3 Things I Wish I Knew When I First Began Managing Projects

The article collects lessons from experienced project managers for people moving from doing the work to leading the work. It stresses that project management means enabling others, judging when schedule, budget, and quality conflicts justify a fight, and staying focused on what really matters in the project.

Reading notes

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• Even if the manager can do a task better, the junior person still needs to do it so the team can learn and the manager does not become a bottleneck.
• New project managers tend to spend time on tasks they feel competent doing and to delay training, mentoring, and trust in direct reports.
• A manager may need to sit on their own hands to avoid grabbing the keyboard and taking over.
• The rule of time, budget, and scope is that you usually get only two of the three, and different stakeholders choose differently.
• The manager has to judge when missing one of those three is acceptable and when it is worth fighting for more time and budget.
• Assumptions can cause trouble because people may not share the same priorities or the same measure of progress.
• The article says to assume nothing and make sure everyone uses the same yardstick for the project goals.
• Managers should learn to identify the real critical path and avoid distractions, including the urge to do work themselves.
• New managers can get stuck in unnecessary detail and miss problems until they have grown serious.
• A delayed $60 cable in a $60,000 order shows how a small missing item can block a much larger delivery.
• Slack time matters because meeting most task dates is not enough if the critical path has no room for delay.
• The article ends by saying there are many hard lessons for new project managers, but these were the ones that caused the most trouble at the start.