How to have fun with day to day project management

Project Management is a serious business; it takes a perfect symphony of people, processes, tools, and culture for a project to be successful. As complex as daunting as it can be, the project management discipline provides ample scope for those involved to have fun. With a simple change in perspective, Project managers can infuse fun into mundane day-to-day project management activities. How you ask? Read on…

Gamify Task Management

Tools dominate task management activities in enterprises. Project managers take care of most of the delegation and monitoring of tasks on project management tools and rightly so. However, over the period of time, this tends to take away the people connect and makes the whole exercise mechanical. Project Managers can make task management more interesting for themselves and the team by introducing gamification into the mix. Team members could earn points by completing tasks on time and desired quality and could be eligible for larger rewards and recognition over a period of time. Project Managers can leverage these scores to nudge the laggards and get them back on track. A “wall of fame” of sorts could be created to highlight the leading scorers and motivate teams to push themselves.

Meaningful Meetings

From planning to task management to status updates, a project manager’s day is full of meetings. According to Lucid Meetings, companies in the US have more than 11million meetings per day, and Up to 50% of these meetings are a waste of time, costing the US $37 billion per year. How do you make meetings fun? The key is to first categorize the need for meetings and limit the number of meetings per day based on the need. The second part is making each of these categories more engaging. Let’s take daily standups as an example. Imagine starting the standup with a quick motivational session and having a different team member lead the standup every day. You could have themed meetings on different days of the week to keep it fresh and cut the monotony.

Creative Communication

Part of a Project Manager’s job is to keep stakeholders and customers equipped with the latest information on the project. Sometimes this becomes quite a cumbersome activity with a number of reports going out on a daily. With the frequency and volume going up, it could also have an impact on the viewership of reports. To address this, Project Managers could find ways to consolidated reports and make them more insightful. To make it more engaging, they could add some industry insights, news, relevant content and add a touch of seasonality (holidays, SuperBowl, etc.)

LoL Leadership

If the intent is to have fun, there are a hundred ways. Here are a few:

1. Take your meeting outdoors once in a while
2. Let your team members roast you once a year
3. Get your team together for a Harlem Shake or a Mannequin Challenge
4. Express your appreciation with a Top Gun Handshake
5. Let your team express themselves
6. Be approachable and be open to taking a joke
7. Create team rituals for Goofups, victories and everything else

We spend over 20 years of our life at work on an average. Might as well have fun with it right? So find your own zone and double up on the fun!