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What it means to be a Project Manager

What does a project manager do everyday ?

  1. 1) Check your Emails: Email has become the official modern mode of communication that is being followed by a lot of people to send vital information.  A Project manager can’t afford to let some crucial piece of information slip through the cracks and has to skim through all the emails he receives.
  2. 2) Handle and Make Calls: Calls are the ideal way of keeping in touch with your project team and stakeholders who have problems or answers that are needed instantly. Project managers will always have calls he needs to take and calls he has to make to stay connected.
  3. 3) Organize Meetings: Timely and regular meetings are a great way to deliver their message to the team and also keep stakeholders and sponsors updated.
  4. 4) Update Dashboard: A project manager always keeps a bird’s-eye view of the project’s progress by using a dashboard, and maintains it as an one-stop shop for all the important metrics and KPI.
  5. 5) Get Daily Project Status: A project manager needs to where the project stands in comparison to the plans that had been made and to what level it has been completed.
  6. 6) Check-In with the Team: To really know about the project a manager has to meet up with the team that is working on the front lines of the project.Check-ins with your team is a great way to get a barometer of the project from the ones who are on the front lines.
  7. 7) Lookout for Issues/Risks: A project manager has to keep a constant eye to look out for any issues that may come up and see if any of the known risks are occurring right now.
  8. 8) Maintain Time-sheets: It is essential to keep a daily time-sheets maintained to have a clear picture of the project’s progress.
  9. 9) Create Daily Checklist: Being a project manager can get tedious and time consuming. The best way to keep track of all the work to be done in the day is by having a checklist. It helps avoid missing the small tasks that may have bigger repercussions later. 
  10. 10) Track Budget/Expenditures: Every project has a budget and they can overrun if unchecked. It pays a lot of dividends for project managers to keep track of the amount of money spent at the current point of the project and the allocated budget for the same point.

What does a project manager do every week ?

  1. 1) Get Weekly Project Status: Along with the control of day-to-day progress of the project, project managers must keep track of weekly progress as well to get better at the big picture stuff. 
  2. 2) Look at Overall Project Status: Project managers have to overview overall status of the project to determine where you might need to address issues.
  3. 3) Update Dashboard: The dashboard gives a project manager a clear moving picture of the project’s progress and deserves a daily and weekly stop.
  4. 4) Send Stakeholder Summary: Dashboard has an advantage of making the summary report that can be sent to the stakeholders to keep them updated.
  5. 5) Approve Time-sheets: The daily time sheets maintained have to be approved each week to make sure that the right payments are paid for the work. 
  6. 6) Clear Invoice: Even the invoices that have piled up for the week need to cleared by the end of week.
  7. 7) Have Weekly Kickoff/Wrap-up: On each Monday a project manager kicks off the week with a plan by looking forward and then at the end of the week has a wrap-up to see how they have done and address any issues that can arise in the coming week.
  8. 8) Perform Weekly Check-in: Weekly check-in are nothing more than a more structured and far reaching form of a daily check in.
  9. 9) Give Team Appreciation: A project manager needs to give the team the attention and appreciation they deserve at the end of each milestones. 
  10. 10) Analyze Lessons Learned: There should be a time that the project manager spends on looking back at the project and trying to find what went right and what went wrong. It is essential to learn from the two do better utilize the good and reduce the effect of the bad.

What more can a project manager do be successful ?

1) The meetings need to be productive as well as fun, to keep moral and engagement high.
2) The calls made will need to be personal and with the clear intention to build relationships, they should not waste a person's valuable time. 
3) Each meetings should end with a clear closure point and actionable items so the team members can start working the moment the meeting finishes.
4) Issues need to be resolved at priority, even a small lingering issue will never resolve itself and has a huge likeliness to get worse with time.
5) Clear any ambiguity in what needs to be done or what the current state of the project is so that everyone is on the same page.
6) Always inform stakeholders, as clear information and transparency will make a happier stakeholder. People like to feel as a part of the loop, especially the ones who are funding the project.

What attributes makes a project manager a champion of the industry ?

1) An effective and influential communicator, someone who can negotiate through office politics and move detractors to promoters.
2) A valued member of the organization who is respected overall and whose ideas are seen by the wider team as being important and worthwhile.
3) An intelligent individual who has a strong understanding of project management and the goals the team are working towards.
4) A motivational and inspirational person who is positive and willing to coach and support the team through change.
5) Someone who is passionate about the effort and truly believes in the change and can see the endgame.
6) Someone with leadership qualities who does not take “no” for an answer.

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