I had a really productive day yesterday in my role as a project manager and senior systems engineer for my two teams.
And yet, I only moved one item forward between both team kanban boards.
How Can That Be?
There are other days where I knock out 4-5 items I had planned. Schedule updates, documentation, analysis on change requests, etc. But they don’t compare to how productive I felt yesterday. Why?
Because yesterday, I eliminated several obstacles for my project team members.
Real Productivity
While I strive to continuously improve in my personal productivity, my primary goal as a project manager is not that ‘local optimum’ of just my own tasks.
My primary goal is the productivity of my teams. Period.
So when I do a particularly good job of removing obstacles from their path, so they can go crush it, I feel especially productive.
We have a ‘blocked’ status in our kanban process. It helps the team and I to identify cards which are blocked in some way. Sometimes it’s an unanswered question that we need a decision on to move forward. Sometimes it’s waiting on another outside party to finish before we can continue on a task or user story.
The most important parts of my role on our teams are:
- Provide direction and course corrections as necessary to the teams
- Empower my teams to utilize their abilities within the constraints of our high-level primary objectives
- Remove obstacles from my teams’ paths
Number of Face-to-Face Conversations
In general, my truly productive days also correspond with:
- A minimum of time interrupting my team members, outside of our daily tag-ups, questions from them, and coming back to them with the answers they need
- A maximum number of face-to-face conversations with people outside my teams, getting decisions made and documented and in general pushing for the things my teams need to succeed
So what do you think? Is my definition of a truly productive day in line with your own experience or expectation for a project management role?
Some assumptions must be made on projects when there is a lack of information available.
This may be due to our lack of an ability to predict the future accurately. In most cases, this is a valid source of necessary assumptions on projects, although we still do our best to get better at making them and eliminating as many of those assumptions as possible.
I’ve noticed something with people in general and making assumptions though.
The quality of communication is inversely related to the number of unnecessary working assumptions.
As communication goes down, assumptions go up. And vise-versa.
Nearly every day, in every project I have worked on, I see this. A question is being discussed by a group of people, or someone is trying to figure out an approach on their own. Rather than going out and talking to customers and key stakeholders….talking to the end users and their own team members….for many people it’s more comfortable to make an assumption about what is needed.
Let me stress the part about team members because it may not be obvious…. team members can interpret requirements, initial design, and interface specifications differently. One may implement Y and the other implements something to interface with Y(iThink) instead of the way Y was actually built.
As project managers, it is incumbent upon us to slay these unnecessary assumptions wherever and whenever we find them.
Take a moment now to refocus your attention so you are keenly aware of assumptions when they crop up. Tune your project manager radar and start asking questions when you see the signs of possible unnecessary assumptions being made.
How to Spot Assumptions
- You hear the phrase “I think”. Start asking them questions to clarify what they do and do not know. Go hunt down answers.
- Be agile and test-driven. Continuous integration & test will uncover these assumptions and slay them early.
- You hear a pause or lack of confidence in the voice of a team member when discussing an implementation detail.
- Keep a list. Ask your team questions like “What questions or uncertainties do you have about what you are implementing?”
- Ask about obstacles. In scrum fashion, ask what obstacles are holding people back. Many assumptions will be found this way.
How do you spot and slay assumptions in your projects?
photo by kevindooley
