What should the project manager do?

After chatting with a project manager for a while, he said, "I am very tired in the project. Besides project management, there are many other things that need to be done by me, I feel that there are fewer tasks assigned to myself and fewer jobs. I am a project manager and want to set an example." I was surprised at the time. How could this happen to a project with five people? So I drew him a matrix like this:

The image of this topic is as follows:

I said, "Look, what are you doing ?" He said, "Yes, I don't think I should do anything! It's really dizzy !"

If a project team of more than four project members is still working on specific tasks and writing specific documents, I think there must be a problem with this project. Because you have spent too much time on the details, it means that you are not paying attention to the more important things.

In my opinion, for a project team with more than four project members, the project manager should do only three things:

1. Overall project plan and control

Planning is just a means of control. You must be clear about the overall stage of the project and how to quickly advance when there is a problem with the project progress. I usually list large periodic plans and key requirements. For detailed plans of specific stages, I will arrange a project member to take charge of the tasks at this stage as I have no energy. If you have any questions, we can discuss it, but you must have a pair of eyes staring at it.

In addition, one of my commonly used methods is document templates, which can be used to control the content and quality of projects. This is very useful. If you only understand the document template as a format, it will be boring, document templates are the establishment of the framework. Sometimes they even need to be refined to three levels of directories, specific tables, specific problems and fields. The degree of detail depends on the importance, this job is very important to the project manager and takes a lot of time. Of course, for me, I will not write one by myself. Instead, I will discuss it, draw a draw, let the project members prepare the first draft, and then conduct a round of discussion, through discussion, you can understand the process and content requirements.

2. communicate and coordinate resources

Communication is too important. Some people say that the work of project management is communication, communication, and re-communication. That's right. There are too many project managers who need to communicate with each other. Customers, project members, companies, family members, and a bunch of people don't have to spend time solving the problem? Therefore, you must spend a lot of time communicating. How long have you spent communicating with the customer? For a project manager, ideally, you can open the door of any customer's office to chat at any time, except for the Secretary's archive (Mail and written materials should be used for the Secretary's archive ). A good project manager can achieve this in 2-3 weeks. The reason behind this status is that you can help your customers solve problems or give them help and inspiration. Otherwise, you will be kicked out when you get in.

Another important task, of course, is to coordinate resources. There are a lot of content in this regard. The most important thing is, if you find that all the members of the project team are confused or economic, you can find another solution, find someone else, customers, companies, and outsiders. This work is difficult and cumbersome, So we often need to be self-reliant and hard-working. The order of Coordination resources must be: the order of customers, their own companies, and external resources, which is complicated and troublesome.

3. Handle events outside of the project

A very important task for a project manager is to control the scope of the project. How can this problem be solved? Dare to say "no" to the customer, but this "no" is not a mess. If you refuse the customer, you will reject yourself. This is far from an artistic question, but whether it can help the customer solve the problem from the standpoint of the customer. Even if the project cannot be well solved, you need to tell the customer how to solve the problem and give a way out, instead of blocking it back. On this basis, we will analyze what we can do under the constraints of project time, cost, quality and scope. It's not a simple task to provide customer solutions, from reference documents to operational projects and integrating resources. You need to invest a lot of energy, instead of letting project members spend too much time on this. In this sense, the project manager is responsible for allowing project members to work in a relatively secure project environment.

What we should do is to fully mobilize the capabilities of project members and involve them in the project management process. It is by no means an shirking of responsibility and is good for project work and personnel training, if the project manager's eyes only focus on the project itself, it is difficult for the project to have good results.