I’m very recently a manager. This is great! But the one thing that keeps tripping me up is keeping track of everything everyone is working on. Among my team, there are probably 20-25 active projects at all times. Plus I average about 50 work emails / day, of which 10-15 need an immediate or nearly immediate response.
…I’m drowning in this. Too many damn things to keep track of. I’ve had a few too many discussions with customers and the higher-ups where I’ve been like, “Wait, what is this project? Who is the customer? What are we trying to do?”
Anyone have a good method for organizing a large number of technical projects? Computer/digital/app is fine, but I’m also fine with regular old pen and paper. I just need a reliable way to keep projects organized.
…Or am I deficient in not being able to keep 20+ active projects in my head?
Create a page for EACH project, with specific columns related to that project.
You can add/delete columns and data as necessary - but that way, when someone asks, “How is Project 8 coming along?” you can flip to the page in Excel and see exactly what has been completed, notes from those team members, what needs to be filed or researcher or worked on - plus due dates and milestones, etc.
Be sure to back these files up regularly, but as long as you have it all at your fingertips, it is easy to “brush up” on the status of each project as those team members are walking down the hall to meet with you, and you know exactly what to ask, who to praise and who to tell to get off their ass and do something.
Also, perhaps when things are slow on Friday afternoon, you can review them all and send out the appropriate email follow ups for them to complete on Monday to update you with the status.
I have to keep track of over 200 projects. I created a spreadsheet “Master Plan” that gives an overview of all the projects. I capture the code name of the project, the item being altered, a link to a picture of the finished product, a brief description of the project, the lead manager’s name, projected sales, expected completion date. and Next Steps. I also have a column that is coded green, yellow and red, which indicates if the project is on track for being finished on time. This data allows me to easily sort the projects in various ways. The 3 sorts that I use the most are Expected Completion Date, On/Off track, and Item being altered.
There is also a link that will take you to that project’s dedicated sheet, where I keep all of my detailed notes/information/Next Steps.
Maybe not helpful, but:
Simplify Everything.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Prioritize and stick to the list.
And yes, DELEGATE whatever you can.
I’m remembering the four D’s of paperwork: Do, Delegate, Delay, and Dump. Sometimes it pays to “delay” things that don’t need immediate attention; they are often cancelled.
I ask my reports for periodic (weekly or monthly as appropriate to the type of projects). Keep it really simple so that it is basically a list of bullet points, just an email or a word doc from each person, should only take about 10 minutes to complete
HEALTHCARE EXCHANGE ROLLOUT
-Deadline: Due to be online by 01-Oct
-Risks: Accounting has not approved CapEx
No in-house testing scheduled
Congress
Status: Unlikely to be ready by deadline
Keep it really easy because people WILL hate doing their status report, so it needs to take just a few minutes. Encourage them to put on there anything they are working on, as it will make sure you know what your people are doing. For instance, in my company we are very laid back about reporting structures, so another manager may ask for help from one of my folks (lots of specialized expertise). We deal well with that, but this makes sure that I know that John Doe has been asked for something I might not have known about. And, if I think it is too much, I can speak to the other manager about prioritizing, re-assigning, etc.
You can “sell” this to your reports by pointing out it makes sure they get credit for anything they are working on, and protects them because if they are held up by something beyond their control (that document has been in QA for review for three months and they won’t get it done!) you have the ability to step in and protect your employee. After all, the delay is QA’s fault.
Finally, look at AMA (American Management Association). THey have lots of good courses, including some for first time managers.
Don’t be overwhelmed. My experience is that any new assignment comes with a period of “OMG what have I got myself into?” but a while later it all seems second nature.
Yes, DELEGATE, DELEGATE, DELEGATE. The Straight Dope Message Board is your friend! (ETA: I mean, the OP’s friend, of course.)
Just post your 50-or-so e-mails-a-day right here on the SDMB, and the Teeming Millions will crowdsource all your management for you! You’ll get management galore, with umpteen recommendations (mostly conflicting) on each topic from which you may choose. We have lawyers, doctors, accountants, and HR types all at your service, along with all the programmers, mathematicians, truck drivers, and airline pilots to do your dirty work. You can even get colonoscopy advice for your entire staff.
Have a weekly status meeting either for each project or even one big two hour staff meeting with five minutes on each project. Three slides - an overview slide, a current status slide, and a current issues and risks slide - maybe a forth slide - what they anticipate doing between now and the next meeting. (I am NOT a powerpoint fan, but its ideal use is this). The advantage of a big meeting - everyone has five minutes, five minutes ONLY on a timer, is that the staff may see project synergies - and they MIGHT even understand why they can’t steal resources from Bob right now (but if they give Bob a little help, they might be stealable in two weeks).
Each project gets a website. The website should have the current project status powerpoint featured prominately, and its first page should be a scope statement and current status, and then the additional project documentation should be linked to. Emails asking or telling you about a project should have a link to the project web site so you can refresh yourself.
Each project should get a logo. If you have a sense of humor and the company does as well, just let the project managers pick something - the Fennic Foxes from ZooBorns, Homer Simpson, the Apollo Landing - whatever - but each one is unique. This gives you a visual clue - “oh, this is the Homer project, I remember…”
Finally, be honest. “This many projects is overwhelming to catch up on all at once, I need you to always link to your project page and that page needs to have the scope and status on it - that way I won’t mix up your projects with someone elses and you’ll get better and faster decisions from me.”
As a project manager, you need to document it all anyway. So if all you are doing is documenting it in a format that is easy for the manager to get to with a once a week update of the documents. It takes fifteen minutes per project you manage, once the templates are in place. For the five minute reviews - if you have twenty projects you are talking about taking a little over an hour and a half once a week. If your organization doesn’t have the time to spend an hour and a half once a week making sure all the projects are moving along and looking for synergies between them, you are doing it wrong.
Seriously, the company I used to work for, this was the BEST thing - IT wide we’d only do it once a month with the CIO and only for projects that had $250,000+ budgets - but it would result in a flurry of phone calls post meeting of “hey, I have this, it sounds like you can use it.” Or “I’m doing this, do we have overlap?” With my VP it was weekly, and projects with over $50k budgets, and my director and I would do it weekly for all the projects in my portfolio (I was a portfolio manager). I worked closely with my project managers on all of the projects so I could answer his questions on projects I wasn’t the manager on.
I’ve got a couple of questions.
What are you expected to do in the way of managing these projects? Keeping track, in the sense of tracking deliverables etc., is a lot easier than managing.
How many people report to you? What kind of hierarchy is in your organization? Does each project have a manager?
Are these really 20 different projects, or are they really five different projects broken into 20 pieces for funding reasons?
Weekly project meetings sounds like good advice, until you consider that this would use up over half of your week, with no time for email or getting ahead of the game or responding to the many requests you will probably get from your boss. If you clump them, you might cut it down a lot, and you might also encourage synergy across projects.
Above all, standardize. If you get project reports from everyone - and you should - make sure they are in exactly the same format, so you don’t spend time editing them to fit together.
Delegation is good advice, but you need to make sure that the person you delegate to is reliable. If you are not sure, you can monitor, but you can only monitor so many people at a time.
Reuse saves money in product development. It also saves gray hairs in project management.
I think what you need is a database, or at least a series of Excel worksheets to track projects. When I was a manager, we had more than 50 projects that all overlapped each other through the year – I had to juggle them amongst six team members, two people on each project. We started with Excel spreadsheets, and I tasked a couple employees with figuring out how to set up a FileMaker database. They programmed a bunch of reports for me to run and made everyone’s job a bit simpler by automating many old manual processes, including tracking deadlines and assignments.
I maintain well over 100 web pages, and don’t go crazy since I automated their generation. When data changes, a new page is generated. When we get a new instance, a new page is generated and the html page which points to these pages is automatically updated.
This is custom coding. On the other hand, if you have an internal wiki capability, you can get the project leads to update the pages themselves.
I ask, because I’ve learned that the first month, maybe 6 weeks of any job change involving capacity stretch may have a tendency to feel terrifying, overwhelming or plain impossible. If you’re still in that window, what you’re going through is probably quite normal.
Some good advice in this thread so far, thank you all.
…though I will say that I Excel with the best of them, our projects don’t necessarily break down easily into columns and tables. But I do need to think about how this could be done.
I’m supposed to pretty much know everything current on each project. As in, salesperson calls, I pick up the phone, I need to be able to talk intelligently about whatever the hell they bring up. Deliverables is a good idea, but it’s more than that - it’s customer complaints, current customer order patterns, customer history, customer visits made, work needed going forward (that one is a deliverable, I suppose)
3 people currently report to me. I expect 4 once I speak to my manager tomorrow (there was a guy who was told either transfer to my department or “we’ll miss you”); his deadline was a few days back. I really wish my manager had told me by now. We’ll see. I’m hoping for 5-6 next year, we are really understaffed.
These are 20 unique projects at all times, minimum. We are a specialty manufacturer/supplier, so we have 300+ active products, customer issues at maybe 10, going after new business at like 15.
Yep, I’m finding this already. Just the email and meetings eat 30% of my week. Travel eats probably 50%. That leaves me 20% to do actual work; I (used to be) a lab guy, I have zero time anymore for the lab, which kills me. Even now, I’m getting simple projects that would take a small amount of lab time (~4 hours) and I want to do them myself, I just don’t have the time. Like I said, I need more people, my boss agrees I need more people, I’m just waiting for them to pull the trigger so we can hire.
This is excellent advice. And honestly, I need to do it. I’ve been putting it off, spending a couple of hours each week cobbling together reports. Why I’m putting it off - I’m fairly young, my reports (at least 2 of 3) are fairly old. And resistant to new formatting, technology, hell - even fonts. I need to broach this gently, but I’m still mulling over how to do this. I do need to pull the trigger on this though, agreed.
I really have nobody to delegate the management stuff to. I was promoted, hopefully for my good qualities, but realistically also because my boss wanted to delegate some stuff too.
Most of the projects the programmers who work for my team get assigned last a few days. What you propose only makes sense for things above a certain size and duration.
ETA: a website to document a 4-hour project? Doesn’t make sense.