Project Management for Small Teams – Part 2

By Guest Blogger Adam Bullied

This is the second installment of a two-part series. Read Project Management for Small Teams – Part 1.

Ongoing Planning

Let’s face it – planning is not a one-time activity. It has to constantly be happening to ensure things stay up-to-date and the entire team is in sync. Ideally, this means the entire team gets together on a regular basis and discusses their parts of the project and where they are at.

Image: sxc.hu

I’ve seen this done numerous ways – daily stand-up meetings, weekly team meetings, breaking the team in to pieces and meeting that way, etc…

At the very least – for a small project, you need to get the entire team in a room at least once a week to build up accountability, a level of communication, and trust. If someone misses a deadline, the question “why?” must be asked. Remember, everyone on the team isn’t accountable to the project manager – they are accountable to everyone else on the team.

People will hate working on something if they are making their dates, but Person A continues to miss theirs and nothing is done about it. Get everyone in a room, hold people accountable – really, you just need to actually manage.

Stand-ups can be great too. It may seem like overkill to do, but in the long-term you can save a boatload of time with them. Here’s a general format:

• Keep them under 15 minutes
• Designate a member of the team to run them
• Have everyone give a brief update about what they did for the last 24 hours
• Have everyone give an update on what they will do for the next 24 hours
• Go around the room and have folks identify red flags they have
• Encourage people to solve problems with others right after the meeting

This can save a lot of time with sending unnecessary e-mails, procrastination, etc… and it can contribute to building a culture in the organization of getting things done efficiently instead of waiting.

Status Reports

With most projects, the manager is going to be communicating with stakeholders regularly. This could be senior management at a smaller company or maybe just the team working on executing the plan. Maybe it’s a client or external partners.

Regardless of who it is, you need a clear and direct way to indicate where you are currently at, if you are going to hit the dates and deliverables you said you would, and where things aren’t going so great. That’s probably the most important.

The easiest way to do this is through a red / yellow / green system. Things in green are totally fine and either a) done or b) going to be on time beyond the shadow of a doubt. Parts of the status report in yellow are in certain danger of missing their estimated delivery date and need to be looked at right away. Items in red are past the date and are actually severely affecting the project being successfully delivered and probably require stakeholder intervention.

In Closing

Keeping things lightweight and clear can’t be stressed enough. In addition, communication is paramount – regardless of the size of the team executing the project.

Be careful not to get bogged down in complex PM jargon and tasks like CV (cost variance) or order of magnitude estimation, critical paths, resource loading, and other things. Chances are, if you are running the project and your gut is telling you something is amiss, it is.

Adam Bullied has more over 8 years of experience working in start-ups and maintains a blog on product management at WriteThatDown.com.