How to Avoid Being a Pass-Through Project Manager
One of the greatest pitfalls a Project Manager can fall into is the temptation to simply pass information between their client and their team. It can be especially tempting when you are slammed with things to do or a project is particularly complex and technical, but those are the times when it is the most detrimental to your project. I have seen projects and teams fall prey to this behavior more times than I can count, but with a little attention and prioritization, you can avoid this mistake and keep your projects and your teams humming at max efficiency.
What is a Pass-Through Project Manager?
So what do I mean by pass-through Project Manager? This is the term I use for someone who simply forwards or ferries information back and forth between two parties. For example, my client has sent me a list of feedback on their app that I forward on to my team without really reading or reviewing it.
Why is this bad? Well, what if several of the items in the list of feedback had already been logged by your QA team as bugs? Or maybe something they’ve called out as a bug is actually expected behavior? Maybe there’s a change order lurking in there! The only way to know is to dig in and review the feedback. If you don’t, you’re wasting your team’s time reviewing items you could have culled ahead of time. On a project where deadlines are looming, that wasted time can be the difference between meeting and missing your date!
How to Avoid Being a Pass Through Project Manager
Now that you understand what a pass-through Project Manager is and why they can be detrimental to their projects, you’re halfway to avoiding making the mistake yourself. Here are some other steps you can take to help you improve your project management skills and increase your value to your clients and teams:
1. Understand your deliverables.
Whether you’re building an app or designing marketing materials for an upcoming campaign, it’s critical that you understand what has been committed and why. The what enables you to process incoming and outgoing information in the context of your project. The why can help you determine how to proceed when your project hits a speed bump. In the example above, if you didn’t understand the expected behavior of the app, you wouldn’t be able to effectively cull the list of feedback.
2. Stay on top of the work being done.
Hopefully your team is using some sort of tool to track the work that needs to be completed (sticky notes on a white board totally counts!). It’s critical that you are on top of the status and content of that work in order to effectively manage communication between your clients and teams. Back to our example, if you weren’t familiar with the bugs your QA team was logging, you wouldn’t know whether there was overlap between the client’s feedback and the team’s. You don’t have to commit this information to memory, but you should be familiar enough with the system you’re using to easily cross-reference or review without a bunch of digging.
3. Encourage frequent and transparent communication.
The more often and candidly you are speaking with your clients and teams, the easier it is to add value to your project. If you are co-located you can monitor interactions and conversations with physical proximity. If your team is distributed, that monitoring may occur in a messaging or email format. Regardless of how you monitor, pay attention to what is being said even if it doesn’t directly involve you. I can’t tell you how much valuable information I pick up simply from “eavesdropping” on conversations or catching up on a Slack channel when I get out of a meeting. This can save you a ton of time and energy trying to get up to speed later when something needs to be communicated to a client.
4. Erase the phrase “that’s not my job” from your vocabulary.
It is easy to have the mindset that an architecture question or sales call don’t have anything to do with you as a Project Manager, but the reality is that the more you know about your client, product, project or deliverable, the more effective you will be, period. Don’t shy away from investing the time and energy needed to be a true member of your team and not just an outsider waiting to be engaged.
You would be surprised how many meetings, conversations or emails can be short-circuited by the Project Manager if they are truly immersed in their projects and teams. Imagine a “bug scrub” call that didn’t require a developer to be present or a change order that never needs to be written because the PM knows the deliverable and the client’s needs inside and out. Not only does this help you avoid the pitfalls of becoming a pass-through Project Manager, it makes you a pleasure to work with as well!
