The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

by Camille Fournier

Managing a Project Project management is the act of breaking a complex end goal down into smaller pieces, putting those pieces in roughly the most effective order they should be done, identifying which pieces can be done in parallel and which must be done in sequence, and attempting to tease out the unknowns of the project that may cause it to slow down or fail completely. You are addressing uncertainty, trying to find the unknowns, and recognizing that you are going to make mistakes in the process and miss some unknowns despite your best efforts. Here are some guidelines: Break down the work. Get out a spreadsheet, or a Gantt chart, or whatever works for you, and start breaking down your big deliverable (say, rewriting your billing system) into tasks. Start with the biggest pieces, then break the big pieces down into smaller pieces, then break those down into even smaller pieces. You don’t actually have to do it all yourself. If there are parts of the system you don’t understand well, ask for help from the person who does. Get the big stuff broken down some, and then turn your attention to the ordering of the work. What can start immediately? Hand those tasks off to the people who can actually turn them into ticket-sized work. Push through the details and the unknowns. The trick of project management is not to stop when you feel a little bit stuck, or tired of it. It is tiring and tedious, as I said earlier. And it’s not something you probably know how to do well. So keep...