Hanh VuPrincipal Project Manager| solo.ioChurchville, Md, United States
Hi all,
If you were a PM with too many projects to look after and keep on track, getting additional experienced PMs to share the project load is is not an option, but you do have access to administrative resources and some project coordinating resources, what would you do in terms of delegation so that you can increase your own bandwidth to deal with the too many projects?
It's the situation I found myself in currently. I'm currently juggling 3 software development projects of varying sizes, in varying stages. But there are at least that many more that needs project management effort from me. When I said I can't take on more projects without dropping the balls somewhere, I'm told I need to figure out how to delegate some of what I do to others, so that I could "take on" more projects, while keeping my eyes on all of them.
It's a challenge I'd like to meet. I'm still trying to formulate my own ideas, but I would love to know your thoughts and suggestions.
I believe Hanh is reluctant to delegate project management tasks to people that have no domain knowledge as she thinks they can't handle such tasks. Am I wrong Hanh?
For Project Managers with no domain knowledge project management is primarily administrative work (keeping track of things, reporting, scheduling meetings, taking notes, facilitating decision making process, etc). When working with the team these PMs are limited on keeping track of the progress and are unable to lead. They can't even understand the terminology used by the team members. They only care if a task has been completed or not. Nothing more.
PMs with domain knowledge like Hanh can take a more active role in leading the project team asking the team members pertinent questions and making judgements about the work that is being performed. PMs with domain knowledge probably consider impossible managing a project when you have no domain knowledge and that's why they are probably reluctant on delegating work to people with no technical expertise. This is my opinion. Saving Changes...
Hanh VuPrincipal Project Manager| solo.ioChurchville, Md, United States
Hi Milena, Deepa, Adrian, Deepesh, Keith and Luis,
What a stimulating discussion! Thank you for you input. Many of you hit the nail in the head.
I manage a small in-house developer team. The team itself is 2-person short of staff. Additionally, because of the lack of adequate PM support so far, some of the developers have had to do the lead work in smaller projects. But my manager would like to shift technical lead/facilitation work on to me to ease the burden on the developers (because they are just as swamped). I am both the PM and BA in all projects I work on, there is no help on that front :(.
It is very true that there are many aspects of the PM work that i'm not doing, partly because it's not needed in my roles (such as cost and budget calculation, forecasting and reporting), but mostly because I simply do not have the time. I do JUST enough of documentation, meetings and reports to keep people the core team and key SHs informed and moving forward. Well sometimes, what I thought to be enough, isn't quite enough, but I adjust as needed.
The PC and admin staff can't lead a software development project the way I do. I know, because we tried. It does turn out much like what Adrian described So here I am looking for other ways to spread the workload with what resources we have. Many of the concrete suggestions in this thread are very helpful. I'll add them to my thinking pot. thank you. I note the suggestion to organize myself, true THAT! And observation of the effectiveness of a PM without domain knowledge is confirming.
I've got some thinking to do. will let you know what i come up with.
Thanks for your help. Saving Changes...
Hanh VuPrincipal Project Manager| solo.ioChurchville, Md, United States
Hi all, it's been a while. I hope you all are safe and well. I figure I would give an update on the outcomes of how I shift some of my workload to the administrative staff in order to increase my own bandwidth (before COVID-19 hits us all) and take on more projects.
At my work place, we create a new role called "Project Administrator." And I got to largely define it. Tedious details aside, the things that I was able to shift to this new role include:
- attending meeting and take notes (i still take my own notes, but in case I fall behind during involved discussion, this helps)
- draft agendas for updates and planning meetings, getting updates from teams and contractor prior to the meetings so that i can put my final spin on them before we send them out.
- scheduling meetings
- creating tickets identified in meetings and put links into various tracking docs
- perform simpler communication tasks, such as reminding some folks of things due.
Time on the clock wise, i dont think this has given me a whole lot more time to my bandwidth. However, what this does help me is to consolidate my thoughts and not have to switch context and mode of working as often as I used to when I did all of this by myself. There is something to be said about being able to stay more deeply focus on less things, instead of frequently juggling different types of tasks on more things.
