3 Tips to Become a Great Project Manager

In this week's first email, we discussed an imminent problem that many project managers will face in 2024. It was about upcoming layoffs and performance optimization.

In the second email, I've summarized the top three reasons project managers need to level up their efficiency as soon as possible.

In this email, you'll learn the following:

1. How to dramatically increase your understanding of project management as a system.
2. How to generate additional value for the company where you work so that impact is undeniable.
3. How to ensure your boss and key stakeholders actually know about your achievements.

The problem is that most project managers don't have formal education. (But anyway, these schools and colleges don't teach practical skills required in the real world.)

So, you learned everything related to IT project management from the internet: articles, YouTube videos, and ebooks.

Unfortunately, lots of content is created by professional writers. They have zero hands-on experience in leading projects.

So, you often feel a lack of trust and confidence in those pieces of advice.

The three tips below come from practical experience. It was tested and proven many times.

Tip #1

This one is critical to improve the efficiency of your project management skills in the real world.

Likewise, it's the first step in improving processes and tools in an organization.

It might seem simple to you. But you need to start drawing!

First, you want to draw a project life cycle in the organization and industry where you work.

You want to focus on identifying phases. These are parts of the project where the nature of the work differs from one another. For example, designing a user interface (UI) vs. writing code to implement requirements.

This is critical for several reasons:

1. You can identify dependencies between phases and deliverables.
2. You can choose the correct set of processes and tools for each phase (based on the experts you work with).
3. You can identify major deliverables for a phase. This one is arguably the most important.

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As a result of this exercise, your brain will generate dozens of questions. I'm confident you'll find a lot of space for optimization.

And don't be like Martha from the previous email. You should NOT manage all aspects of a project the same way.

Second, you want to draw a diagram of the project management approach in your environment.

Understanding how information flows and transforms through processes and tools is critical.

You should end up with something like this:

This exercise will help you develop a big picture of project management. You'll notice bottlenecks and inefficiencies—for example, places where you have to copy-paste and edit information manually.

Obviously, these are your opportunities to generate additional value for the organization. However, there are more efficient ways to do that! Let me explain.

Tip #2

Ron is a project manager in the same company where Martha worked. (yeah, you should have read the previous email🤔).

Unlike Martha, Ron was NOT fired. There was a strong reason!

Recently, he finished another project. Like many other projects in this organization, Ron faced a recurring problem: At one stage of the project, many defects appeared, and the QA team should have caught that.

Unlike other managers, he decided to find the root cause of the problem. To make a long story short:

• Ron analyzed performance data (unlike many other PMs, he diligently collected that data).
• He created a tool to eliminate the ambiguity that causes the defects. In essence, it's a spreadsheet. Nothing fancy.
• He presented the tool to all his PM colleagues. One of them used the tool on her project and got the same benefits.

As a result, Ron fixed the root cause of a problem that haunted a dozen other projects.

Ron generated additional value for the organization. He did it the right way, which we'll discuss in just a moment.

But here's a catch:

You can generate value in a much simpler way. Here are the top three examples.

First, you can teach others. You don't need to be the most experienced PM in the company to teach. You can teach all people who are just a few steps behind you in professional development.

Teaching is a highly visible activity:

1. You invite your boss to your events.
2. You record your training sessions and share them.
3. You can also share slide decks and documents.

There are a lot of reusable and valuable artifacts when you teach in the workplace environment.

Remember this: There's always someone who will benefit from your teaching effort.

OK, teaching is not for everyone. I get it.

Here's a second one:

For many project managers, finishing the project on time and within budget is the primary goal. However, for the company, it's not. Your company wants to make money.

So, the secret here is to hire entry-level engineers. That will reduce the costs of the project and will increase the profit margin for the company.

The challenge is that your project management approach should be efficient enough to accommodate the needs of inexperienced people.

(Your leadership approach plays a huge role here. You need to know how to motivate inexperienced people to perform exceptional work)

The third way to generate additional value is to help your boss. You can simply ask what's on their plate. Just like you, they have projects they need to finish successfully. But they are mostly internal ones.

Having an excellent professional connection with your boss is never a bad idea.

Tip #3

Here's the secret:

No one cares about your job responsibilities.

You get your salary for fulfilling the main responsibilities. But you get promotions and salary raises for achievements and the additional value you generate.

Likewise, recruiters and interviewers are not interested in your responsibilities in another company when you are looking for a new job.

That's because the practical implementation of those responsibilities is entirely different in different companies.

That's why you want to start collecting achievements (relevant to a project manager). You can use them to show your impact on the organization.

But how can you do it without appearing like a bragger?

Whenever you want to show a new achievement to your boss, create a retrospective meeting to share your lessons learned. Or run a case study to show the results you achieved on your project.

Processes do not improve in a big-bang fashion. Instead, it's better to have small but regular improvements.

This way, you share your lessons learned and help others. At the same time, you highlight your successes.

As with teaching others, this approach generates a lot of visible artifacts. People will remember them (or even use them).

So, for example, you can process your performance data and compile a set of practical recommendations for future projects.

And here's a PRO tip. You can engineer your achievements. Moreover, you should be intentional to create achievements that build your resume.

It's time for you to become a great project manager.

The fact is you need to become a great project manager ASAP. But I almost hear you ask these two questions:

1. What does it mean to be a "great" project manager?
2. What is the path to becoming a great PM? Is it PMP certification or something else?

We'll continue this email series on Monday, and I'll break it down for you. So, stay tuned.

🇺🇦 Dmytro Nizhebetskyi

IT PM School

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P.S. There will also be an important announcement on Monday; you don't want to miss it. ;)

P.P.S. If you have any questions about what we covered this week, please reply to this email. Let's discuss it.