up:: [[Software Engineering MOC]] source:: [[The Manager's Path]] # Managing a Project as a Tech Lead These are some step-by-step guidelines to approach project management as a tech lead. 1. **Break down the work** - use your favorite tools to recursively break down the ask into smaller pieces of work. Once some of the work is broken down, look at the ordering of the work and hand off tasks to people who can turn them into ticket-sized work. 2. **Push through the details and unknowns** - "the trick of project management is not to stop when you feel a little bit stuck." Push past those points by asking an experienced manager to push through with you, ask you questions to prompt you, or work through it together with you. 3. **Run the project and adjust as you go** - a good planning process helps you know about how far the project has come and about how far it is from being finished. Things **will** slip, the key is to communicate that to stakeholders along with underscoring completed milestones and remaining work. 4. **Use what you learn during planning to manage requirement changes** - apply what you learned from breaking down the project with its original requirements to what it would look like with the new requirements. Communicate the cost of those changes (new planning? more work? significant risk?) clearly. Having an idea of the effort the changes will take will help make the optimal compromise to achieve a deadline. 5. **Revisit details at you get close to completion** - do a *pre-mortem*: run through all that could fail on the launch of the project, and figure out where *good enough* is, socialize it, and commit to it. Cut out any remaining work that falls below that line. Attend to the finishing details as well: what is missing? What testing is left? What verification must be done?