Being a project manager for the first time can be a pretty daunting experience, which is exactly how I felt when I was tasked with being the first project manager in my cohort for our first internal client project.
Despite my initial worries about not being able to build off of the feedback given to previous project managers in my cohort (as I was the first one!) , I quickly realised that everyone who has gone through the DS before has also had to be a project manager for a client project at some time. This was super useful and I just went around the office asking for tips and advice, and I also read a lot of blogs. All of this allowed me to kind of predict and plan the course of the upcoming week, and definitely left me feeling a lot more prepared going into my role.
Project Day 1: Monday
Based on hearing from everyone else, and also from Coach Carl’s lessons on client projects and project managing, I started the week off with a preliminary schedule, with things like hard deadlines; stand-ups; and client catch-ups scheduled in from the get-go so everyone always had an idea of what we were working towards. I did try to keep this schedule flexible as I knew things would come up through out the course of the week that would need to fit in and I also knew that some people prefer not to have a really rigid and strictly enforced schedule. I really made use of the whiteboards in the training rooms and made sure that every day we were working on the project, we had a nice clear schedule of the day on the board and also key tasks and things that we were aiming to get done. Additionally, it was important to consider from the start external things that would affect the project like tube/rail strikes and days off.
Following the kickoff meeting, we started with a group exploration of the data and then broke off into teams for each key section of the project brief. Reflecting back on this week, it would have been a better idea to not split into such static teams so early on as thinking about the “bigger picture” was quite important to this project and the teams had overlapping aspects that could have been better worked on together. By the end of the first day, the main goal was to draw up some rough excalidraw sketches and some initial charts. While the team were working on this, I began work on our presentation and also a template for the dashboard.
Project Day 2: Thursday
Our next project day wasn’t until the Thursday, which was also a train strike day which meant that some members of our team were working from home. This day was focused on each team completing their final dashboard by the end of the day or I called it - the point of no return. It was definitely challenging with having a hybrid team, especially when some teams were split up and for anyone dealing with this in the future I would really advise focusing on communication and making sure everyone is kept in the loop. Once I received everyone's final dashboards I formatted them so that they were consistent with each other and put them all into one workbook so each section could be interconnected via buttons.
Here is an example of our flexible/rough schedule from Thursday
Project Day 3: Friday
On Friday, I wanted everyone to focus on getting presentation ready, although there were some minor last minute tweaks that did need to be done to the dashboard. I think it can be a little hard for people to hand over their "final" piece of work the day before the presentation as its so natural to just want to keep working on it and tweaking little details, but because it's the kind of thing that you can work on forever I did feel it was important to draw the line somewhere - and that line was drawn on Thursday. Later in the morning we were able to do a quick run through of our presentation and posted on convo asking people to watch and give us feedback, which was very helpful - especially as this was our first client project presentation. I also made sure to arrive early to the presentation space as I knew I would have to set up things like the owl camera/microphone and I wanted to pre-empt any technological difficulties.
Summary
I think the project went relatively well considering this was our first project and my project managing experience prior to this was essentially non-existent. However there are definitely areas the team could improve upon and thus future recommendations I would offer to upcoming PMs, such as thinking more about the "bigger picture"; ensuring that related parts of the project are appropriately linked; not splitting into dedicated sub-teams so early on; but the list really could go