How to follow up on your project team without micromanaging?

Hi George,

How to avoid this trap from our end is...in my experience, i set-up everyday stand-up call and necessarily, i take end of day progress from the team members.

Ofocurse i maintain, daily status ( please note that, daily progress is different from daily status).

I will see, if the progress is not meeting teh status like, % completion to be achieved per day, then, i will try to undertsand what are the issues, any follow-up is requried from my end, any specialists/SMEs help is required withing or from my Adjacent teams etc.I also check, how many bugs are outstanding to be fixed per day and among them which are the bugs that are blocking more number of tests etc. Just gave this example as it will be easy to comprehend. Similar appraoch for different facets of project/s.
Hope this my help.

Bala - Great comments....

Edward - Excellent post...

Is there something like the "post of the week" or "post of the month"? well this one is surely one of those.

I wouldn't mind you posting some more on this subject, you truly understood the sense of the question.

This topic could be so messy, and can only be understood fully once you've gone thru the fire.

I would argue with the fact PMs get a bad reputation for being micro-managers since, at least in IT, many if not most of them can't really micro-manage or can't do this in a way that would negatively impact the team members.

In my opinion micromanagement has a negative impact on the employees when the project manager, manager or technical lead gives concrete instructions to an employee on how to complete a task, effectively telling him/her how to do his/her job. This kind of micromanagement can only be practiced by people who come from the same line of work as the workers and is needed when leading entry level employees.

At the beginning of my career I had to work with some sort of solution architect which I had to help by writing database scripts to gather the information he needed. Since he was not an expert in my field he was unable to micromanage me in a way that would have affected me in a negative way since he was unable to perform my work.

Later on, on the same project I worked with a lead consultant that was really a micro-manager that was giving me very detailed instructions on what I have to do and was checking and correcting me very frequently. This was a nightmare for me. He was able to do this since he was from the same line of work as I was and was able to do my work.

So my advice for PMs is not to worry too much about micromanagement since as long as they don't tell team members how do to their jobs their so called micromanagement most likely will not impact team members in a negative way. Frequently asking for progress reports is not really micromanagement in my opinion.

Micromanagement can really be an issues for technical leads, team leads and functional managers since this group of people can tell employees how to do their jobs.

Thank you George, I have been meaning to contribute to the blogs, i will do a write-up soon as I can on my personal experiences with micromanagement.

Hi Adrian,
I think we can all agree the word "micromanagement" is thrown around more often than necessary and if i may, i think wrongly used. The negative connotation it depicts is what this thread is about. It doesn't really matter if it is an IT project or construction project, the fact that an assigned PM has to literarily run after resources to get updates is just wrong.

PMs are charged with making sure everything goes well. When a project fails, the PM is the first to be blamed, i think this makes a lot of inexperienced PMs lose sight of what is most important and act accordingly.

People, process, technology is what most IT PMs are charged with. The interaction of all 3 to generate a unique product or service is what project management is all about. We can control technology, amend processes but people don't fall into that category. I can argue from personal experiences that you don't have to be guilty of micromanaging before your team/stakeholders accuse you of it.

I think this thread "How to follow up on your project team without micromanaging?" is not only asking for strategy(s) to not micromanage your team but how do you go about managing your team without being accused of micromanaging.

"Frequently asking for progress reports is not really micromanagement in my opinion". What do you regard as frequently? I have had someone say a manager requesting a weekly report was a micromanager. The fact is in today's workplace, most people have lost touch with reality.

Your personal experience of being micromanaged is not uncommon, you could have improved matters. If he was correcting your work before you submit it, then you should have asked him to hold his thoughts until you were done and submitted. I am sure your project could have survived you, having to correct any mistake if you made any. You don't have to be unprofessional because other people around you are. Your Lead consultant was perhaps hyper and probably unsure of himself, and unwittingly projected that on to you.

Your micromanaging scenario happened to me, I told the manager that i don't need to be reminded of a deadline since i sat in the meeting when the deadlines were agreed upon. I also told him to not bother me until the deadline i was given has passed with me missing it. A lot of young PMs in their eagerness unknowingly bring unneeded stress to their teams. It is up to the teams to checkmate that.

I disagree with your advice for "PMs is not to worry too much about micromanagement since as long as they don't tell team members how do to their jobs". I was a Lead Operations Analyst with the highest rating before becoming an Ops Manager, my teams benefited from my extensive knowledge especially when we needed 6-sigma ratings. A PM is actually responsible for telling people how to do their jobs, read this PMI article
http://www.pmi.org/learning/library/duties...ct-manager-5117

PMI says the PM - Defines Project Roles and Responsibilities, i think we need to stop with the "don't tell people how to do their jobs".

Your team should check themselves that they are performing activites as agreed upon and manage an overly enthusiastic PM as well. As PMs, we manage laterally (other PMs), up (Senior management) and down (surbordinates). We need help to be better, not negative connotation that undermines our authority.

The point is, PMs are not miracle workers and we should learn that even with the best laid plans, you can end up with a team that would thwart your plans from day 1. No one talks about stakeholders who for no reason would make it impossible for your team to get anything done.

Thank you for your message Edward.

From my experience, I have seen that in the IT domain project management has become to a large degree some sort of profession on its own right. There are people that are starting their career as entry level project managers while many others manage projects without being able to do the work of the project team members.

In the above situations, it is simply impossible for the PM to tell the team members how to do their jobs, when he/she is not from the same line of work as they are. It is like someone that hasn’t practiced or studied medicine tells a surgeon how to perform an operation.

It is important to make the distinction between asking someone to perform a task by defining what needs to be delivered (in user’s terms) and giving instructions (in technical terms) about what exactly needs to be done to complete the task.

When you are “managed” by someone that is unable to do your work, you don’t feel the same pressure as you would feel if your manager was from the same line of work as you are. In the first case, you have the freedom to do whatever you think it is right to complete the task while in the second case you must obey the instructions given to you by your manager and as such you have no freedom.

This pressure, in my opinion, is the negative side of micromanagement but in some cases, for instance when the team members are inexperienced, you must micromanage. The problem is you can only micromanage in this way if you are a better worker than those you manage.

Not giving concrete work instructions to workers but asking them each day or even many times a day about the progress could also create a negative impact on the team members but in my opinion it is not as bad as giving them concrete work instructions.

Now regarding the PMs authority, from what I’ve seen in IT, it is generally low to non-existing. The main reason for this situation is the fact that the project is a temporary structure from within an organization that doesn’t have its own resources but instead uses resources who are owned and managed by someone else (not the PM).

The fact that the PM is not also a very experienced SME, in my opinion, is another important factor that affects in a negative way his authority. An author wrote in a book about project management that when the PM is not also an experienced technical expert then he can only work in a weak matrix environment and the team members would not seek guidance from him/her but from their functional manager.

So many, if not most PMs (at least in IT) don’t manage “down” as they have no subordinates but they must manage laterally even their project team members as they are (from an organizational point of view) peers and not subordinates.

I think this analysis is exactly right. It behooves any PM in a technical field to be as thoroughly capable as possible in order to effectively manage the project and its team members.