Ideas for developing a more democratic project management practice.
- Teach your team valuable scripts to reset relationships with clients or execs so they can speak directly with them
- Alternate who takes meeting notes
- Involve your team in the scoping process
- Involve your team in the estimation process
- Don’t sell work that the team hasn’t gut checked
- Don’t hide your actual slowdowns: exposes the gaps in hiring and hyper productivity
- Stop prioritizing other people’s checklists
- Try to think of shared positive risk and give people autonomy to help realize those risks
- Involve clients in retrospectives
- Do more frequent retrospectives
- Stop time tracking
- Do a financial literacy workshop to teach teammates which metrics/drivers they can support
- Stop utilization tracking and work in time blocks instead (bill related to days or weeks or months, not hours)
- Hire and train up junior PMs who can support projects
- Check your project management hiring process and evaluations for inherent bias
- Adopt a modern Agile approach that protects safety, and puts people ahead of process
- Four day work weeks
- Build safety into team conversations—actively support teammates who are talked over, ignored, and consistently misinterpreted. Demonstrate democratic, supportive conversations.