Oraib NawashInnovation Project Manager| Free LancerOrland Park, Il, United States
Hello everyone.
In projects, as a project manager do you send reminders to your team or talk to them about the tasks? if the tasks on track or not?
OR your supervisor does that? Saving Changes...
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Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Task and team monitoring is a PM responsibility.
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1 reply by Oraib Nawash
May 15, 2023 12:46 PM
Oraib Nawash
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Thank you, Thomas. I agree it is the PM responsibility. However, do you like talk to the team or assignee before the tasks are due and follow with them? Via emails or in person
Saving Changes...
Oraib NawashInnovation Project Manager| Free LancerOrland Park, Il, United States
May 15, 2023 12:24 PM
Replying to Thomas Walenta
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Task and team monitoring is a PM responsibility.
Thank you, Thomas. I agree it is the PM responsibility. However, do you like talk to the team or assignee before the tasks are due and follow with them? Via emails or in person Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Oraib,
it depends.
On the culture of the team, if there is a sense of responsibility so they respect due dates and try to keep them and a sense of openness and honesty so they give an early warning if a due date is at risk. CCM is a scheduling method that uses these senses. If you do not have this responsibility and honesty, you might be chasing the team for keeping deadlines, which is not fun, and can result in micromanaging and lack of trust.
On the criticality of the deadline, which might put a additional responsibility on the PM for a specific due date, e.g. external dependency or customer promise. In these (hopefully rare) cases, it may be warranted to set countdown lines before the due date (e.g. 10, 5, 2 days before) and monitor them explicitly, e.g. by communicating them publicly (like the start countdown for spaceships).
It is always better to ensure meeting due dates instead of missing them and trying to catch up.
If you ask team members or you send them an email, the relationship message is 'I do not trust you'. It is better to create a standard habit that team members by themselves give you a heads-up some days before 'all ok with the due date' or 'there is a risk of a miss' - without you having to ask. These habits can be set in team building exercises and documented in team charters. And do never blame people if they miss a due date and informed you in time. Saving Changes...
Oraib NawashInnovation Project Manager| Free LancerOrland Park, Il, United States
Thomas, Thank you very much for the sufficient and direct answer. This really helps. :) Saving Changes...
Some specialized software like Jira, Trello, Notion, etc allows you to organize tasks for your team, and configure sending automatic e-mail notifications to every member about their assigned deliverables. Saving Changes...
In a matrix organization, managers will typically review all the upcoming work for all projects with their direct reports (the functional organization view). While I try not to status things to death, I will review upcoming events at our regular project meetings (the project level view). This serves a different purpose than their managers' reviews as I am looking for dependencies between contributing teams.
Generally I don't ask everyone if they will be done on time as they have the ability to provide estimated completion dates (ECDs) in our scheduling system if they differ from the plan dates. Critical path items get extra attention, especially if I know from my conversations with the team that they are at risk.
It is also more effective to ask your team members to share their plan with the broader team, rather than just asking whether they expect to meet the scheduled dates. Saving Changes...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
I always prefer in person conversation well ahead of due dates as an actual conversation could reveal things that you won't be able to reveal from just sending an email. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Just to add my "discussion-mates" here in the place where I worked, inside the project charter, we included what we call "problem resolution model" which is a "pyramid" showing the level of blockers to be reviewed for each project team layer from development team (where development team is not related to software product) to steering committee and the cadence and duration of meetings to review that. For example, we met the steering committee bi-weekly 30 minutes. For development team it depends on the method to be used (for example if you use Scrum you have 15 minutes daily meeting) and the maturity of the teams, but at minimun we performed 2 meetings by week just to remove blockers. Saving Changes...
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