(^122) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Serve Your Team
Karen Gillison
Leesburg, Virginia, U.S.
long BEFoRE I hEARD oF An AgIlE* METhoDology, I worked with the
best project manager I ever met. Looking back, he was using prototype tech-
niques from the agile approach. He viewed his job as a facilitator for the team.
He saw his day-to-day duties as identifying and removing obstacles, and pro-
viding team resources. He was doing things that increase team velocity.†
There were no multihour meetings where you fight to stay awake until it’s your
turn to provide a status update—the ones where you wish you could escape
and actually write some code, so you will have some progress to report for the
next meeting. Instead, we started each project with a kick-off meeting, invit-
ing people with job functions from requirements to testing. The whole team
met to get a shared vision and understanding of the project. Then, every few
days, the project manager would come by for what we called “doorway” status
meetings. Each teammate gave a brief update on what was complete, what was
in progress, and what issues were critical.
This project manager tracked project status in a visual, obvious way. He had a
master spreadsheet for all the assignments, listing who should complete them.
He updated this document regularly, and posted a large printout outside his
doorway. Having information posted where we could all see it was great for
team communication. An added bonus was that it was also visible to upper-
level members of management, and provided them with a self-service way of
getting status updates whenever they wanted.
- Agile: An evolving methodology that promotes a software project management process that
encourages shorter planning phases, more adaptability to change, teamwork, unit testing, personal
accountability, and frequent customer involvement.
† Velocity: A term used in agile software development to show the rate of progress for a team or a
team member, i.e., how much an individual programmer will be able to produce in a given time
period.