We made it to Part 2! If you missed Part 1, you may read it here. Let’s continue the conversation this week on common project management mistakes made by EMs. As a reminder: none of us are perfect and even the most experienced engineering leaders fall victim to these mistakes. The important part is identifying them and taking corrective action so you can hopefully avoid them in the future.
6. Lack of Flexibility
In a perfect world, what you will say what you’re going to do and do as you’re going to say. You create this beautiful plan and you deliver against the plan and everything is wonderful and you run into no roadblocks. But the world isn’t perfect, and therefore we often find ourselves needing to pivot. Sometimes it’s a shifting deadline, sometimes another project takes priority, sometimes a project gets scrapped altogether. It can be easy to get angry or frustrated in these situations, especially if you’re just trying to minimize scope creep and context switching for your team.
Solution: Be prepared to adapt your plan as necessary. Understand why direction is being changed, explain this change to your team, and move on. You can always provide feedback on how the sudden change may have been avoided. This is also why it's useful to use some sort of agile project management framework because it allows you to ship what you have and not have to scrap everything then pick it up later if need be.
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