How to Complete Projects
Dayton Chan,
How to Get Projects Completed?
Have Strong Leads
Having strong technical leads will go a long way to help you complete your projects. More than experience and technical know-how, find technical leads that are willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. I would much rather rely on a less experience technical lead with a “don’t give up” attitude than a 9 to 5 rock star who bails and leave things for others to complete. If you are fortunate to have both a rock star and someone who never gives up, keep that person for life.
Earn your team’s respect
Earning your team’s respect is not the same as pleasing everyone on your team. When you show that you are on top of things and consistently complete projects, it doesn’t matter if most members think you are a hard ass (excuse the French). They will respect you for your abilities and for bringing projects to completion. Not everyone will like working for you (or even with you), but they will respect you.
Make your team believe that there is an end
What can be one of the most discouraging thing in a project is seeing that there is no end in sight. If you have worked in your profession long enough, you would have seen these never ending projects more than once. Set specific milestones and timelines for completing things and do everything within your power to meet them. If you are the project manager, you need to persuade others (e.g., management) to either move the project forward or move the team off.
Know what is important, deliver your deliverables
Don’t waste your team members’ time by overspending on things that are unimportant. Know what is absolutely important for completing the project, and focus the team’s energy on those things. There is not a magic process for determining what is important. Project methodologies might help in drawing a line between things of less importance and those that have higher importance, but it’s experience that will tell you. Know your most important deliverables and get them done.
Know how much is enough
Just as important as knowing what’s important, you need to know how much is enough. In every project, you are constrained by scope, time and resources. Understand how much is good enough. The bar for good enough is defined differently based on many factors. For instance, if you are managing the grand opening event of China’s 2008 Olympic Games, good enough might be pretty high. However, if your responsibility is delivering remedial training on a minor update of your intranet site, good enough might be more trivial.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Unless you communicate with your team members, stake holders, your boss, how will others have a clue as to how well (or not well) your project is doing. Set realistic expectations, establish intervals for your communication, listen to your team and clarify that you understood what they said. When communicating out, make sure people understand you correctly - clarify that they do.
Get Buy In
Learning to effectively get buy in is probably one of the trickiest skills to learn. Understand your audience, and understand what is important to them. Learn to ask the right questions that gets you the answers that you need. Your stake holders need to understand what value your project will be delivering. Help them understand what good enough looks like. Get your buyin agreed early in the project.
Completing projects has the most to do with people
If you can’t work with people, it is going to be really difficult to complete projects that requires more than just YOU. You don’t need to be the most charismatic, most popular, best presenter, best looking or the most intelligent looking. Instead, you need to be willing to solve problems with people, listen attentively, communicate effectively, and deliver real value to them.
