The 60 Minute Project Manager

What can you do in 60 minutes? Watch a program on TV. Drive your kids to an event and back…depending on traffic and where you live, of course. Go out for lunch. Read a magazine article. Write an online post. Manage a project. Wait a minute….manage a project? In one hour…can that be possible? Yes, and we’re probably already doing it without thinking.

For the purposes of this article – and probably most of my articles – I’m going to stick with the assumption that project managers are often overseeing 5 or 6 active projects at any given time. Looking at the normal 8-10 hour day and considering email, phone calls, a little down time, and that some unexpected work will find a way to fit itself into slots of time, you’re left with only about one hour per project per day. Of course, that depends on the project – hot projects may get more time and some projects can go dormant for a week or two and not require any time. But on an average day, you’re left with about 60 minutes to spend on each project every day.

What Can You do in 60 Minutes?

So, as the project manager, what can we do to ensure our project’s success in 60 minutes a day? You’re probably already doing it, unless you’re in the position of managing only one project at a time – in which case you’re either lucky, bored, or managing an incredibly large project.

Actually, it doesn’t seem like much, but 60 minutes a day is likely the normal amount of time we’d spend adjusting project schedules, making project-specific phone calls, reading and writing project-specific emails, and preparing project status reports. The exception is always going to be the days we have official project status calls – which for me are nearly always an hour long if not more – but then again how often do we only put in 8 hours in a given day anyway?

Time Management is Key

To actually “effectively” manage a project in the 60 minute pockets of time we likely have available on a per project basis, we need to be:

• Organized
• Stubborn (I think I’ve mentioned this once or twice before)
• Focused (stay free of distractions)
• Maintain a steady weekly ritual (our tasks involved with the management of each project changes little from week to week – we perform the same main critical functions…performing them routinely each week at the same time helps us to balance each of our projects so we maintain our productivity as we control 5-6 projects at a time)
• A good and effective communicator (if we have to re-iterate things over and over to our team members, we’re wasting too much of our time and their time)

I’ve never met a project manager with extra time on his or her hands. It just doesn’t happen. If you have extra time then there’s probably something you’ve overlooked, a large issue headed your way, or you simply probably should be spending more time on one of your projects. It seems as a PM our responsibilities, our project resources’ needs, and our customers’ needs always swell to fill up whatever available time we have.

Summary

There’s nothing earth-shattering here. I’m merely stating that most of us have been 60 minute project managers throughout our careers. You do what you can for your projects in the time you have slotted for them, then you move on to the next project. At the end of the day, you’re a success if you made the rounds on all of your projects and you feel comfortable enough about what you did for each of your projects and customers that you can sleep well that night. After, of course, opening up your laptop one more time around 1:00am to tweak tomorrow’s status report. That always seems to be a given for me.

Related posts:

1. Twitter and Facebook as Project Management Tools?
2. Managing Issues and Risks on a Project
3. PM Best Practices for the New Project Manager
4. Project Success Series: Ensuring Revenue and Profitability on Your Project
5. Help! I Can’t Find My Project!