I was really excited to interview Patti Chan about her experience as a project manager, mostly because of all her interests outside of work, including her love for cooking and organizing Ignite San Francisco, as well as her background of continuous learning and working hard to create a successful start-up in Baltimore before joining Intridea, where she currently works as a project manager. Patti didn’t disappoint me as she shared some great knowledge and advice over some tea and delicious appetizers at Samovar Tea Lounge. Here is what I learned from Patti:
Managing A Remote Team
Intridea has an extremely innovative and modern organizational model, where employees can work from pretty much anywhere with an internet connection ranging from San Francisco to New York to as far away as China.
Every time there is a new project, all Intridea project managers discuss it during their weekly Friday call, where they also discuss the progress of all the projects in the company on a very high level. At this point, they figure out who the best people suited for the project are, their current resource loading, and how much time is needed for that project.
Each project team consists of 2 to 7 team members with the project manager as the lead. The project manager is responsible for reaching out to team members to get the project started and making sure they’re on track as the project progresses. The project manager is also in charge of communicating with the client, gathering requirements, and even making most of the decisions. Although this type of working model is very modern and is where many companies even imagine for themselves in the future, it is not easy to make it work.
“One way they make it work is that majority of the employees that come to work for Intridea, they come from a freelancing lifestyle,” Patti says. “A lot of their employees used to freelance, they’re used to managing their own clients, they’re used to doing their own invoicing, they’re used to being self-disciplined – making their own hours and making it work without somebody looking over their shoulder all the time. So that’s kind of the profile of the best Intridea employee. People who are already self-discipled and can make their own schedule.”
As Patti points out, successfully managing a remote team requires having a team that is full of independent and self-disciplined individuals who are willing to go with the flow, are willing to accept change, and are always willing to learn and try new things. In summary, you just need a team you can trust, and luckily that’s what Intridea hires for.
Project Management Tool Kit
Intridea is unique, in that project managers get to choose which project management tool to use, since small projects require different tools than bigger ones. Some of the tools Patti uses are:
- Google Docs: Patti and other Indridea project managers use Google Docs for smaller projects or for other relavent documents, which they put into collections and share with the team and anyone else who needs the documents.
- Unfuddle: From all the available online collaboration tools, Patti prefers Unfuddle, an all-in-one project management tool that is not too overwhelming. Unfuddle’s features include tracking milestones, bug / ticket tracking, a notebook area to share resources among the team, and a message thread. Unfuddle also hosts code and provides version control for developers among other features.
- Pivotal Tracker: Patti and other Intriedea project managers are open to using Pivotal Tracker, especially if a client already uses it.
So basically, Intridea project managers have the freedom to use their own judgement based on the length of the project and their client to choose the tool that fits. What an idea!
Personal Task Management
Although Patti prefers to use Unfuddle for shared to-do lists and ticket tracking, she uses a free basic version of Backpack for personal task management. She has a page for each project she’s working on, which she divides into 3 to 4 sections:
- Daily SCRUM Review: Intredia follows the SCRUM development methodology, part of which includes getting together as a team and discussing what everyone did since the last meeting, what they’re planning on doing today, and what blockers or obstacles are keeping them back. As Patti points out, the worst thing to do for the SCRUM meeting is to think back on what she’s working on right before the meeting. Instead, Patti has a list of things she has to do throughout the day, which she checks off throughout the day, so she just looks back at the page as a quick reference for her stand-up during the SCRUM meeting.
- Notes: As things come up throughout the day, whether she needs to set reminders for herself or has some thoughts about the project or has a question she needs to ask, she keeps these in the notes section.
- Release Notes: Every project Patti is working on has a release, where the team deploys a bunch of code to production. For every release, they need to tell the client what exactly was included in the release. Creating this list right as the code is pushed to production, is just not feasible, so Patti keeps updating that information in the Release Notes section of the project throughout the project, so it’s very easy to put together for a client when needed.
The common trend that Patti follows is writing down notes, lists, and tasks as they happen, so during reporting time, she can easily look back and put together a report instead of scrambling to remember what exactly she did or what features her team added for the client!
On Being A Woman In Project Management
Not only is Patti unique in that she is one of the few women out there who knows how to program and is also a successful entrepreneur, she is also one of the very few women in Project Management as a profession. When I asked Patti about being a woman in a men’s world, she said the following wise words:
“I think the thing to do is just to get really good at what you do, and stick to what interests you, stick to what makes you passionate, stick to whatever you’re going to enjoy learning so much about that you’re going to get really good at it, and then also start sharing with the world. Write blog posts or give talks or give workshops or go out and talk to other people about what you’re doing, and then it will just naturally come.”
“A lot of people complain. There aren’t enough women in tech or they don’t get enough recognition – I don’t think women should get recognition just because they’re women. But be really good at what you do and be vocal about it and share it with others and then instead of people looking at you and going “you’re a woman in tech”, they’ll go “oh, you’re an expert on project management” or “wow, you’re a really great rails developer” and it just so happens that you’re a woman. That’s my approach to it.”
I honestly agree with Patti’s quote here. It’s not about becoming a “woman in tech” or a “woman in project management” or a “woman in a profession dominated by men“, it’s really about becoming a well-respected individual in your profession simply because you’re great at what you do and people respect you because of it (both men and women).
Great Advice
I asked Patti to give some advice to other project managers out there, and once again, I wasn’t disappointed. Here is what Patti told me:
“When I was an engineer, I had managers that didn’t really care about what I did. They just wanted to know when it was going to be done. And even if I got excited about a certain technology or a piece of code that I was writing, their eyes would kind of glaze over and they would be counting down the seconds to when they could stop talking to me, and I think thats really detrimental.
I think as a project manager, it’s so important to – maybe you don’t have time to learn as much as your engineers know, but at least listen to the basics and try to understand the concepts. And I thinks once you start showing that, that you respect what your engineers are doing, and not only that, but you’re interested in it and you are appreciating them for what they do, that goes a long way to having a healthy team that jives really well.”
I think the greatest managers are the ones who can identify what sparks your interest and let you develop it. If a manager is so focused on just getting only what they need from you, they’re not really leading. Luckily, there are people like Patti out there who do care about their team and about what each team member needs to grow as an individual, and she has a incredibly supportive environment from Intridea, something that many companies fail to provide.
