If you are a keen readers of the data school blogs you might probably know that every cohort would have client projects in their trainings, and each member in every cohorts would have a chance to be the project manager for a week.
I was picked as the first project manager of our cohort (it was chosen alphabetically). And I want to write this blog just to document some thoughts and lessons learned throughout my project manager week.
So on Monday we received a client brief and we were asked to look into the data base and the client gave us 4 areas to look at. First lesson to the previous me, or anyone who might have a chance to become a project manager in some sense: We do not need to take the whole client brief as it is. Sometimes client might ask for a lot, more than what the time is capable of doing within the designated time period. Also the areas to look at doesn't mean we can only look at those areas. We can expand/ narrow down the direction.
Unfortunately I cannot travel back in time to tell myself that. On the first day I broke my cohort down into small sub-group very early and had them to look into the designated areas. And here is the second lesson: You might want to work more as a group. I was too hasty and wanted to speed up the data investigation stage just so we can start working earlier. But I did not know that in the end slowed us down, as there were some tables/ views in the data base are for cross department. And every sub group was too focused into their own areas and end up having the cross department conversation quite late in our project timeline.
Lastly I think as a project manager I might need to put myself more in the shoes of the audiences. One thing we had during the project week was the daily catch up with the client, for this I consider ourselves very lucky that the client was very responsive and gave us good direction. However when we had good directions, it was already mid week. So as a project manager if I could spot out that the directions of some sub-team might be a bit off earlier and steer them back to the questions. Then it would be an easier week. But I guess these were all a part of learnings, and I am glad that our cohort can still produce some impressive work at the end of the week.
So after a long rambling I guess I want to conclude some suggestions to be a better project manager, to the future me or anyone who loves to read the data school blog (And some people from DS29 like to spy on me for no reason).
- Study the client brief more thoroughly, define the business questions need to be answered before having the teammate to dive into the data
- Have the teammate communicate more because 1 person from a sub-team might find some interesting data/ tables/ logics which could be helpful for another team. But it would mean nothing if they do not communicate
- Try to view the work in both the client's and teammates' perspective and see how can we juggle between the expectation and also make sure the teammates are staying on the right direction. I believe this would be really helpful as the team would not need to reposition after maybe 1 or 2 days of hard work because what they were looking at was not relate to the client questions
So this is my learning as the project manager. Hope our cohort could be even better after weeks of client presentations.