quickly as possible. Get to know who the players are and what their role is.

3. Learn the business politics, but try and keep youself well above the fray.

4. Learn as much as you can about project management as quickly as you can. No matter how much you feel like you know, it’s probably not enough now that you’re in the main seat.

5. Hit the ground running and be a long distance runner because you may not get a breather for a while.

6. Make sure you have the proper project management tools on hand and if not, make sure you get them as quickly as you can.

I’ve had to oversee as many as 114 projects at one time and now my number is down to about a third of that. However, I have very robust software to assist me and I don’t have to fulfill every function of project management on these project by myself. It is necessary to create a good plan and to keep modifying as you learn more details. Once the project has been initiated and you’ve developed a good plan, most of your time will be spent making sure it gets executed properly. If you control the budget, then it will be important for you to be fully aware of budgeted amounts versus actual amounts.

PMI is a good resource. You can also pursue some good training from approved PMI training resources. My company, PMAlliance, happens to be one of the PMI approved training resources and I can shamelessly promote them by encouraging you to use our training courses. With that shameless plug I will also say that project management training is very important, get it from somewhere.

Does the replies cover all grounds? I don’t think so. As more and more companies are going towards globalization, project manager will have more hats to wear. And project manager might manages a project that is thousand of miles away. And we will need another post to discuss about it. So if you haven’t subscribe to this blog, do so now.

Related posts:

1. The Role of a Manager. Is it Just Operational?

Tagged as: management, project managment, Using LinkedIN