Transfer Task

Keep a diary of your project management activities for minimal one week and add up how much time you spend on I/P, I/F, E/P and E/F activities. Reflect on whether your balance of activities is satisfactory or whether you would prefer to change it.

Input

You may ask yourself why there is a LC about the (daily) work of a project manager? After all, you are a project manager and you are certainly busy all day with making sure the project runs smoothly. Well, this LC is to inspire you to take a different look at the daily work of a project manager. 

The image of the work of a project manager is that of the central person in the project organization, without whom everything would come to a stop. Always talking to team members, handing out work packages, checking progress, assuring that the right quality is delivered, reporting to the project owner and constantly (re)planning of the project’s activities. Bow.. Does your day look like that?

Let us take the task of the operational management of the project team. Is it really necessary that the project manager tells the team members what they should do? If the project plan is well developed, and the team is competent and committed, the team members know what to do, right? And probably even better than the project manager. 
This model of a team managing itself is called a self-managing or self-organizing team. Now, you might think ‘this can never work’, but under the right conditions, self-managing teams can be highly successful as the problem-solving capacity of the team is stimulated. Please mind that there are quite a few conditions for self-managing teams to be successful, such as a clear and shared goal, transparent progress, a not-to-large group and group cohesion and reflection, but more autonomy within the project team creates more time for the project manager to engage with the external stakeholders. 

As stakeholder satisfaction is a crucial part of the success of the project, a substantial part of the attention of the project manage should be directed towards the context and environment of the project. The LC about working with stakeholders provides some useful insights for this.

Another aspect that project managers should consider is that it is impossible to change the past. The message behind this ‘open door’ is that project managers should spend as little time as possible on recording and reporting what happened in the project. That is the past, and although it is important to know what has happened, it is not creating the success of the project. No, the success of the project is in the future and project managers should devote the majority of their time to ‘changing the future’ in the form of improving the project organisation, making staffing decisions, developing the teams, implementing tooling to improve efficiency, influencing stakeholder’s views, etc. Of course, knowing what is going on in the project, and analysing the causes for that, is a fundament to build on, but the main orientation of the project manager should be on the future.