Project Management Help Pt3: Workflows

In My Humble Opinion
1

Thank you guys for helping me so far with all of your advice.

I am a Jr. Project manager at a company that has created a new and unguided division. We are left to fend for ourselves. Our business development manager gets the business, I manage the projects and our developers build the product (websites).

We are running into a very big problem. I cannot seem to effectively monitor everyone’s time to keep us on track with the budget. It is all manual. We do have a system that has a “workflow” system called Celoxis.

I am wondering if my idea has any merit:

I think to keep us on track with the budget and to give the guys an idea of what they have to work on without meeting about it every morning, I should take a website project, divide it into the milestones defined in the proposal and assign parts of it to each person involved in a workflow. The result would be a place where a developer could go to see what they owe for the project period and start knocking off the milestones.

Part of this process, since some projects can go on for months, would be a way for the developer to submit a quick weekly report that gives me an idea of what they worked on, their progress, and how much time they spent on it. This will help me track our progress weekly, while giving the team a little more freedom in terms of workload. Right now we have been assigned a list of tasks on a weekly basis to complete and I think it’s getting too micromanaged.

Another part of this workflow would be a PRD or Scope definition that defines each milestone in detail, so more specific tasks could be created by the developer involved in the project.

Is this a good idea? Was I clear with my ideas?

Basically I am just trying to come up with ways to make it easier to project if we are on the right track or not in terms of budget without asking each team-member how long they spent on a particular item every day.

Any suggestions on what to read, etc would be appreciated as I have been left to figure out how to effectively manage projects on my own.

2

Who’s assigning the task - if you are the PM that’s your job.

I don’t know what scale you are working on. Managing workflows is important on largescale projects - on small scale projects you manage the project. Managing the developers’ time against budget isn’t the same as managing risks, issues, and what they have accomplished. The latter should be handled by them reporting to you and you putting the item into the risks and issues log (e.g. development on this phase will take X longer than scheduled because…). What they’ve accomplished could be a simple checklist of tasks you gave them with space for “distractions”.

If you have Project server you can use that for time tracking, or set up something where they can log time against the project online.
A basic link about Agile project Management, including handling teams and managing work.

The other problem you will have is that all PMs have their own approach - ask six a question and you’ll get a dozen answers.