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PM Guide to Succeed with a New Project

What is your biggest fear when you change jobs and start with a new team and project? For this article I interviewed colleagues — PMs and POs asking them this one simple question.

The majority of answers underlines the need of finding support and being successful with the project. Once you enter a new social environment, your judgment as well as your status as a professional is questioned and you have to reestablish it. Having a core plan that fits every scenario will help you to overcome this challenge and make the experience less stressful.

80% of the information about the project you will get from conversation with team members, and only 20% from documentation in Confluence or Jira tickets.

Spend first 2 weeks doing one-to-ones with following groups of people:

Doing interviews in this specific order will benefit you.

Team members can raise issues that are bothering them and later you can validate this feedback with team leaders. Talking with other PMs will make it clear if the problems raised by people exist only in your team or are general issues across the company. Knowing that, you will be prepared to have dialog with stakeholders and know which company values to highlight in your conversation.

Football team managers strive to get the best players for the team. The same rule should work for the development team. The major success of the team lies in its members’ professionalism. Your goal as a leader is to ensure that the team consists of strong team members.

Of course hard skills aren’t the only thing that matters. When looking for a good team member, pay attention to the following soft skills:

Motivation. When a person does work just because he can do it and not because he has to. This attitude can be contagious in a good way.

Ability to be a team player. Great football players are not only those who scroll goals. Encourage those team members who review pull requests and help others with higher priority tasks even if they have their own tasks to do.

Look for integrators. Does it happen to you when everyone in the team says that his part is ready but the whole thing is still not done? Integrator is a person who is ready to take responsibility for putting everything together.

This step is the most crucial for smooth delivery. You are a lucky one if you joined the project where best CI/CD practices are already implemented. In other cases you will need major time from a Devops specialist to set it up. Asking about CI/CD practices and devops capacity right on the interview will give you a good overview of how soon your team will get to the performing stage.

Devops is a person who can technically set up deployment flow. However what the flow should be is up to you and tech leads.

Think how your manual QA engineers will test the application so that they are not blocking developers and each other. This will be a сlue to structuring a deployment workflow. Automation can be added on later stages.

For majority of cases 3 development environments will cover your needs:

Daily meetings will be enough to start with while you are busy with setting up the previous 4 steps. But once you’re done — start improving the quality of your team collaboration with Scrum rituals.

Daily meetings:

There are 2 models to structure your daily discussion:

Around team members — when each team member shares his progress. This works better when there are small tickets on board which don’t need much interaction. This model also helps to see the list of people who have capacity to pick up new urgent tasks.

Around tickets — when you build discussion reviewing progress on stories one by one. Use this tactic when you have several large stories in progress and you want to encourage team members to discuss blockers and next steps.

Using both approaches will make your daily standups diverse.

How long should the daily standup take?

Daily standup should take as long as the team requires.

The best moderation practice says that daily standup should be 10–15 min for the team up to 10 people

Establish the rule to bring discussions of local issues to separate meetings with only a few members involved.

Sometimes break this rule if you see your team feels like talking.

Tips For Effective Grooming:

A Key To Successful Retrospective:

- What we did well

- What went wrong

-Action items — in this column team will place ideas to resolve existing problems

Integration as a new PM to a team is not always an easy process. Usually, when the previous leader leaves a team, some team members might also leave.

I have never entered a new company and found stakeholders to be completely satisfied with the delivery.

A more common scenario is that after 2 weeks of inspiring onboarding, you will have to take off the rose-colored glasses and meet unsatisfied clients or stakeholders who will tell you that the scope had to be delivered months ago.

It’s critically important that while you are setting the delivery process based on the steps above — you stay unprovoked by a rush and dissatisfaction from the business side.

Don’t try to increase the team velocity while the delivery process is still broken.

(What do you usually do once you see the engine light go on? You call a tow truck or try to reach the nearest mechanic by moving slowly. You don’t rush at top speed because the car could break down.)

Explain to your stakeholders that the team needs some time to get back to a performing phase.

It usually happens that the team is also demotivated and is far from trusting you as a new leader.

What should you rely on during this period of uncertainty when you have neither approval from the client side nor stable support from the team?

The ideas in this article will make you more successful and confident when entering a new project.

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