On today’s episode, Carrie interviews Diane Kinney from the Versatility Group about project management. Diane has 20 years of experience as a small business owner and many years as a C-level exec. Diane has helped small business owners and freelancers get a handle on the business end of their businesses. When you start as a specialist – developer, designer, writer – the challenge is to learn “the other stuff” from project management, client management and organizing your time to balance all the work in your day-to-day activities.
What you will learn in this episode:
- A project is defined as work that has a specific beginning and an end.
- Do not get wrapped up in the terminology of project management terms
- Typically your project will follow a task by task approach.
- The actual date of a project start is when the client has signed the contract.
- You need to allow for time for learning something new on a project that is unfamiliar to you.
Important Steps of a Project:
- Project Management is a set of skills, processes, and communication.
- Planning – the scale of the project can impact the work that needs to be complete.
- Scope – it is important to define what is in and what will be out (not delivered) in the scope of your project.
- Time – this does not have to be exact. It should be defined as the amount of time to work with all the resources that are available.
- Dependencies – things needed to be received before work can continue. (ex: approvals from client to continue work on a logo or receiving content from the client).
- Items that are out of scope – do not get carried away adding cool features that you or the client come up with.
- Communication – It is important to have regular updates with the stakeholder of where things stand. You do not want to be “heads down” doing the work without regularly updating the client.
- You need to master and define actionable items and tasks in your project.
- Track the time of everything that may not be in scope to know where your time is going.
Tips for Freelancers:
- You wear many hats as a freelancer. Be aware of the hat you’re wearing when you’re planning a project.
- It is important to master and define actionable items and tasks in a project.
- When you have that “PM hat” on you need to realize that project management increases in complexity and depth with a larger project and a larger team.
- If you do not drill down the tasks of a project adequately you can’t create dependencies between them and schedule them correctly.
- Remember that your client has another full-time focus other than your project.
- Make efficient use of your time by having “filler” work you can do as you are waiting on the client or stakeholder to get back to you.
Episode Links:
About Diane Kinney
Diane Kinney is the Founder of The Versatility Group, a boutique professional services firm. Over the last twenty years, she’s used her extensive business and technology experience to help clients achieve meaningful results with digital projects.
She’s worked with publicly traded companies and enterprise clients to craft smart solutions and deliver multi-million dollar projects on time and budget. She specializes in marketing and growth strategy, workflow optimization and creating operational efficiencies.
Diane Kinney is widely known in the WordPress community and has built her reputation on sharing her experience with small business owners on freelancing and project management. Diane and Carrie are currently working on a new book that will be released this year titled Real World Freelancing.