Humanized management
Step into my blog and come share memoirs and advices about the management of creative teams, technology and B2B projects with a humanized touch from a warm and seasoned manager.
About the series Working in the Helsinki office by the end of 2017 This series of posts came to me as an idea of highlighting personal experiences and solutions of managing and being managed, focusing on a humanized approach to deliver good results and consequently a better society by countering the imposed disposability of human workforce.  A younger self working at a shared apartment back in 2015. I have had all kinds of professional experiences for the past 11 years, from working on a multi-billion company branch with a lot of established rules and structures, to having my own small business and later helping another one grow. Those experiences made me go through different roles in different environments, from the frontlines of development to the management of teams with +50 people in a total of more than 180 projects.  Part of +50 people that developed the Virtual Helsinki project. So, through many successes and failures, I’ll share my view on what makes a good management, how people can be nurtured to become an A-Team, and how we can make work be worth our time in our brief existence. Getting Started! What to do to get started? You just got assigned to a project and, even if you were the one to make the deal with a client, you might not have all the answers to make it happen yet. Many questions might come to mind, after all, what is the project about? Who is the client? How do I assemble the team? Should we have a meeting with 20 people to brief everyone? What if somebody new joins? What if somebody leaves? The list of questions can become quite long and eventually meaningless. That’s why I prefer to break down a project in small, but significant bites of information. (I’m writing this while hungry, so cope with me in this next example, it’ll make sense).  Photo by Engin Akyurt at Pexels Let’s imagine you’re about to eat a burger and have a notion of what its ingredients are, but it’s only after you start nibbling on it that you start to break down and identify the different flavors and textures, and only through that a full understanding of the burger comes to mind. And I mean literally! Especially if it's a unique good or bad flavor, it is now impressed in your brain and helps you to differentiate burgers and even different franchises! It’s the same with a project, even though they might not be as tasty, you first start with an overview of what they are or might be, but only after going through its essential components that you understand what makes it unique and how to prepare it. For example, one can see a videogame project as just another game. But what kind of game is that? Is it for mobile or desktop? Who is the player base? What is the genre of the game?  Photo by Valeria Boltnevia at Pexels And just like the burger, after you know at least what kind of bread and patty, what sauce, what cheese and what vegetables, you have an understanding to either go through or prepare the burger. I like to think of each main ingredient as a Lexia, opening up a branched understanding of the main subject, and it’s through them that you can delve even deeper to know how the tomato is grown, who made the bread, what is the sauce's secret ingredients and so on. The thing is that this more complex information will be necessary only later on, knowing the fundamental details are the first step to getting started.
With all this in mind, I’ll be breaking down in the next post of this series what is necessary to kickstart a project by knowing your business, understanding a purpose of the project and how to efficiently communicate with your team, your client and, most importantly, yourself. Until next time! Comments are closed.
|