Managing Small Projects.

Managing Small Projects. My own experience.

Are you tired of being busy as a bee? Are you your own worst enemy when it comes to achieving the deadline? I felt this heaps of times. I tried to analyze the causes of my failure and it appeared that they repeated from project to project and I made some conclusions:

1. I didn’t spend enough time for thinking and planning activities, and afterwards I had to reestablish requirements and redo incorrectly completed work. At the moment, I always assign about week or to for proper planning and setting expectations accordingly. It is also necessary to estimate the efforts needed for a project and evaluate potentially costly risks. First of all, I define the scope of a project which includes objectives (what the project should accomplish for the business) and deliverables (including features in and out of scope). Then I make scheduling and estimating. Usually I take each deliverable and break it down to separate the tasks needed to carry out each one. 2. One more mistake in managing small project is “overmanagement”. I faced it when was firstly appointed to be a Manager of a project with four person’s team. I interrupted in working process of each of my team , tried to anticipate all possible problems and didn’t do what I should - maintain lines of communication to the stakeholders and team, do my own investigation and concentrate on solving problems when people bring them up. 3. When I saw the dreadful results of my “activity”, I changed the tactic, but went the other limit which is called “undermanagement”. I didn’t monitor the work of my team, I was totally absorbed in my own development so that even hadn’t time for resolving problems and communicating with the stakeholders and team. To avoid this, the manager should have fewer tasks, in my example of a four person team, 50% of the manager's time should be devoted to management. 4. As we were constantly run out of time and trying to hit a project deadline I sometimes didn’t organize every day team meeting. It resulted in doing things that were not needed by the project. On the contrary, daily follow-up with the team helped to catch problems early. I understood, that if we don’t have possibility to communicate face to face, I can send plans via email, or I can give a print out of the plan to my project team members. You should always remember that talking to team members daily encourages them to share their challenge early, not wait for the weekly team meeting. 5. Another drawback of my projects was a (отсутствие формального завершения работы) lack of formally ended projects. I didn’t consider it necessary to celebrate milestones and completion, as a result my team missed opportunities to capture learning from successes or failures. Having learned this lesson, now we celebrate the success as each deliverable is finished. This step is important as it gives a team a chance to feel proud about the accomplishment - a great morale comfort before the start of more work. We also make a summary report of what went well and what could have been improved on the project.

- Set goals; - Generate methods for achieving goals; - Create a plan for career development; - Analyze one’s week and strong sides; - Generate a celebration speech; - Choose a present for a friend; - and many other.

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