I wrote this post while listening to this song. 🎧 Hit the play button and enjoy!
In this post I will discuss the challenges and lessons during my experience as project manager!
Here at The Data School we have all kind of professional experiences during training that we might face in our consultancies in the future.
I will discuss here the approach I decided to take in this project and also all the challenges we faced and lessons I learned during this week as PM.
The project
In the project brief, we were asked to make a visualization to see the frequency and location the clients were being serviced and also look into the demographics of the clients.
The Approach
I split my cohort in 2 teams (data cleansing and dashboard). While the data cleansing team was working. The other team started exploring the data and building the charts. I think this Agile strategy let us get to the solution quickly. Once we got the data ready, we replaced the data source.
We didn’t have many problems with joins and unions, as the client sent instructions on how to make the joins and unions. However, the Data Cleansing team spotted several errors in the data presented to the client in the Data Quality section, as the client required.
The client was clear in what he wanted to see in the analytics. He asked for filters, labels, and some specific chart types (for instance, the bar chart from the main dash). These all went into the portfolio dashboard. In the second catchup, the feedback provided by the client helped us to make some minor adjustments and confirmed we were in the right direction. In our last catchup, we could present the final dashboards. We got positive feedback from him and I think that helped us to be confident in our presentation on Friday.
My Experience as PM
I was a bit nervous during the kickoff and couldn’t make many notes, so I was a bit lost after the call. Fortunately, the team understood what the client wanted and could explain me later. I tried to be involved as much as possible in each part of the project. So I explored the data and followed what the teams were doing, avoiding micromanaging, so I could help those who needed it, or seek help from other people in the company.
Tips: If you are like me and can't make notes at the same time as you speak, I recommend sharing these tasks. As PM, choose someone from your team to make notes while you ask questions, then you can makes notes while the team is asking questions. At the end you can bring all the notes together.
Alternatively, when you are on calls on your own, you can ask at the beginning "Do you mind if I make notes as we speak?" And usually people will then take pauses naturally when they see you writing/typing.
Challenges and Lessons
As a lesson for the next PM, I would say is important to keep calm as this makes the communication more efficient and also let the team work in a better work environment – none wants a stressed PM around while they work under pressure.
For the next projects I’ll try to set a clear deadline and be rigid about it. I received this feedback from the team and I agree with them as I think we could get better results when the deadlines are well defined.
All in all, I think we did a pretty good job as the feedback from the client was “Nailed the brief and showed even more”, and we also learned plenty while doing it.
- For more tips follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
- You can check out my portfolio on Tableau Public.
- Can't Stop Me Now - Oh The Larceny (2017) - Â Tyrone Wells, the lead vocalist of the band and is also vocalist of other two bands, War Hall and Royal Deluxe. Some of his songs was used in Grey's Anatomy and The Vampire Diaries.