Next week is my week to serve as project manager (PM) and I am excited (and a little bit nervous)! I have been looking forward to being a PM since the mock client project with Tom Nook. I had many ideas to organize the client project, especially after seeing my colleagues lead, and this week, during our personal project week, I thought about which strategies I plan to implement.
In my cohort’s shared Google Drive, within each client project folder, we have a Google Sheets workbook to collectively store and share information. These are the spreadsheets I have selected and prepared for our client project next week:
Many of these spreadsheets are familiar to us. We regularly employ the first three spreadsheets:
- Kickoff to take notes during the kickoff meeting
- Questions to list additional questions to email or ask in a followup meeting
- Links to organize useful resources
Calendar is a new addition to the workbook and replaces the Timeline spreadsheet. The tentative calendar currently looks like this:
Of course, this calendar is subject to change based on many factors, such as the length of the kickoff meeting, any additional followup meetings, and especially our productivity. Regardless of these variables, I aim to hold daily peer review meetings, in which small groups discuss their work and any roadblocks, and standup meetings, in which we gather together to touch base. During the standup meetings I will ask for:
- Mood?
- Updates?
- Upcoming work?
- Potential challenges?
The last spreadsheet, Roles, is often not utilized because we opt to write roles on our whiteboard. I plan to randomly divide my colleagues into three peer review groups and record them in the Roles spreadsheet, like so:
In this way, peer review groups can collaborate and talk to each other when help is needed. I will be available for guidance as PM, but I want my colleagues to rely on each other too. I hope to assign each group an element of the final data product, so it is ideal if this project involves three dashboards to split among the three groups – fingers crossed! 🤞
One more idea I am considering establishing is a kanban board. I know Notion has a kanban board template, but as a former teacher, I am drawn to the post-it easel pads we have in the office – not everything needs to be digital. I am imagining something like this on a wall:
A kanban board is a visualization of work in progress. Post-it notes will serve as the kanban cards or tasks to complete. There will be a post-it color legend color coding each colleague or peer review group. The post-its will move between the various columns, each depicting a stage of the workflow. When a task is in the “Done” column, it will be satisfying and hopefully motivating. Lastly, it will be extremely handy to see what is happening in this project at a glance. We understand the value of a data visualization; a kanban board is similarly intuitive and insightful.
I will spend this weekend thinking about the upcoming work week and after my PM week, I hope to write a blog post sharing my experience as a PM – see you next year! 👋