It can be difficult to know when to stretch your existing team to fill out a project, start a new hiring process in anticipation of work, or simply hire a freelancer to help complete a project team. I’ve worked with companies as a project lead, temporary project manager, and full-time contract project manager, and it’s not always easy to get freelance hiring and fit right. However, a freelance project manager can help your team and projects in many ways: project on-boarding, dedicated budget and timeline oversight, clearer communication with teams and clients, providing valuable status reports, and overall coming into the project with a fresh set of eyes that gets applied to your vision for the project and team direction. You’ll…
Make Post-Launch a Success (Presented at Ground Control Conf in London, April 2017) It’s launch day! You and your team have worked hard to achieve this — the moment when you release your client’s website into the wild, ready to go off and live on its own. But wait! Is the client’s team equipped to handle the growing needs of their new website? Who will be making needed updates? Are other team members involved in content maintenance decisions? And will your client be able to deal with the design and development needs of the site as the site’s purpose grows? Join us as we work together in this hands-on workshop to start taking better care of our web projects by thinking…
I’ve started a little project management newsletter called DPM(ish)—I’ve been wanting to do it for months, and finally went for it. We’re a few issues in and I’ve been sharing all of my mostly-project management thoughts, links, and news there. I wrote a bit more about what the newsletter content and why I’m writing it on my newsletter page, but I wanted to share more backstory here. I love a good newsletter, and have been pumped at the recent abundance of interesting, personal, and niche newsletters that are popping up out of simple platforms like TinyLetter and slightly-less-simple platforms like MailChimp. It’s fun to read through personal or educational thoughts from people regarding their work, daily lives, or interests that we all share…
As most of my friends/fam know, I’ve spent the last three or so years moving all over at a somewhat frantic pace (god knows my mail can’t keep up with me!). It was all spurred on after a hasty and messy breakup, moving home to recoup and then moving into my first—and most beautiful—apartment. I lived in downtown historic Troy, NY across the street from my best friend, down the road from my favorite yoga studio, and in a building full of happy, amazing women who I became good friends with over time. After that I jetted off to live in San Antonio for a month with my sister, brother-in-law, and their corgi; decided I wanted to move there more…
Have you ever taken over a project and realized you don’t know where to find the SOW or deliverables at all? What about all those times you’ve picked a project back up after launch to add a feature and had to do your best impression of Sherlock Holmes to dig out what went down on the project before it launched? If you’ve experienced these things, then you’ve experienced project management debt. The idea of content debt and technical debt are decently well-known in the world of web projects. Technical debt refers to the extra work that builds up as a result of code that’s implemented due to the ease (in time or practice), rather than implementing the overall best solution.…
I recently wrote about overcoming project management obstacles when jumping into a new project as a freelancer—but what about actually getting going and starting to manage a project when everyone else is already in the middle of it? Jumping into the middle of an ongoing project is pretty par for the course as a project manager. All sorts of things can happen to cause us to transition onto a project midway through: a colleague on vacation, we’ve started a new position, the current project manager needs a backup, or a teammate is unexpectedly away for a long period of time. Regardless of the reason for a transition, it can be stressful to ramp up to something without knowing what to…
As a freelance project manager, I’ve jumped into projects at almost any phase: from projects a few days away from launching or kickoffs right after proposals are accepted, I’ve been a part of it all. Jumping into the thick of a project means getting up to speed on lots of things very quickly, and that transition is only improved by lots of transparency. If not, gathering all of that institutional knowledge becomes a burden to the project manager and an obstacle for the whole team. Most of the time, I realize I need access, knowledge, or context as it becomes relevant during my project ramp-up. It’s fairly typical of project owners and stakeholders to give basic context to a project…
One of the biggest challenges I face as a remote project manager is that of instant gratification in communication. I’m an extroverted people-person and also happen to be a verbal linguistic learner. Solving a problem that requires others’ input works best for me when it’s done on a voice or video call, which isn’t always possible when working remotely. Everyone works at their own pace and signs on at their own time in remote work. Whether the company sets general “in-office” hours to check in online, or if you (like me) work with contractors or people across the globe, not everyone is online and working at the same time. Communication is frequently asynchronous and I am not always afforded the luxury of a real-time…
This is an updated version of an article I originally posted back in 2015 on this blog. Some minor adjustments and updates have been made, and I’m working on a few more in a similar vein – so keep checking back! Awhile back I was at a local meetup and had the chance to talk to a lot of people about what I do as a freelance, remote project manager. I’ve been contracting full-time for almost 3.5 years now, but I wasn’t surprised to get so many questions. Contract project management isn’t as common in the tech world as freelance design or development is, and it’s still somewhat of a novelty. So, I thought I’d talk about what I do,…
After another year of freelancing, building client relationships, dealing with both great and difficult projects, working with incredibly strong partners, moving halfway across the country, and a whole host of project management/tech events, I’ve really refined my approach to work that I take on. I’ve found that all of the work I do and projects I take on have patterns that are shared across contracts. Certain things are important to me in how I work, how others interact with me, and it’s become a core foundation in how I work—the principles that shape what I do. I look at these core principles as my personal set of project management standards. This core approach is something that I think we should…