Project Manager, How to Manage your 1st Project?



Congratulations! you’ve made it. After a long time, maybe years, you have been assigned to manage your first project. You might have some help. You may have a mentor or two. But like any self-respecting project manager managing your 1st project, you want to be independent. Project managers have the difficult task of not only launching a project, but also making sure that everything runs smoothly and collaborating with team members and the client. Being a project manager on your first project is a major challenge. In the following article, we will give you some tips to successfully manage your first project.

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1) Write a General Overview

To start, you need to create an overview that will guide you throughout the project. Define the purpose of the project. Be clear and include only the most important and realistic plans that you will execute.  The overview can serve as a guide if you face problems.

2) Define the Scope

The first, and most important, step in any project is defining the scope of the project. What is it you are supposed to accomplish or create? What is the project objective? Equally important is defining what is not included in the scope of your project. If you don't get enough definition from your boss, clarify the scope yourself and send it back upstairs for confirmation. While the example is slightly off the business topic, we can all relate to a wedding reception. In planning a wedding reception, you may have as your scope: prepare a wedding reception for 100 guests, complete with dinner, open bar, wedding cake and a live band for dancing by a certain date at a cost not to exceed $20,000.

3) Set expectations early

A productive team knows what to expect. As soon as most of the team is together, hold a kickoff meeting. Provide them with an overview of the project’s purpose and the approach that will be taken. Tell them how long the project is expected to last in duration. Let them know what you expect from each team member.

During the kickoff meeting, I like to establish a set of team norms. This is a set of guidelines that the entire team agrees to follow. Although I strongly suggest some of them, such as “Promptness is a sign of respect,” I let the team come up with most of them and agree as a team to abide by them. This sets the expectation for behavior for the team and gives them buy-in when they produce the ideas and agree to them.

4) Determine Available Resources

What people, equipment, and money will you have available to you to achieve the project objectives? As a project manager, you usually will not have direct control of these resources, but will have to manage them through matrix management.

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5) Define Your Goals and Expectations

Define the goal of your project and make sure everybody understands it. After you have set your goal, come up with expectations to successfully complete the goal.

Inform your team about your goals and expectations for the project. For each member, consider putting on paper general guidelines and strategies to follow. This could include their tasks and the expectations for completing them.

6) Resist the urge to be a task master

Many new managers – old ones too – think that project management is about following a project plan and ticking off tasks as they are completed. Along with this, they constantly badger the team members to determine whether they have completed their scheduled tasks.

Completion of tasks is only one aspect of managing a project. It is more important to be aware of each team member’s status and understand the issues and obstacles that may cause them to fall behind. When the project manager understands that information, he or she is better able to provide status updates up the chain to higher management.

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7) Ensure Good Communication

For your team to work as a unit, it is fundamental that there is good communication between everyone: yourself, the team, and between team members. Good communication between team members prevents potential problems during the project.

8) Understand the Timeline

When does the project have to be completed? As you develop your project plan you may have some flexibility in how you use time during the project, but deadlines usually are fixed, as in the case of the wedding reception. If you decide to use overtime hours to meet the schedule, you must weigh that against the limitations of your budget.

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9) Get to Know Your Team

The members of your team are the force which drives the whole project forward. You will want them to effectively and efficiently complete their tasks. Therefore, take some time to get to know the members of your team. This allows you to know their strengths and weaknesses so that you can properly delegate tasks.

10) Be a servant to the team
Another assumption that many PMs make is that the team serves the project manager. In reality, any management role is a support role. The first responsibility the project manager has to the team is to remove obstacles. While the project team is busy working on their assigned tasks, they are bound to face obstacles. Rather than allow them to interrupt their progress, the project manager should support the team by facilitating the removal of those obstacles.

A project manager should also promote collaboration among the team. The team members are on the front line of the work and know most of the detail involved. Rather than making decisions in a vacuum, the project manager should facilitate collaborative decision making with the team. This results in better decisions and better professional development of the individual team members

The project manager should also mentor the team members. Hold regular one on one meetings with each team member. Get to know each person’s strengths and weaknesses and help them develop on the project and in their careers.

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11) Assemble Your Project Team

Get the people on your team together and start a dialog. They are the technical experts. That's why their functional supervisor assigned them to the project. Your job is to manage the team.

12) Be Supportive

So that the project can run smoothly, ensure good collaboration between team members throughout the project. You should not merely act as a project planner and controller, but also a mentor. Establish your authority as the project leader, but ensure that it is based on positive aspects of leadership – to provide help and advice for your team members.

13) Monitor for risks early and often

A risk is anything that has a chance of going wrong. An issue is a risk that comes true. Performing a risk analysis early in the project and regularly monitoring for risks throughout the project will increase your chances of avoiding issues down the road. Additionally, should the risk become a full-fledged issue, risk analysis enables you to be better prepared and have a strategy for dealing with it.

14) Detail the Work

What are the major pieces or components that have to be created to complete the project? For example, a wedding reception requires at a high level: a reception hall, food, drink, a cake, guests, and entertainment. Of course, each of those larger items can be broken down into many additional items. That is the next step. 

In our wedding reception example above, you likely have a team or person in charge of different components. Work with your team members to spell out the details necessary to achieve each major item. The person in charge of food must understand the options, the cost limitations, and make selections that support achieving the scope. List the smaller steps in each of the larger steps. How many levels deep you go into more and more detailed steps depends on the size and complexity of your project.

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15) Assess Risks

Every project has its unique set of risks which could arise at some point. Assessing potential risks in a timely fashion is essential for the success of your project. Take time to investigate the weak points of your project and warn your team members about them. A good way to manage risks it to use a risk breakdown structure.

16) Motivate the Team

Everybody needs proper motivation in order to successfully carry out a job. Don’t mention tasks and deadlines too often as this can impact work performance. Instead, motivate team members by praising their work (if deserved) and provide helpful advice when someone is having problems.

17) Have a purpose with each communication

Being put in charge can sometimes give someone an authority high. They model themselves after their own former managers and develop some bad practices. Some project managers like to call attention to someone’s mistakes. Others may state obvious facts to show the team how much he or she knows.

Stop and think about why you say what you say. This applies to emails also. Everything you communicate should have the desired outcome of improving productivity in some way. Beating the team down or trying to impress the team members with your vast knowledge may accomplish the opposite.

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18) Develop a Preliminary Plan

Assemble all your steps into a plan. A good way to do this is to use a precedence table identifying what items must precede other items. Formal project management practices call for developing what is termed a network diagram and identifying the critical path. ​While this may be beyond your needs or knowledge level, the core issue is to sequence the activities in the right order and then allocate resources against the activities. Questions to ask include: What happens first? What is the next step? Which steps can go on at the same time with different resources? Who is going to do each step? How long will it take? There are many excellent software packages available that can automate a lot of this detail for you. Ask others in similar positions what they use.

19) Create Your Baseline Plan

Get feedback on your preliminary plan from your team and from any other stakeholders. Adjust your timelines and work schedules to fit the project into the available time. Make any necessary adjustments to the preliminary plan to produce a baseline plan.

20) Be Flexible

Sometimes the plan you’ve outlined simply does not carry out the way you would have liked. If this happens, maintain a positive attitude and work out a solution with your team members. If some parts of the initial plan do not work, you can adopt an alternative solution. A flexible and open attitude will help you effectively handle obstacles.

21) Managers don’t like surprises

Bad news on a project is inevitable. Someone will be late on a task or a vendor will deliver the wrong equipment, setting the project schedule behind. When this occurs, it is important to communicate that bad news to your manager as soon as possible.

Transparency is critical to your success. Hiding an issue, hoping that you will resolve it before management finds out will backfire more often than not. When issues occur, let management know and have a plan in place to let them know you have it under control.

It is also important to provide as long of a runway as possible for the manager to make a decision. Provide the manager a heads-up before announcing bad news in front of others in a status meeting. This gives her a chance to prepare a response and possibly make a decision before the meeting.

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22) Request Project Adjustments

There is almost never enough time, money, or talent assigned to a project. Your job is to do more with the limited resources than people expect. However, there are often limits placed on a project that are simply unrealistic. You need to make your case and present it to your boss and request these unrealistic limits be changed. Ask for the changes at the beginning of the project. Don't wait until it's in trouble to ask for the changes you need. However, if your project involves a wedding, do not expect to be successful asking for many significant changes!

23) Work Your Plan, but Don't Die for It

Making the plan is important, but the plan can be changed. You have a plan for driving to work every morning. If one intersection is blocked by an accident, you change your plan and go a different way. Do the same with your project plans. Change them as needed, but always keep the scope and resources in mind.

24) Always Have a Plan B

A back up plan in case the initial one does not work is necessary to successfully finish a project. A skilled manager does not allow himself to be taken by surprise and always plans ahead. Accept the possibility that the plan you adopted at the start of the project might not work. So, make sure you have the right solution in case there is a need for it.

25) Monitor Your Team's Progress

You will make little progress at the beginning of the project, but start then to monitor what everyone is doing anyway. That will make it easier to catch issues before they become problems.

26) Document Everything

Keep records. Every time you change from your baseline plan, write down what the change was and why it was necessary. Every time a new requirement is added to the project write down where the requirement came from and how the timeline or budget was adjusted because of it. You can't remember everything, so write them down so you'll be able to look them up at the end-of-project review and learn from them.

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27) Closing the Project

Assuming you have clearly set the goal of your project. The work on the project and the process involved are there to enable a successful completion. Confirm project delivery, testing and make necessary preparation for its release, all according to the agreement with the customer.

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