by Caryl Teh
Being a project manager can be daunting! You shoulder the responsibility of ensuring that your team is working together well enough to deliver their best work on time. You’re the tone-setter, the mediator, the point person.
While there is no single all-encompassing guide to help you become the best project manager ever, here are 3 things that could help boost your project management skills.
✓ Know the key terms
✓ Keep track of dependencies
✓ Centralise communication
1. Familiarise Yourself With Key Terms
Sometimes it seems like each new project has a language of its own. It’s important to familiarise yourself with those key terms so that you and your team can communicate effectively with each other.
Here are some common general project management terms to start building your glossary:
| Term | Meaning |
| Kickoff | The first meeting of the project team to discuss project goals, requirements, and more. |
| Scope | The details of exactly what’s included in the project. You’ll hear things referred to as “in scope” or “out of scope.” |
| Resources | What your team needs in order to complete the project. Resources can include people, budget, materials, equipment or software, space, and more. |
| Stakeholder | Anybody who has an interest in or will be impacted by the project. |
| Dependencies | Elements of a project that are tied together, ie. one can’t happen without the other. There are task dependencies and resource dependencies. |
| Critical Path | The longest path of dependent project activities. If a delay happens on your critical path, you run the risk of your entire project running behind schedule. |
| Milestone | A specific progress deadline within the project. |
2. Keep Track Of Dependencies
As mentioned above, there can be task and resource dependencies within a project. For example, you can’t edit your product video until it’s been recorded. That’s a task dependency. Or maybe the video recording software you need is being used by another team and isn’t available for you until February. That’s a resource dependency.
It’s important that your team identifies and accounts for these dependencies during the project planning process. That will help to set a more realistic timeline and avoid those frantic scrambles to adjust if a dependency sets you back.
3. Centralise Communication
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, centralise communication. All that project jargon and careful planning won’t be much help if your team’s communication is scattered between different messaging platforms, endless email threads, and random written or typed meeting notes.
Project management is a whole lot easier when you have a centralised project master. Google Sheets is a useful tool to get you there It should include things like:
(1) Overview
- Project title & objective
- Start & end date
- Link to a shared online folder containing all project documents, videos, or files
(2) Contact list of stakeholders and team members who are working on the project
(3) A calendar timeline
(4) Task tracker
- Task details / action items
- Person in charge
- Status (eg. WIP 20%, WIP 50%, WIP 80%, completed, approved, file uploaded)
- Remarks
This gives your entire project team a single source of truth where everybody on the team can immediately check the status of any ongoing task, and get the information and context they need.
We’ve only just scratched the surface, but we hope these tips make project management seem less daunting and help you manage your project team better. It’s a skill that takes time to develop, so ask your team for feedback on how you can improve and be patient with yourself. You can do it!
Source:
Trello
