In February, we conducted a mitap about project management. We didn’t search for a silver bullet, but voiced and heard many life hacks on managing expectations, combating burnout and preparing for a retrospective session with the team. Details under the cut and in the video.

10 points above Yo

The head of the Yandex.Money project office Pavel Aksyonov formulated 10 rules for working on projects. For starters, I suggest reading Sammarie, and for full immersion in the topic with examples from practice, include video.

1. Identify customer expectations. There can be an abyss between the voiced or fixed TZ and the true goal of the project, the crossing through which will take a lot of extra time. So it is better to clarify on the bank what the customer actually wants.
2. Form new customer expectations with regard to its ultimate goal. The customer does not always have enough expertise to choose the most convenient and understandable mechanic for the end customer. Grasp the project intelligently, think about what the user will be like in the scenario you are working on. Could improve - carry the idea to the customer, convince him.
3. Brought the problem - seize the solution, but rather two. If something is not going according to plan, if there are objective reasons that knock out the project from the schedule, evaluate alternative ways and offer them to the customer. So he will have a choice - for example, to postpone the entire launch date or postpone the implementation of secondary functions to the second stage.
4. Identify decision makers - and communicate with them. It happens that with an order for a project comes an intermediate link - a person who is afraid to retreat half a step from an agreed "at the top" plan. And if the plan is obviously bad? Go out to the decision maker and interested in the result. Do not be afraid that the escalation will put the project manager in an unfavorable light. In the end, both the customer and the team have a common goal - a worthy and effective product.
5. Collect opinions on the side of the customer and work with them. Sometimes the project may not go as planned - for example, if the source material was not ready in time. In such a situation, it is worth discussing with the customer new general priorities: the deadline, cost, quality of the final product.
6. Identify parameters for evaluating results. This may include not only typical indicators like terms and income, but also some unobvious things - for example, compliance with a certain cultural level accepted by the customer.
7. Involve the customer in the project activity. When the customer is immersed in the course of the project, he can relate the course of events to his expectations, thus avoiding unnecessary rework. If the project is long and the customer is far away, it makes sense to invite him once a week or two to work among the project team.
8. Indicate to the customer the complexity of the individual "invisible" processes. Sometimes replacing the color of one icon may entail changing the colors of all icons at all stages, or worse - preparing a new description for all these changes and matching this description with a viciously long circle of people. It's worth it?
9. Do more than you promise. The devil is in the details: if you promise a schedule, let it be beautiful and clear, if the deadline is not strict this week, then Friday night is definitely not suitable.
10. Work with expectations - they are constantly and gradually changing. Managing expectations includes regular fixation of time and results, feedback. If you do not keep abreast, expectations can change to just the opposite.

Tired of ajail: how to coach a tired team

Anna Obukhova , managing partner of ScrumTrek, explained how to detect burnout, how to deal with it and coach a tired team. So that it does not seem that burnout is the lot of the weak, we immediately disprove: the best, ambitious ones, whose expectations from themselves and the company are high, burn out.

Burnout has quite physiological signs:

• First, bags under the eyes, puffiness: fatigue is the accumulation of toxins and fluid retention - a natural reaction of the body that these toxins want to dilute so that they are not so toxic.
• Secondly, the effect of Botox in the eye: a glassy, ​​frozen look and fixed muscles around the eyes can talk about burnout. Why botox? Because the same immobility of the muscles give unsuccessful experiments of young.
• Thirdly, the coordination of movements changes: people often do not fit into the doorways, here and there get new bruises, etc.
• Fourthly, immunity is weakened, a person often gets sick. And the burnt-out person is not necessarily a simulator - he can really get sick, and even with high fever.

Measure the burnout level of each team member using the APGAR method (a similar metric is applied to newborns). This is an abbreviation of the English words appearance (appearance), performance (productivity), growth tension (reaction to changes), affect control (control of emotions), relationships (relationships in the meaning of the level of cynicism). Rate each employee on these grounds by assigning 0 points if there are problems, 1 point if problems are not critical, 2 points if there are no problems. The higher the final score, the better.
Found the team members with the lowest score? Pay attention to these people - gradually their desire to work and performance may decline.

There are a number of simple rules for removing a person or team from a burnout state:

1. Need to slow down
2. Get support from
3. Rethink your goals and priorities.

If you lead a group in which there is a burnout, do not rush into battle, start with yourself. Anna measures her own condition using the Welltory application - analyzing the heart rate, it assesses the level of stress and energy (norm: 20% stress, 80% energy). Only a charged person can overcome another burnout. If your energy level is below the desired rate, proceed. Meditation is suitable for someone, and digging for someone (Anna Obukhova's method).

About what types of burnout are and how else to deal with them - learn from the video.

How to talk to yourself when preparing for a retrospective

Olga Drozd, Yandex.Money project manager , shared her experience in preparing and conducting retrospectives. Not everyone in the audience was evangelicals of this method, so for the beginning we will answer the question why it is needed at all. So, a retrospective helps to analyze everything that has been done or not done during the last iteration, to highlight stoppers and conflicts in order to cope with them in the future.

The retrospective can affect three large blocks:

1. The control zone is the command itself. In this zone, changes occur frequently, issues are resolved quickly. With regular retrospectives, the number of questions from this zone will decrease, giving way to external topics.
2. Area of ​​influence - for example, other teams and units. If there were difficulties in communicating with other teams, look for ways to solve them, try to extrapolate some positive experience to a wider range of teams.
3. The attention zone is the entire outside world. At this level it is important to discuss all the risks that may arise from the outside, and to prepare for them in advance. It is important not to overdo it and not to waste time discussing the factors that you cannot exactly influence (remember the example from Radio Day? If you can't influence the Ministry of Defense, let's focus on a button).

The role of the company in retrospect is unusual: it is impossible to act in the usual image of a manager who has already understood everything and will tell everyone now - it’s better to hold the position of a facilitator , that is, a person who will help the team to jointly understand the strengths and weaknesses and work out a joint solution of problems. The task of the facilitator on the basis is to fix everything that we agreed to adhere to during the next stage.

On how to choose a place for a retro, unusual formats and the results of a perfect meeting can be found in the video.