Project Management Experiment #502849281

Okay, so it’s actually #1 but, you know, exaggeration. This week I served as project manager for a travel concierge website. My goal was to figure out how to bring out the best in my team and create a great website for the client. I was ready for the challenge.

The first challenge was a team member that wasn’t delivering. I needed color and font recommendations and after 2 days, we didn’t have any. At first, my response to her was with frustration because I was annoyed.com. My next response was to ask myself how I could get what I needed from her without the annoyance and frustration. I thought about what she was saying, “I’m confused, I don’t know, I’m stressed,” which to me meant she was doubting herself. Then I thought about what she liked, she liked shopping. I drafted an email to her and letting her know that both the client and I believed in her and liked her taste. That she should take it easy and pretend she was going shopping for colors. 40 mins after I sent that email, she responded with 4 different sample palettes that were amazing.

Now that that’s taken care of we can move on. Every morning, I started with a scrum meeting by going around the room and asking where everyone was with their assignments and what they need to complete their tasks then I would update the scrum board accordingly. I liked this part, it helped me to understand where we were and helped me figure out the next steps. One thing that came up during these meetings was a case to too many chefs in the kitchen. While the developer was working on the site, someone else was going in and making changes that confused the developer. My first method of dealing with this was telling the other person that she was not allowed to make changes to the site. I then needed to restrict her access as her changes were causing more work and confusion for the developer. Well, that did not go down smoothly. She was upset that her rights were restricted and decided she no longer wanted to work on the project. I was definitely disappointed in her response but I decided that it was more important to have a secure site and one person working on the developing. Thankfully, the rest of the team supported me and stepped up to do the tasks she had been assigned. From this, I learned that a bad actor on your team is worse than a competitor and steps needs to be taken always to protect the work.

Even though I had daily scrum meetings, it became clear to me that tasks weren’t as clear as I thought they were. This happened when I couldn’t be there in the morning and my team needed to work on their own til I got there. I received panicked slack messages from the team members, new client deadlines, no response from one team member about their status and just a general sense that they were lost. Fortunately, I was able to respond to some of the texts and get back an hour earlier than I expected. After going around the table to find out what everyone was working on, I learned that some people weren’t actually communicating to me the fullness of where they were and what they needed. One member wasn’t doing what she was assigned and they had been given new instructions about what they should be doing. What a mess to unpack. I decided that instead of redirecting them, I would help as much as I could to get their tasks completed. From this, I learned that sometimes when a team member says they’re clear or they don’t need any help. I should press and ask more detailed questions so we are both clear about what is expected.

Additionally, after this project I have learned that it’s important to learn the strengths and weaknesses of my team members and build on their strengths. Understand the different communication styles of  my team so that I can communicate with them effectively. Listen to the different ideas of the team and encourage them to try new things which means I need to create an environment where good ideas can flourish. Identify and eliminate bad actors from the team as early as possible, quality is always better than quantity. All things considered, we delivered a functional website on time. It wasn’t always pretty and smooth but it was a wonderful learning experience. I look forward to more experiences as a project manager.