Oh. It looks like you’re also the project manager
When it comes to project management, there is a vast amount of wisdom around best practices, and how to turn the odds of success in your favor when planning, executing and closing projects. And every day, project managers are tasked with mastering all that knowledge.
But what I have seen in real life is that often the person designated as the project manager is not, by discipline, a project manager. They may have little to no experience in that role, and may have been given no direction on how to be successful beyond the required output and deadline of the project.
If you are or will soon be in that situation, this article is for you. I’m going to make the assumption that you have some sort of project plan that you have either developed or been given.
To start, I have three critically important areas to focus on to help you avoid disaster. Following that, two extra tips if you have the time and mental capacity.
1. Understand the contract
Too often, project managers receive very loose details about what is in the contract, and don’t get an opportunity to read and understand it. Despite best intentions, this is much like trying to understand a complex legal document through a game of telephone.
The Contract Scope
What we agreed to deliver and how we will deliver it are equally important when understanding the scope of the contract. Typically, this comes in both a short-form, high-level statement at the top of the contract, and as a detailed list of what the end product will entail. It’s important to make sure your plans on what and how you deliver match the contract.
Often, the client contact who negotiated and signed the contract is not your day-to-day client contact. Without an understanding of the contract scope, project managers could find themselves in a client kickoff meeting, for example, with people who know about the project but have not seen the contract. Such a meeting is a great opportunity to educate the entire team on the scope of the contract and review the change management process, if needed.
Timing
Timing just means the date you are on the hook to deliver by, right? Well, maybe, but maybe not. Depending on the delivery process, you may be contracted to have weekly or daily meetings with the client to share specific project data, financials, etc. And you may need to gain client acceptance on a series of deliverables for the contract to be considered complete. If you miss one of these check-ins, you may not be fulfilling the obligations of the contract. And when that happens, the client may not be willing to pay for some work.
Price & Billing
When are you invoicing the client? How much travel budget do you have? Does the client need to sign off on anything before costs are incurred or an invoice is sent? Understanding these sections of the contract will help ensure that invoices are paid on time and help you manage the financials through delivery.
Completion Criteria
A poorly written or misunderstood contract completion criteria can turn all your hard work into a seemingly never-ending financial disaster. Make sure your plan includes the mechanism that indicates the contract is completed.
There are plenty of other areas in a standard services contract I have not mentioned here. The general rule is that the contract should be reviewed and understood by both the project manager, as the person responsible for the delivery, and your day-to-day client contact.
2. Understand the financials
There are many incredible books and information sources on the topic. In this article, I cover the two basics project managers should be thinking about — to understand how they impact your project and to manage it appropriately.
The simplest way to approach financials on a project is to think of the project as a simple business in which you are tasked with balancing the books. In this simplistic view, project financials are broken down into two categories: Cost to deliver the product and Revenue, which hopefully covers costs, overhead, and maybe even some profit.
Cost
Typically this breaks down into three major groups: labor costs, expenses, and third-party costs. Your company may have tools, methods, and processes to help you capture these costs but even the best processes can have gaps and issues. Deep dive to understand every individual cost in your project, then make sure you didn’t miss anything by double-checking the contract. Use a spreadsheet or something similar to plan out your costs by week, with separate line items for each type of cost, so you have a plan to track against as they happen. There are many factors that can derail invoices, labor costs, and expenses from being processed. If you don’t have your expected costs mapped and tracked, you could find yourself exceeding the budget without knowing or missing costs, which then show up after the project has completed.
Revenue
For most, this area is less complex than cost management — yet it is so critical to get right. It ties back to understanding your contract. Make sure that invoicing and other activities associated with billing the client are being completed according to the contract and that your client is paying you according to those same terms. You may also want to track revenue against your costs weekly, monthly, etc., depending on the best practices your company uses.
The key takeaways for revenue are to make sure you understand how your billing process works, how you need to reflect revenue in your financial tracking, and how to track if the client has paid or not.
3. Communication
Even the most dire of scenarios you may find yourself in as a project manager can be improved with good communication. If you think there is an issue or risk that you cannot confidently solve with your project team, have an honest conversation about it with someone more senior in your company who has a stake in the outcome of the project. Discuss the issue, the risks, and your plan to solve it, and get advice on having that conversation with your client.
Hearing a point of view from someone else could help you avoid all kinds of potential issues you may be unaware of when having that conversation with your client.
Other areas to focus on
You have my Top 3 and you likely have your work cut out for you. If you have the mental capacity and time, here are two more tips.
Build a support network
Having people to bounce ideas off of, ask questions, and get other points of view is valuable to being successful — even more so when you are out of your comfort zone. It works best if your support network is unbiased, so try to build it with people outside of your specific day-to-day project delivery team.
Learn the tools beyond the basics
Every company has tools they want employees to use. Project managers typically have a set of tools that are custom-developed, but those tools may not always make sense. Being a good project manager starts with knowing what tools you are being asked to use, then taking it further — understanding that the more you know how the tools work and the logic behind them, the faster it will be to solve the million scenarios you may face that are outside of the 10 your tool was designed to solve.
