Standard Work for a Project Manager

Owais Mughal

In Lean methodology 'Standard Work' means the tasks, activities and processes that are routinely conducted in a specific way. This means they are standardized in terms of being documented, measurable and repeatable.

In the following text I propose a Standard Work template for project managers. This list is by no means ‘definitive’ or ‘exhaustive.’ You can tailor it to your individual needs but I am confident this standard work will be applicable to most of the NPI/NPD project managers. I’ve put this list together from many years’ of experience in the field so I know it works.

Daily

1. Meetings – Meetings are an important daily standard work for a project Manager. Whether we like it or not, it is the forum where people are brought together and things move forward. Whether it be a phone meeting, a daily standup meeting or a round table meeting, emphasis should be kept on keeping the meetings efficient.
2. Phone Calls – One on one phone calls with team members, stake holders and customers are an inevitable daily standard work. The Rules of efficient meeting apply to phone calls too.
3. Daily Project Status – This is something a project manager must do to keep track of all her/his projects in the portfolio. This could be in the form of a dashboard or in terms of projects task list. If I have to pick one topic in project status – I’d say you want to keep a close eye on schedule and its dependencies daily! Resource constraints and budget variance may be alright to not check on daily basis but all projects that become late, do get delayed one day at a time therefore a daily diligence on schedule is a worth wile effort.
4. Check in with the team – This means communicating with project team as well as with stake holders or leadership. It does not mean each and every team member and stake holder needs to be contacted daily but some of them should be kept in touch daily.
5. Risk Management – There is no dearth of printed and online material to highlight that project management is in actual risk and issue management. According to one of the PMP exam preparation book; “Every project meeting must include a discussion on risk management.” It is by daily managing risks (and issues) that we can proactively work towards smooth sailing of a project in future.
6. Emails – This is an unavoidable piece of daily standard work. However, the need is to keep email communication efficient. A google search on efficient email communication will lead you to a treasure of information on this topic.

Weekly

1. Project Budget and Expenses – A weekly accounting should be done to keep Budget and expenses updated on the project. For some projects this could be a daily task but from my experience a weekly frequency is the sweet spot between doing it daily or monthly.
2. Summary for stake holders – Communicating daily with all the stake holders is probably too frequent as in peace time (*) it will dilute the importance of issues. Stake holders are generally busy people and they may start ignoring a daily barrage of emails. On the other hand, and doing it monthly is too infrequent as a monthly will most likely be too late to do something about the risks and issues. Therefore from my experience a short and to the point weekly project summary that specifically lists issues/risks and what help you need works the best. (*) I said ‘peace time’ because in some projects there will be times of escalation or crises when you must go to daily or even more frequent communication.
3. Time sheet and Invoice approvals – if needed for your project(s).

Monthly

1. Project Review with Leadership – This could be done more frequently depending upon the size of the organization and how busy the leadership is. But you don’t want to go more than a month without a project review with leadership and decision makers.
2. Celebrate Successes – No matter how small, it is important to celebrate team successes and recognize your team members when they do a good job. This could be done more frequently but a monthly recognition should be the minimum.
3. Lessons Learned Meetings – Learning from the past is a very important activity to keep the current and future projects mistake proof – as much as possible. The minutes of these meetings should also be archived in some sort of knowledge/data base/share point from where the future projects teams can also take advantage.

This article is also archived at my Projects and Products blog