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and the peculiarities of the performer. The ideal PM does not have a situation where a task is set, done, and on the day of the deadline it turns out that the wrong thing was done or nothing was done at all. If you need to delegate, the PM doesn’t fight fear or micromanage. He has a well-established process for smooth delegation and monitoring the transition of responsibility. For some reason, for many, it’s easier to burn out doing everything themselves than it is to delegate and give corrective feedback. It’s important to learn people skills to understand who you are tasking and delegating to. Someday there will come a point when you just have to trust, and the cost of making a mistake will be high. By understanding people, you will be able to better assess the risks and not lose out. And don’t forget about the support of the people you delegate to. They are more scared than you are.

      Resources inside and out

      The ideal PM manages internal and external resources, and his prime version always knows in advance when everyone on the team is on vacation. He always knows the actual and planned workload of the team. He keeps track of deviations from the plan, allocates resources to project tasks, accounts for vacations, rotations and onboarding of new specialists. He communicates important changes and plans to the resource manager of the company. There is no such thing as a team suddenly being abruptly released or work extending for several months due to his fault, but no one knew about it in advance. Otherwise, managing expectations is simply not possible. If there are not enough resources and external specialists or services are connected, their load or costs are also taken into account in the project. Usually the main resources are team hours and money. They are never infinite, so the ideal PM controls them to make the best use of them. If resources are shared in a company, conflicts are inevitable. Communication and willingness to help each other to agree is important here. The better a PM works on load predictability, the less such conflicts will occur. For this to happen, this is what every PM should do, not just one PM.

      Feedback and motivation

      Feedback is a very cool and useful thing. Many times I have seen teams where they decided to give honest feedback. They have a culture and honesty is one of the most important values. As a result, half of the team ends up with feedback like “this is shit, we need to redo it, can’t you do it properly, do I have to do everything for you?”. It’s fashionably called toxic. In a perfect PM, feedback is part of the atmosphere and culture. He doesn’t have toxic feedback. He has honesty used to build trust, adjust behavior, get in sync, and help grow. He knows when and how to give out feedback. Negative feedback is given out in person and praise is given out publicly. He has no favorites, celebrates employee accomplishments and objectively evaluates the contribution of each project team member to the success of the project. This process is called “feedback” for a reason. Communication works both ways. And it should have a supportive, corrective and developmental function. It’s like WD-40 for the social mechanisms in the team. The right feedback can have a tremendous impact on a team’s self-esteem, and motivation will be a natural side effect. You don’t need to look for motivation externally, you need to create the conditions for it to appear internally.

      Knowledge sharing

      Given what I said earlier, you’ll have a team of “sweet cats”. In this situation, knowledge sharing between team members is inevitable. An ideal PM encourages such processes and at the end of the project he will discuss with the team who has learned what. He is a professional mentor himself. He helps people to systematically pump up their skills. Not only with tales from the field, but also with the help of a development plan and mentee support. He can turn an ordinary PM into an ideal one in a clear time frame, and enrich the team with managerial skills that will increase its maturity. Such a skill makes the ideal PM very important for the company as he is the custodian and dispenser of the right culture and knowledge in the company. And if the company has a knowledge base that will store all this and provide people with information through easy search, then it is a fairy tale in general.

      Session 5.

      Financial Management

      When it comes to finance, many PMs cringe and turn the tables on accountants, financiers or a process called “I don’t know, I plan the tasks and someone else does the math”. The ideal PM knows that he/she is not working in a hobby circle. The company is doing business and making money. For money to be made, there must be more revenue than expenses. He understands what revenue, inflows, expenses, and profitability are. Knows what affects these metrics in a project and how to work with them. All resources and tasks have a cost and their effective allocation affects the success of the project. This understanding of the financial aspects of a project helps him make informed decisions to optimize costs and increase profitability. And also not to get into preemptively failed or unfeasible projects. A general understanding of finances and managing the financial model of the project helps in better bagging, not…

      Doctor: I see, Mr. Gregory. Please continue.

      Financial modeling

      When it comes to launching or deciding to launch a project, the ideal PM uses financial tools and programs to create detailed financial models. At least on a napkin, at least in Google Sheets. He or she knows how to create budgets, analyze financial metrics, and forecast future revenues and expenses. A project financial model describes project parameters in money, allows you to interpret financial data and draw reasonable conclusions. The ideal PM always keeps the financial model up to date. At any given time, he or she knows what the projected profitability of the project will be and what will happen if a developer is suddenly removed from the project or a client takes several weeks to coordinate the color of a button with his wife. If due to the specifics of the project the financial model also becomes complex or individual calculations are needed, PM quickly finds a common language with financiers to make a tool convenient for all. Since the concepts of PL, CF, CM and COST for an ideal PM are not TikTok slang. We can say that a financial model for a PM is like a unit-economy for products. It gives you an understanding of the parameters at which the project will succeed, and at which parameters it is not even worth starting and you need to change the conditions. The financial model fixes the indicators at the beginning of the project, always shows the planned figures, the forecast of hitting the plan and the actual figures. The PM monitors deviations and makes decisions. The head of such a PM or CEO may not even communicate with him if he is sure that the financial model is up to date and the numbers do not give alarm bells. Financial modeling makes the ideal PM an entrepreneur in his project, and this is a completely different level of thinking and management.

      Cash flow

      Everything may be rosy on paper or in the tables, but if you don’t get the planned cash (CF), you may have a cash gap. Cash flow is live money that falls into the company’s account. It is used to pay salaries and buy coffee for the office. Every month, regardless of how things are going in the project. When there is no money in the account, but there are expenses, it is unpleasant. It’s good if the lost money covers the income from other projects. But this is not always the case. That’s why the ideal PM ensures that the money is received in a timely manner. From the very beginning, from getting to know the client to receiving payments, he or she builds agreements and controls the process to make sure everything is on time. Believe me, as soon as a scheduled money arrival appears in the financial model, the finance people read it as “PM [Name] has signed in blood that amount N will be on X number. Nothing can prevent that, and if it does, the PM will kick that money out and we are 100% counting on it.” They’ll never say that, but that’s what they think. For the ideal PM, getting paid is a separate sub-project. From the beginning, he studies the payment process at the client’s company, outlines it and coordinates it. He knows the timings and everyone involved so he can monitor and very specifically ping who needs to be pinged. When necessary, he can even go into “cute collector” mode or escalate when nothing else is working.

      Session

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