So after about 6 weeks of being in the data school we've finally started client projects with our first being an internal project for a client called AllChains. They are a fictitious bicycle company who are underperforming and our project was to make a data driven decision on whether the company should sell to their rivals or not. The analysis in this project being the key factor.
Now depending on how you look at it I either drew the short straw because I had the esteemed responsibility of being the first project manager or I was incredibly lucky since at the very least if I messed up at least it wasn't with a real client (I was more leaning towards the former since being the first your going in completely blind).
This is just a small reflection on how the week went with my team (fair warning its gonna be a long read this is more a record for myself then a riveting blog) :
Monday:
So technically speaking the process for the project probably started before Monday. On Sunday night I had luckily opened my laptop during the afternoon and noticed Robin, our main contact for this project had fallen ill and we'd be having our kickoff meeting with Carl the CTO instead. I also had a quick look in the google drive and noticed our brief for the project which had been uploaded a couple of hours earlier. Using this information I informed the rest of the team about the changes and prepared a rough timetable for the project as well as some potential questions to ask so we weren't going in completely blind.
On the day itself, the kickoff meeting went quite smoothly with Carl as he informed us about the client and what they were after. He emphasized that the analysis was the most important aspect of our task and wanted there to be a clear decision backed by analysis that we could present to the stakeholders.
I then divided up the team based on their own preference of which departments they wanted to work on and also made sure to put someone on some market research. I also managed to set up a meeting with Carl despite his busy schedule for the afternoon. This would allow us to have something to work towards and let us know early if we were on the right track.
The teams then worked on their data discovery and partway through I held a group meeting to bring everyone together and discuss what questions they were setting out to answer and let people throw ideas back and forth about what they should be working towards. By the time the afternoon meeting came round I was really impressed with how far everyone had gotten with the time they had and each group managed to show the client some sketches of what they were working on and where they were headed with this work. We ended the day with some valuable advice/ guidance of where to go heading into day 2 of the project and we also agreed we'd be scrapping the market research as this would take too much time to put together and we may not have the necessary data available to us.
Tuesday:
Tuesday's focus was mostly getting the graphs and analysis we had talked about previously done on tableau and focus on some tangible returns. As Robin was still sick and Carl was unavailable on this day I managed to organise a call with Andy the CEO in the afternoon for a catch up.
While the team got on with creating their graphs and fine tuning their analysis I worked on creating the dashboard template and formatting document the team could use to make all their dashboards uniform for the client. I also started work on our presentation for Friday.
On Monday I had made a point of doing the data discovery together so we spent most of the time together as a group so that questions would be easier to answer and everyone would be on the same page. Tuesday I had booked a room for the team in case they wanted one but wasn't too fussed if people wanted to go off on their own and work on their own section of the project. To my surprise most of the group decided to work in the same room again and were able to help bounce ideas off one another.
By the time the call came with Andy most groups had multiple graphs prepared and one team even had a dashboard to show. We were again able to get some valuable feedback from the client about the work we had done and made sure we were staying true to the scope of the project.
Wednesday:
Wednesday we had half a day to work on the project; our last day before the presentation on Friday. I wanted to avoid having to do any work on Friday other than preparing for our presentation. With this in mind I made it clear to the team that the main focus of the day was to finalize their dashboards with the goal of combining them all by day's end.
For the most part the team were on track to do this and come 5 o'clock we were able to combine all of the work into one tableau workbook. There was some last minute talk of changing some of the graphs at 5.20 but at this point I did have to make the decision that we would stick to what we have for the presentation on Friday and that our focus now was to prepare how to present our findings to the client on Friday.
Friday:
I made sure we had a room booked for the Friday up to our presentation time so that we had somewhere to practice together and give feedback. We managed to finalise what we were going to say and I put the call out on convo for anyone willing to give us feedback. Shoutout to Gerda Staurylaite and Erica Hughes for listening to our presentations and giving us some valuable last minute advice and help, it really prepared us for the final presentation to the client.
After lunch we managed to present the work we had done to the key stakeholders for AllChains and the feedback we received was extremely positive. Other than a few hiccups the things we learnt doing this project and the feedback we have received throughout will be invaluable to us going forward to future client projects.
Summary:
Given this was our first client project for all of us and the added oddity that the clients were our coaches, ultimately I think we did really well as a cohort to come together and produce the quality of work we did. I think everyone acted professionally, took their tasks seriously and produced some great analysis at the end of it all. We managed to keep our goal of giving an analytics based recommendation to the client clear throughout the project and the team really helped each other out with questions and constructive criticism throughout. Everyone was confident about sharing their views and I think this showed during the presentations on Friday when the teams were able to bounce off each other.
Learning as PM:
I personally do not feel I did a good job as PM, it was my first time in a role such as this and having never seen anyone do this before it was challenging to know exactly what my role entailed outside of the Admin role.
I knew going into the project what I wanted to do as a rough outline and kept our goals throughout the week clear but tried to be as Agile as possible with my methodology so that we could react and adapt to any feedback we received.
I tried to base my management style on how I personally like to be managed and went for a more hands off/ laid back approach all while making it clear what targets I wanted to hit during the week. This stopped me micro managing the team but also meant I was maybe too distanced from the actual work being carried out.
During the data discovery phase of the task I as PM tried to take a overall view of the data and see what tables were available for each team using the schema but it meant I did not really dig into the data myself in any detail so was less aware of what could be tangibly done with the data. In Hindsight I would've dug into a specific department myself then branched out so that I at least had a deeper insight into one of the teams.
I also think I took for granted the fact that the team were all working in the same room for the project and assumed there would be communication between the teams. There was communication certainly but I think I may have been able to coordinate this more as PM by having short catch ups with teams and maybe guiding each team's analysis to be more related to each other rather than just letting it be a free for all? This is something I probably will pick up observing other PM's and their management styles.
Finally, while I think the admin of organizing meetings with the stakeholders and communicating with them went pretty smoothly I did not think this was a true reflection of how it would be in a real project scenario. Having come from an auditing background I know how much of a pain organizing meetings with clients sometimes is and the pitfalls you face when everyone is on different platforms. I think this being an internal client with everyone on convo/familiar with how to use spacein etc. made it extremely easy to organize but in reality would probably be more of a headache.
Overall I think I'm able to take away a few things from this experience to improve my management in the future but I'm looking forward to being a team member again in the client projects going forward.
TLDR: Good internal project, learnt a lot hopefully the real ones go as smoothly.