As you progress through your Lean Game Plan, there will be times when you conduct Rapid Improvement Events that will be 2-5 days. There will also be times when you have to manage larger projects, maybe six sigma projects that are larger and more cross-functional. Regardless, here are four tips for being an excellent project manager.
Tip 1 Only do projects that matter
It will be hard to be an excellent project manager if you are leading a project that doesn’t matter. Capture the ROI before beginning any major project. Make sure you have leadership support.
Establish a governance team for the project that includes leadership outside of stakeholders of the project. Use a PICK chart to narrow options to the easiest and highest payback projects from the large list of options. Facilitate the project selection process if you can.
Tip 2 Have a clear outcome
Ask for clarity on the impact on the customer, quality, on-time delivery, or impact to the bottom line. If the project impacts the customer, develop a customer journey map before beginning the project. Capture customer benefits.
If it impacts quality, try to understand the current cost of quality before beginning and the expected improvement. If your company is spending $2M on quality-related issues and this project will save $200,000 that’s 10%. A great project.
Develop a future state so that everyone is clear on what the process will look like at the completion of the project. Develop that clear outcome.
Tip 3 Have a project schedule and milestones
One of the nice things about using the six sigma DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, and control) framework is that it has milestones and tollgate reviews. Get approval from the governance team before moving onto the next step.
If you aren’t familiar with this framework, just google it. There are millions of pages about DMAIC.
Beyond using a framework, make sure you know what the steps of the project are. Who is managing the different parts of the project and when the completion dates are. Use a tracker like Asana, Jira, or Trello.
Use a communication tool like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom to communicate with the project team.
Tip 4 Lead with excellence and service
Identify the things you can do as a project manager that will make the project excellent. Is it the quality of thinking used in the planning? Is it the quality of questions that are raised? Is it the quality of communication amongst the team members?
What about the level of service that you provide as an excellent project manager? Yes, deliver results, but you do that with other people. What can you do to serve and support team members? How can you use your project management skills to help people?
Brainstorm ways that you can make your team members think “Wow, this experience was awesome! We made a change and it was great to work with such an excellent project manager!”
As always, it is an honor to serve you and I hope that you and your company are getting better every day!
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