These days, everyone is a Project Manager.
It’s just the way we’ve got to do work to get work done.
Things are more fluid, and ever-changing in business, but hopefully we know our teams and are always progressing our ways of doing things together…

Here is my takeaway #7 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:

7) “…this book is different (than other PM books). It’s based on two ideas:
1. Project management is the work of the twenty-first century. This means that everyone is a project manager.
2. Project management is no longer just about managing a process. It’s also about leading people–twenty-first century people.”

The quote continues, “This is a significant paradigm shift. It’s about tapping into the potential of the people on the team, then engaging with and inspiring them to offer their best to the project.”

Note: This comes from Chapter 1 “The New World of ‘Unofficial’ Project Management” (page 7-8)

Something I love about the project management field is how open most project management experts are with their knowledge and with accepting other’s efforts in managing a project. They know we are all constantly learning, growing, and adapting it to our unique spheres of influence.

The field itself evolves because people evolve with the evolving world of work. It’s okay to do some wayfinding to establish how to go about it in your actual work experience. We need more “unofficial” project managers for all the projects that need to be done, but we also need those managers to look to best practices, where possible, that have been established by career Project Management Professionals (PMPs). It’s a matter of figuring out what is good, better, and best as we mature our project management in our organizations. We should iteratively get better project by project in managing projects to reach desired outcomes.

So much about projects is unique, variable, and dependent upon working with the strengths and constraints of the individuals, teams, and organizations you work with. Be aware that managing a project is very different than managing functional operations or managing department workflows, however. This book does a good job of laying out a way to project manage people when/where project management has not been well-established (very few successes to speak of) and formalized (no proven format and Organizational Process Assets [OPAs] to follow) in your organization.

Story time: Some of my best project work has come with remote teams. It’s more difficult to know a person from a distance, but strangely bridging that distance has led to more and better communications. Sometimes when sitting in the same room with people we take it for granted. We assume that everyone hears each other’s side conversations and understands what everyone else is doing.

In one instance, I established better communication boards that were used more consistently by a partner across the ocean. My contact was a strong communicator, but our process had holes in it. After we fixed the process, we had few breakdowns in the flow of information, at least for communications affected regarding the status of deliverables.

It took me stepping up and leading to change a process that previously relied solely on emails (that important persons may or may not have even been copied in on, or it just gets lost in abstract email threads), and it took some authorization from leadership above me to get the proper permissions, along with some assistance to systematize the workflow interactions in a way that our team and their team would be comfortable with. My bosses had concerns that changing the process would not be received well and that we would need to introduce it slowly, little by little. I actually was impressed with my contact and his team. There was not much change resistance. I found that engaging with and inspiring my point of contact to try a better way was not that difficult (the only person who would have to operate any differently as a result), since we built out a ready-made solution and assured their team that using it would only make their lives easier.

Kudos to everyone involved for their skills in implementing a communications solution that helped on both the giving and receiving ends of our communications. My status meetings to my local cross-functional team and my contact’s status meetings to a similar cross-functional team improved significantly as a result. And with the improvement of the flow of information both teams were able to stay more on top of issues at hand and answer to them more quickly when questions did come up.