There are hundreds of things you can do as a project manager to deliver a project. How do you prioritize what’s on your project management to-do list? Here are tips from the pros:

Let the environment guide you. Monitor your project environment and respond to concerns that arise. Things change day to day in a project. Teams can get stressed. Key staff can argue. Stakeholders hear rumors and get fearful. Unexpected issues arise. Ensure you address these concerns, and you’ll create a positive environment for project delivery.

Accommodate your senior stakeholders. Design your to-do list around what your stakeholders need to trust in your project management. Understand their desires. Are they detail oriented? Do they want frequent status updates, or alerts only if there’s a problem? The last thing you want are worried senior leaders, so accommodate their needs – but don’t hide bad news from them!

Focus on risk. Keep risk monitoring in the forefront. Talk about risk often with your team. Watch for risk triggers and be proactive with your response strategies. Supporting a risk management mindset is powerful – make it a significant part of your to-do list.

Complement your project team. Every project team has strengths and weaknesses. Use your experience to make up for team shortcomings.  When appropriate, offer your help and teach your team members. Ensure you aren’t taking over their responsibilities —  you already have enough to do as the PM!

Support your team. Your team is crucial to project success. Take care of them. Pay attention and support their needs. Thank them when they do well and guide them when they go astray. It’s easy to forget this in hectic project environments, so ensure supporting your team is a to-do list priority.

For more info, watch my course Project Management Foundations.

It’s irresponsible to promote early estimates as being accurate. Early on, there are too many unknowns. A responsible approach focuses on communicating our estimates as gradually more accurate. Here’s what you can do to produce responsible estimates.  

• Label your estimates. An estimate without a label implies the value is accurate. Label your estimates to indicate their accuracy, such as rough order of magnitude, budgetary, or definitive. Define the accuracy range for each label, such as -20% to +50%. Then, indicate when a more accurate estimate can be produced.
• Re-estimate at key points in the project. Events like finalizing a contract provide significant information to improve your estimates. Produce refined estimates after each of these events. Develop and communicate a schedule for re-estimating, tied to the events, to demonstrate a clear rationale for how you intend to incrementally improve your estimates. 
• Keep refining estimates during project execution. Don’t stop estimating after planning is complete. As major deliverables are produced and costs become known, continue to refine your estimates. This further demonstrates that estimation accuracy evolves, and reflects your concern for the money and time you spend.

Project management entails managing expectations. You can set expectations about estimating by creating an estimating schedule and estimating to that schedule as your project progresses. That’s a responsible and rational way to manage estimating.

To learn more about estimating, check out the estimating movie in my Project Management Foundations course.

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Bob McGannon and I talk about whether a project manager can have too much authority. We also talk about what to do to make sure everyone understands the authority the project manager does have.

Q: Everyone tells me to pad my project estimates. Should I follow their advice?

A: No! You should share your best, most accurate and non-altered estimates with your sponsor. Padding your estimate is adding contingency without justification. Be transparent. Share estimates with your sponsor, emphasizing that they don’t include contingency.  Then, share your recommendations for how much contingency to add based on specific risks associated with the project.

For more on project management, check out the Become a Project Manager Learning Path at LinkedIn Learning.

Collaboration is gold in projects. Collaborative stakeholders produce better requirements, provide support for your solution, and rarely raise issues when accepting deliverables. Even with these benefits, there can be too much collaboration. Here are symptoms of too much project collaboration and how to correct them:

• You have more stakeholders than necessary. Environments that are extremely collaborative can bring a wide variety of hopes, expectations, and opinions – more than needed for success. When many stakeholders want to collaborate, assign primary stakeholders and secondary stakeholders (more like interested parties). Restrict project authority like submitting formal requirements or decision-making to your primary stakeholders.
• Decisions take too much time.  As stakeholders seek to include others, decision-making can get dragged out. While including everyone can help produce better decisions, timeframes for reaching those decisions can be too long. Lack of consensus can cripple a project. To address this, include review time and decision-making tasks in your project schedule. Emphasize when decision-related tasks are on your critical path and discuss the impacts of extended decision-making time.
• Scope increases. As stakeholders participate in requirements sessions and your solution comes to fruition, new ideas for adding business value can arise. The more the collaboration, the more this will occur! While business value is a good thing, your scope might grow beyond your “minimum viable product.” Ensure your change approval process focuses on limiting project scope to what’s needed to deliver business value. Remind stakeholders that Phase 2 of the project can be evaluated and cost-justified to accommodate the new business value ideas.
• It’s difficult to get approval to proceed or implement your project deliverables. If you hear lots of “it’s ok with me, but please check with x” responses, you may have an approval process issue. Ensure you have agreed upon processes for approvals built into your Project Charter, including who has final approval.

To learn more, see “How organizational culture affects projects” in my LinkedIn Learning course, Project Management Foundations.