Remote project management for dummies (like me)
As many of you I have been managing my team of engineers and marketers remotely. I am not formerly trained in project management; I am just a curious self taught entrepreneur. I have detailed some of the things that have/haven’t worked during the last 3 months:
Do’s:
-Segment tasks into Epics (large tasks), User stories (sub tasks for Epics), and individual tasks (SMART tasks for each user story)… I was simply assigning individual tasks and it made our trello board virtually unusable
-Create arbitrary scoring system for difficulty of tasks and assign a # of points as opposed to hours to help game-ify the process (i.e. 1=10 mins, 10=1 hour, etc.)
-Post meeting agenda’s prior to meetings in slack & follow up with notes as a reply to the agenda post-meeting. This has sped up our meetings & kept us more organized.
Don’ts:
-Don’t adjust deadlines and project scope. I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt to my employees when tasks took longer than expected or there were bumps in the road, however, my leniency conditioned some of my employees into not taking deadlines seriously.
-Don’t forget about formal processes. When we started documenting step by step processes for everything from social media postings to pushing new code it reduced the ambiguity that I didn’t realize existing as it related to getting work done efficiently
-Don’t assume your team understands why decisions are being made. The WHY behind each assigned task is critical to keeping the morale of employees high when assigning work.
Feel free to comment with other do’s and don’ts! I am excited to continue to learn!
