Surprise! You're The New Project Manager

 

I have recently been tasked with taking over a project team.

When you are coming into a pre-existing team dynamic as an outsider, it's always tough.  If you are new to project management it can be a nightmare.  Let me share with you some of the things I am doing right away, and please offer your own best practices and questions in the comments.

One of the first things I did is made a list of initial items I need to know about:

• Who are the people on the project team?
• What are their roles?
• Who is my sponsor?
• Who are the key stakeholders?
• What are the relative levels of engagement and influence of the key stakeholders?
• Who are the key collaborators my team will work with?
• What is the current state of communication on the team? (meetings, status, etc)
• What is the scope and requirements of this work?
• What milestones are coming up on the schedule?
• What risks are we tracking, and are there any new ones keeping the team up at night?
• Do we have any current issues that need to be addressed?

In my environment, the System Engineering and Project Management is rather formal, so I had the benefit of being able to absorb material in Operations Concept documents, software design documents, and interface documents in order to get some basic knowledge of the technical context.

Over the next week I'll be meeting with the team members and implementing my standard process of structured, weekly one-on-ones and continuous feedback model.

So what do you think?  Did I ask all the right questions, or am I leaving something out?

Image by Kapungo via Flickr