5 Ways a Project Manager Can Contribute in a Team
Great project managers and team members share more than just roles. They are ambitious, passionate about their day and curious about improving their contribution to teams. How you work is just as important as the work itself.
1. Products are best delivered in iterations. Don’t focus on creating a perfect scenario for the team. Instead, try to assess what a first iteration of a product needs in one set, short period - optimally one to four weeks - with dedicated time from subject matter experts.
“ When we think about progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. These big wins are great - but they are relatively rare. The good news is that even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. ”
2. The team needs to meet regularly to analyse findings and agree on next steps. Face to face trumps all. All members of the team should be held accountable for their specific responsibilities, come prepared and contribute within their domain. Don’t wait until the next meeting to gather updates. The best meetings are used to summarise the progress and allow the team to debate. During the interval, you can support the completion of smaller tasks. You can help bridge gaps.
“ Collaboration improves when roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood - when individuals feel that they can do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste too much energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focus on the task.”
3. Timeline, budget and considerations are reassessed in loops to balance expectations of when a goal should be reached. Those responsibilities are linked to the engineering team by the roadmap and to the operational teams by all activities necessary to get the product to service. Use notions like burn rate, or the velocity of the team to assess the impact of a small piece of work within the total budget or predetermined timeline.
“The Map is not the Terrain. Don’t fall in love with your plan. It’s almost certainly wrong. Only plan what you need to. Don’t try to project everything out years in advance. Just plan enough to keep your teams busy.”
4. Once consensus is reached on the solution, the team should analyse how requirements integrate with default capabilities already available. Minimal custom build will prove invaluable as the customer base grows and the team is able to remain agile. No code solutions can be sufficient for the first iterations of a new initiative, and you should get everyone comfortable with having to rebuild things as you progress in your journey. It’s all a balancing act.
“Individuals are willing to accept outcomes they dislike if they believe that the process by which those results came about was fair. Most people want their opinions to be considered seriously but are willing to accept that those opinions cannot always prevail.”
5. The success of the build will depend on the collaboration within teams. Engagement is critical in creating and sustaining a solid chain. Vision, Strategy, Engineering, Design, Marketing, Data, Pricing, Delivery, Quality Assurance, Finance, Legal, Compliance, Security, they are all essential in ensuring the success of a product.
“Study after study has shown that teams are more creative and productive when they can achieve high levels of participation, cooperation, and collaboration among members. But interactive behaviours like these aren’t easy to legislate. Our work shows that three basic conditions need to be present before such behaviours can occur: mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity (a feeling among members that they belong to a unique and worthwhile group), and a sense of group efficacy (the belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart).”
