How I Work: Managing Projects from the Moon

It might as well be the moon, anyway! I’ve worked for MSIS on the other side of the Earth, nearly 8000 miles away from Ann Arbor, for just shy of seven years now. My day is your night, so we work almost completely opposite schedules, and I have only four overlap hours each week where we could have real-time exchanges. Like many of you, however, managing projects is one aspect of my job, and - in the spirit of teaching and learning from each other - I thought I’d give you a flavor for how I approach it. Some of this has been influenced by me being a teleworker, but most of it is just my own personal style, and I’m hoping you find all of it applicable to you. If you think I should be doing something differently, though, or if you want to ask me a question about my approach, please leave a comment below and we’ll stir up some conversation.

Manage a Team of One

Before I define work for others, I need to be able to define it for myself...

1. Self-start, understand what I need to achieve, set my own goals, and see them to completion. Don’t wait for someone else to spoon-feed me.
2. Spend some time planning each Monday so that the week is filled with meaningful activities. Sketch out more project stories than I think I can handle just in case I surprise myself (the same goes for any stories I sketch for others). If I have ticket work, know which ones I need to stay on top of. Prep some career development tasks to move forward on in the event that I find myself with a free moment without story or ticket work.
3. If I ever find myself procrastinating, bored, or hiding from particular work, I’ll talk to my Product Owner and/or supervisor about it. It could be a sign that the work isn’t actually worth doing or it isn’t yet defined well enough.

Spice Up Inception

When I start a project and whip up an Inception Deck, I tend to make these enhancements...

1. Help bring my project to life by including extra slides of prototype logos, potential product names, or imaginary ads.
2. Put images of people’s faces, not their names, on the stakeholder map. It personalizes the map, allows me to arrange the stakeholders on it more quickly, and helps me remember who’s on it.
3. When I reach the end of the deck, before I pick a t-shirt size, I write story candidates for the entire project. I make the stories as small (fewer points) and discrete (fewer key results / acceptance criteria) as I can, group them into iterations, then tally the iteration story points. I end up with a better t-shirt size estimate and I’m able to use those stories to get my project rolling as soon as it is cleared for takeoff. (I don’t stick rigidly to them, though - projects need to adapt as work unfolds - so I evaluate story candidates each week and add, modify, or delete as necessary.)
4. If the project feels too big, I add a slide to propose ways of breaking it up.

Stay in Touch

As my project marches onward, I keep connected to involved and interested people...

1. Find my audience at the beginning of the project by writing to customers and staff about what I’m doing and seeing who’s interested.
2. Mine my audience for feedback with interviews and surveys, then share the results with them so they know their input mattered.
3. When I need to get the word out about something, like a product I’ve launched or a survey I want people to participate in, I use a diverse array of media outlets: printed posters, digital signs, MSIS website carousel images, and newsletters like NCRC Community News and Announcements. Michael Warden, Susan Topol, and the MSIS Communications Committee are all great resources for ideas on this.
4. Update my Product Owner every day with a brief list of the project team’s progress on current stories. That gives them a sense the project’s momentum, allows them to make quick course corrections, and lets them give accurate status updates to anyone who asks. I do this through an Asana task that my Product Owner follows, but an email would do just fine.
5. Provide weekly progress updates to my “engage closely” stakeholders. I like to do this with a light presentation - just 3 or 4 slides - that covers what we completed in the week and what’s next on the horizon.
6. Ask my “keep informed” and “check with periodically” stakeholders how frequently they would like to receive progress updates (at weekly, every-other-week, or monthly intervals) and provide those updates accordingly (also through a light presentation).
7. Whenever a project artifact is drafted (design document, policy, process, learning materials, etc), or new piece of technology implemented, I invite my whole project team to review it and provide feedback.
8. Involve all the members of my project team in my weekly planning. Make sure they are available to work on the stories I assign and make sure they have a chance to influence them.
9. If I need to talk to someone in-person, but I’m pressed for time or separated from them physically, I ask someone to be my legs. I could ask fellow teammate Monica, for example, to help me ask a question at a morning stand-up.
10. Look for people who are involved in similar initiatives around campus or more broadly in the industry, then reach out to them for a fresh perspective, to learn from their experience, or to find new avenues of collaboration. Procurement has helped me do this, for example, by recommending people to talk to based on RFI/RFQ/RFP submissions and responses.
11. What I don’t often do are project meetings, be they in-person or via teleconference. I believe they often produce less value than the time they consume, so I use them sparingly and only when I feel there is no adequate alternative.

Make Myself Laugh

I consciously look for opportunities to inject fun and humor into my project wherever I can. It helps me stay motivated, leads to increased creativity in my work, and hopefully sparks interest in others. For example…

1. I build my inception deck and stakeholder updates around a theme and sprinkle in chuckle-worthy images, videos, and/or language. Project named ‘Jolly Roger’? I’m definitely putting a reference to scurvy in there. Everyone likes scurvy!
2. I announce product releases, at least internally to MSIS, with comic strips, animated GIF sequences, or similarly whimsical publications.

Make Things Better

With each project I manage, I try to...

1. Do something better than I did it the last time
2. Do something better than MSIS currently does it
3. Do something that MSIS hasn’t done before
4. Do something that creates value right now (not just at the end of the project)
5. Teach someone how to do something
6. Improve someone’s life, either as a result of the work or simply by the way I treat them in our interactions

So there you have it - examples of the way I work in one aspect of my job. But how about you? Do you do something a little bit differently from others around you? Do you think someone could benefit from knowing? Write a blog post and tell us about it. We're ready and we're hungry.