Know Your Environment
Part 3/3 of New Project Checklist
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
This article is a continuation of a series describing a checklist for onboarding a new project. The first articles can be read using the link below.
Know Your Environment
This might be the most important part of onboarding a new project. Knowing the company and project environment can be critical for the executability of any strategy. Getting to know the main decision-makers, their motivations, and visions. As well as the company processes and mindsets. Working in big companies, process Audits are a big thing and steal time from Managers to run a project, while smaller companies tend to value delivering more without much care for how the project is run.
I will share a story about one crazy summer. One year I was audited 3 times, from different audit teams. I was working for a big company and these audits were evaluating different project aspects, but with some overlapping scope. I quickly realized this was an uphill battle, and my team was being purposely targeted. In a company where 95% of the teams were about sourcing nearshore projects, mine was one of the few fully managed by the branch.
For them, my project was working without any babysitting from the onshore, and this made my project a prime target for showing off that the audit teams were capable of higher-profile work. I wasted an entire summer collecting different sets of evidence, and going through heavy audit processes, just because some teams wanted to show off.
This was particularly challenging because my projects were expected to meet important KPIs, while having crazy meetings with auditors explaining what is Agile. I had a meeting where they “called for reinforcements” with a less knowledgeable middle manager explaining how certain things should work. The practices suggested by those meetings came straight from the nineties. At least in ’90s, we had Guns And Roses playing on the radio, instead of methodological diarrhea.
While starting in a new project or context, is important to query about company practices and resources and how they are expected to be enforced on the project. Identify the types of documents that need to be communicated and which are the main forums of decision-making. If the Manager is replacing someone, he or she should understand which were the notable events or popular queries coming from the different stakeholders.
Networking is utterly important. Getting to know person A or B who can provide insight on different situations. As well as getting to know decision-making staff to avoid cold reaches for decisions and feedback. A Leader should be a familiar face in the organization to make everything smoother. Especially when the Leader is in a position to request people’s attention or higher management approvals.
Is very important to have feedback from senior management. So many times I have bluntly asked senior management what are the most challenging aspects they expect to see in the near future. The more information the Manager has, the better will be for the manager to set up a strategy and address some critical project events.
Reality will be a tough opponent for the project execution. Knowing the environment and the people around the project context should be a point of acceleration and not a set of roadblocks.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur
Ah, Arthur! This was a greatttt read!
I got a new role this week as a project management executive intern! ☺️ Honestly, that's a great feeling.
But, seeing myself working in a different culture, with a different time zone, the first two days were hectic.
I was trying to understand everything going on at once! 😂
Someone said "I was too courteous. " Oh, no! I was only hiding my uncertainty!
This message, is what I need now at this point. Thank you! It was meant for me!