Crash goddamn course in product fucking management stat

In My Humble Opinion
1

I run a clean, tight, action-oriented meeting.

I keep people with egos on topic and constructive.

I am assertive, yet in a way that develops people rather than quashing them.

I can plan out complicated processes, both by myself and in collaboration with others.

I can facilitate communication between people who are having trouble communicating.

These are traits I exhibited which got me noticed for a management position.

When they began to suggest I might be moved up, I thought it’d be to some kind of assistant position, or anyway, something to get my feet wet in the realm of having actual formal power.

But no. Turns out I’m the director of an entire damned department.

No this doesn’t happen by magic. They offered and I accepted. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that. But exigencies and pressures made it difficult to do so, and I am ambitious, and they needed the answer fast, and I assumed they had good reasons for picking me, so I said yes.

Okay, so the above skills do help. But here’s something I’m terrible at. TERRIBLE at. I am the least organized motherfucker in the universe. And in this job there are seventy bajillion different little projects with due dates and processes that need to be revamped and maintained, etc etc.

I need to know how pros keep track of these things I WILL not remember from meeting to meeting, activity to activity, what all is supposed to be being done by this or that person. I WILL need to be using some kind of external aid to be my brain for me here. I think I can pull it off, but I need effective strategies and aids-to-cognition just for the whole business of making sure that with just a minute or two to prep sometimes, I can be reminded of everything relevant to this or that project–where there are seventy bajillion projects.

Right now I’m trying OneNote because I’m somewhat familiar with it. I’d really like the pages to be subdivisible into sub-pages, though. But on the other hand if I go to far with that, things would get unwieldy and I’d probably be doing something wrong. What do you use? Or is this not something any management type worth his or her salt should even be worrying about?

Second thing I’m terrible at–knowing how to find a balance between trusting people to do their job and poking at them to keep them at their job. I have in the past been too far in the trusting side, but this was basically okay because I wasn’t formally responsible for what other people were doing. But now I am.

What I’m doing right now is setting up meetings each Tuesday to meet individually with each of my reports (there will also be cases where I meet with all of them but I want private meetings in case someone’s falling down and I need to be able to talk to them frankly). At these meetings, I’ll be acting like I know all about everything they’re supposed to be doing and eliciting from them whether they’ve met benchmarks we set before, what challenges I can help out with, etc. If things seem to be getting late without enough progress, I can emphasize this to them and in some sense “escalate” the situation though to be honest I do not know what this will mean in practice in any partcular case. I will probably need to take that as it comes.

But anyway, I don’t know if this will constitute too much prodding or what.

I suppose each individual is different.

Well anyway I’m a bit at sea.

Teach me how to do this now! :smiley:

2

I’m thinking about using something that looks a lot like (I’ve now learned) a “story wall” from PM methods like “Agile.” But I’m having a hard time getting a real description of how that works anywhere online, just pictures and vague summaries. I basically get the idea, but would be interested in something more detailed, maybe case studies.

I know Agile etc is typically thought of as involving software development, and that’s not what I do, but the basic idea seems transportable to other contexts.

3

I am also not the epitome of being “detail oriented,” and I do not know that this is something I can change. I will just have to work around it. But any advice on this front is welcome as well.

(When I say I’m not too detail oriented, what I mean is I will sometimes skip an email for no actual good reason and then fail to come back to it later, and I will not see when, for example, numbers in a report are wrong (I’ll just kind of skim over them blithely assuming the person who put it together was accurate), things like that. I suppose now that I’m formally responsible for stuff, I may begin paying attention to things like that, but I won’t know that’s going to happen until it happens.)

4

Man, I would be scared spitless too. I don’t have a good answer for you, but I did do a google…

Good luck!

5

I would go to your superiors* and ask their advice. Don’t put it in “OMG, I can’t do this at all”, but more of a “my biggest challenges are … what do you recommend?” (and then do what they recommend.)

*Assuming you’re working for normal people and not grade-A back-stabbing assholes.

6

Yes, this is my approach so far, it’s good to see it confirmed by others.

7

I’m certainly not at such an elevated position (congratulations!), but I’ve been seeing increasing responsibility over the last three years, and just found out last week that I’m taking over a significant role in the coming months that will require even more time and project management skill. So, I will be watching this thread. However, here’s what I do now:

  1. I use a whiteboard to track the names of the major projects I’m working on so I have a daily visual cue.
  2. I have a notebook and keep detailed notes about actions taken or to be taken.
  3. After a conversation/meeting with key decisions, I will often ask the other person to email me a summary of what was decided or what my deliverables are. In some situations, I will email myself a summary of the meeting so I can keep it on file.
  4. I use the folder function in Outlook to organize by project so I have a record of what has/is being done.
  5. I use the Outlook calendar function to remind myself to do things. You can make it ‘free time’ so it doesn’t show up on your public calendar, and also make it private, so no one can see what that time block is related to.
  6. During meetings where I’m not actively involved, or during down time, I go back through my notebook and make a to-do list. I use a coloured flag sticker for each of my to-do lists (I do this about once every three or four weeks) and review them occasionally.
  7. My boss does this and it seems to help him: he has a small pack of post-it’s on his desk and he’ll make a note of short term tasks and put it right in front of his screens. Some times he has almost a dozen post-it’s in that space, but it’s a visual cue and he works through them as he has time.
  8. The biggest thing for me has been prioritization. Sometimes I don’t address items that don’t have a benefit to our strategic plan. It’s been hard for me to let go of the small stuff, but I honestly just don’t have the time any more. If possible, I’ll delegate it.

Hope that helps somewhat! Good luck. :slight_smile:

8

Get as assistant ASAP. Their job is to organize things.

If you can’t do that, don’t fuck around with do-it-yourself projects and learning on the job. Personally hire a business coach. It will cost some bucks, but you just a raise, right?

9

If it’s only about keeping your own stuff organised, an approach such as Getting Things Done might help.

If it’s about keeping the whole team appraised, then have a look at this previous thread featuring an equally overloaded new manager.

10

Good concept, but there’s a better way of going about it.
I’d suggest spreading them out over the week. When something pressing comes up, the first thing you’ll cut is the 1:1’s. It will create animosity for the last guy in the day, who keeps getting his pushed off because you’ve already spent x hours with cow-orkers but don’t have time for this one person. I’ve seen it happen.

11

Get yourself a nice spiral notebook. Whenever you have to jot something down, put it in there. Meeting notes? Put them in there. Anything at all you want to remember, put it in there. It’s all very well and good to enter things in a program and/or keep separate notebooks for each project, but having one central place to write down all the randomness will save your bacon over and over. If you don’t remember something, you can look back and you can review the last few pages to remind yourself of what’s going on. Anything that needs to be entered into your project management software can be done from the notebook. If a particular page pertains to a specific project and you need to refer to it separately from the notebook, just photocopy or scan it.

“Mark as unread” is your friend.

If you haven’t fully dealt with an email, mark it as unread so you know you have to go back to it.

Yes yes yes.

A general tip - when you’re saving documents on your drive, be absolutely FANATICAL about having them titled descriptively. Make your department do the same. I usually do it like “ProjectName - DocumentType - Date.” This will save you so much time and effort and make collaboration so much easier. If I don’t remember exactly where I put something, I just go to a higher-level folder and put the likely document type into the search box, and voila! On that same note, insist that everyone in your department title their emails descriptively.

This is a perpetual problem for any manager. I’d suggest just going ahead and asking people what level of supervision they work well with. What they say might not actually be what they need, but oftentimes it will be.

And make sure that people are comfortable approaching you and asking questions and/or asking you to review their work and/or provide feedback.

12

[bolding mine]

You don’t need to pretend to be omniscient.

Also, how many reports do you have? It may be better to do these catch-up meetings on a more informal basis.

13

I love the weekly one-on-one check in meeting. Some tips to make it more effective: have each of your staff members write an agenda beforehand and email it to you - but feel free to break away from the agenda if you feel you ought. The email can also include overall project updates, so you can use your meeting time for conversations and troubleshooting.

If you have staff members who feel resistant to these meetings, show them that they’re of use - ask questions to get beyond “everything’s fine” responses, like “what makes you say that?” or “how do you know we’re on track?.”

I think OneNote has some good features for managing workflow. Have you used MS Project? Some people love it, some hate it.

14

The best manager I ever worked for was also the first. It was a small software project with about six people working on it. Every morning we’d have a meeting that was only 5-10 minutes long. The manager kept a list of open issues. It may have just been an Excel spreadsheet with three columns; a description (just a sentence or two), what the next step was in solving it, and who was responsible for that.

So, one morning I might bring up a new issue, “I ran into a problem while trying to import data into the new database. There were a few items that failed the constraints on the new tables” And the manager would say “talk to Dave. He’s in charge of the legacy database that we’re importing from. Find out if he can resolve those failures and how he wants to be notified if any data fails to import in the future. Next?”

The next morning he’d ask “did you get what you needed from Dave?” And so an issue could be closed as quickly as that, or maybe Dave needed to investigate something further and the manager would make a note of what that was and keep the item alive until the next day. It just always kept things moving forward; I knew what I was working on, what the priorities were, who I could get answers from, and who needed answers from me.

I don’t know if that approach would work in all cases. It was a small project. It was also an internal project, what we were creating would only be used within the company. We had someone in the meetings who could say what they really needed the end product to do.
That reads a little odd, always referring to “the manager”, but his name was also Dave and I thought I’d try to avoid any confusion.

15

Where I work we use Jira.

16

The email-to-task flag is your friend. That’s how I keep track of all of the shit I actually have to follow up on.

I get maybe 20 emails that need a real response per day, and another 400 that just get skimmed or trashed immediately. If I were relying on read/unread status to remember to respond to stuff, I’d never remember everything.

17

Dang, that’s a good idea. I don’t use Tasks or flag emails, but I’m thinking I should.

18

I was on programming project where we had a big whiteboard. We had columns indicating major components that needed to be worked on, the rows were by the sub-group or programmer, and we used Post-Its to mark progress. If something was “blocked”, then it got a special color of Post-It (pink, I think), so it was very easy to see which programmer or sub-group was blocked. The Post-It had a very simple status message on it.

19

Just a brief update.

This is turning out to be my dream job.

I work with a group of people that enables my actual job description to be “stay out of the way and let people do their jobs.” I coordinate and facilitate. That’s actually what I do, not just what I say I do. My role isn’t (as I feared) to come up with all the ideas and “get” people in my department to do things. Instead it’s to let the ideas percolate up, watch as people magically get things done, make sure the rest of the organization is providing proper support to my guys, “manage upwards” (i.e. make sure the people I report to are as informed as they need to be to make the right decisions about us :wink: ) and run meetings where my main role is to ask pertinent questions. I LOVE asking pertinent questions.

I have a special task right now to get a lot of messy and confused practices codified into something more streamlined and clear. I love this too. And the way I’m approaching it (as just getting down on paper the best version of what “you guys have been doing all along anyway”) has elicited tons of buy-in for what I was afraid might be seen as an “imposition from above.”

The problem described in the OP of juggling all the balls has turned out not to be as intractable as I feared. OneNote basically does what I need. And because the people I work with are so competent and actually do things (I’m not used to seeing this!) the balls I’m juggling are very light and magically land where they’re supposed to land most of the time.

For a first time supervisory position, though I do think they launched me into this before my time,*( nevertheless this is turning out to be a really good experience.

I’ll write again next week with a different opinion after it all falls apart. :wink:

*Let me not forget I helped “them” “do this to me” by accepting the position…

ETA: I am really proud (proud enough to mention it here) of the fact that these guys are praising me behind my back. I overheard… The one praise that I really enjoyed was that I know how to run a productive, efficient meeting. That’s something that I think about myself too, and it’s not something I would have expected to be true before I actually started doing it about a year ago. Meetings get a bad rap. You just have to know when to have one, and how to keep it on task and action oriented. I have discovered that many people who run meetings don’t know how to do this. And it turns out I can. And I kind of like it. I would like a job where I was just doing that all day. I’m sure everyone else would too, which is the usual problem with dream jobs. :wink:

20

BTW the title of the op was supposed to say “project,” not “product”.