Project Management New Year’s Resolutions for 2024
Can you believe another year has gone by and we’re heading into 2024 already!
I’m sure it’s because I’m getting older myself, but the years seem to be flying by. I’ve been at my current company nearly two years now… not bad for something that started as a short term contract!
The work is still interesting, but as always at this time of year, my thoughts turn to what I could be doing differently/better/faster/easier and what I want my goals for the year to be.
With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about resolutions – the beginnings of new habits. Or at least, habits I used to have that haven’t really been my focus in recent times.
It’s the time of year when individuals start to think about what is important and how they can live their best life and all that – so why can’t teams do the same? You could have a conversation with your colleagues about what new habits they want to develop or reinforce during the year.
The infographic below shows the things I’ve been thinking of for my projects. If you are going to come up with a list of team resolutions, then it should be something you co-create – don’t just print off this list and tell them that’s what their goals are!
Use a team meeting to talk about what is important for the organization and for their professional development, and then pin the list up somewhere where everyone can see it.
Time tracking
We will track time on our priority projects and use the data to improve estimates.
Our current time tracking system is pretty basic but fit for purpose. The key challenge for me is making sure my team know what the project codes are so they can track against the right initiative.
Estimating
We will test new estimating techniques instead of always relying on professional judgement.
Options we’ll look at include Rough Order of Magnitude and parametric estimating.
We should have enough data to be able to do these now. In the past, it’s been a challenge to find the time for estimating, but I think that’s starting to improve as we are seeing teams carve out the time to do the job properly.
Lessons learned
We will run regular lessons learned identification sessions and turn those into actions for improvements. Beyond identifying lessons, we will record actions in a central database and use that as a starting point for planning and researching new projects before they begin.
We’ll have a clear agenda for lessons learned meetings and invite the right people to contribute.
Top tip for lessons learned: if you want to run several sessions with different audiences and then combine the results, that’s fine. It’s something we talked about in our Project Management Rebels group mentoring call recently.
Meeting minutes
We will commit to getting meeting minutes out within 24 hours.
In fact, we might even go further than that and use automation tools like Otter to make it faster and easier to document what was agreed in meetings. We’ll use AI assistants where it makes sense to do so.
And we will stop doing meeting minutes for meetings where they are not needed, for example where the key actions and decisions are tracked in an action log, and further notes aren’t required.
Work/life balance
We will take active steps to create a culture where balance is the norm.
In fact, we’ll move towards work/life integration, where we can seamlessly manage work and life together. Because kids in MS Teams calls is the new normal!
Internal networking
We will make an effort to meet other teams in the organization to share what we do and learn from them.
Professional networking is important so we’ll invite other teams to our team huddles so they can present what they do, and we’ll return the favor.
Do any of these strike a chord with you? If not, that’s perfectly fine, by all means write your own for personal and team use. Why not come over to the Project Management Cafe Facebook group and share them with us there?
