At the time this blog post is being written, I am halfway through our first external client project as project manager (PM). We are working with a family-owned egg production company that has scaled tremendously in the past 70 years of business, and, as a southerner, I was pretty excited to work on a project in the agriculture sector. Does egg production count as agribusiness?
So far the project has been going well from my point of view. Aside from some of the nervousness that I can sense among my peers—probably because this is our first “real” work assignment—I have full faith that they can deliver what the client needs. As PM, my responsibility is to be the glue that holds the project together; with that, some of the ways I’ve tried to make every work period productive are:
- Centralize the schedule and assigned tasks in one excel sheet so no one is ever confused about the agenda or what they should be working on.
- Liaise with the client and ensure all communications between the team and the client are ultra transparent!
- Check in with team members one-on-one to discover challenges or issues that I can help rectify. From personal/emotional obstacles to technical ones.
- Buying snacks! Nobody in my team will go hungry.
Successes
One of the practices I implemented into the workflow was an anonymous Google Form, so that I can gauge the morale of the team and obtain feedback as a PM. Feedback is a pertinent facet of group work that is essential to growth, and, by anonymizing responses I can eliminate any subconscious biases that may have appeared if this data was collected with names attached. Below are testimonials from some of the peers about what’s going well:
- “Doing a great job checking in with everyone”
- “I think the feedback that [redacted] got last week was noted and I can tell [it was implemented] through the way the week is progressing”
- “I think Jalil is managing the engagement professionally and promptly. Also his opinions/clarifications on work is a a plus as well”
Areas for Growth
On the flip side of the positive feedback, I also got some critiques of how I can improve! Luckily, we are only halfway through the week so I still have the opportunity to implement some of the suggestions that my peers offered.
- “Maybe announcing the times of things out loud too b/c sometimes I'm so locked in that I don't look at the tv. so for example, "morning guys, work until XX and I'm going to do a check in at XX" and also like "I'll be going around in XX minutes" “
- “Asking clients questions sooner in order to get a response faster”
- “Checking preferences before procuring snacks”
Altogether, my experience as PM has been challenging and rewarding, but I’ll earmark the reward aspect for now, until we present our products to the client :)