Tips from the PM Trenches #1

A quick tip from the PM trenches - 

It's new project season, that time of year when we are all starting to go heads down into our first round of new projects. A quick suggestion before you end up buried in project execution; document what your successful project should look like.

Most of us do this at a very high level, either in discussions with our sponsors, or perhaps in our Charters. I suggest going a bit deeper.

Set some time up with all of your key stakeholders. Facilitate a discussion focused on what would make each one of them consider this project a success. Even 15m with each person will get you some good data, when you scale it out to the whole team. 

No wrong answers, just document what each person thinks success looks like.

Over the next few months it’s going to be easy to get buried in the day to day execution and testing of your big projects, having a list like this will be the touchstone you can refer back to over the course of the project to ensure you aren’t missing the proverbial forest for the day to day trees. “Get this thing live” becomes just one of the goals of the project instead of taking over as the singular driving force.

Once your project is completed this is also a valuable tool for your lessons learned, however formal or informal that process is. Instead of relying on your team to remember what they thought they wanted in the initiation and planning phase, you will have a snapshot of that key moment in time documented.