In this post, I will be sharing my experience on how to lead a project. There is a specific reason why I am writing this post. Since the day the term 'project' came up in the university, I were bound with the term 'leader' in all the occasions. I have been the leader of ITA, SE, ITP, SEP, PDM according to my knowledge. So I would like to talk about the experience of me leading those projects.
You might wonder something.
"What were the results of the projects?"
And don't worry. The projects that we had published results, we got A's and 2nd year ITP project was selected to be presented as an example project for this year 2nd year students. So I think that I am in a good position of talking about leading.
Before leading a project, there should be a project team to lead. And there are things that you should know before leading. The project team consists of members. Those members have different capabilities and capacities may differ. As a leader, you should identify those and understand each an every member in a project group. Project is not an individual thing. It is a team effort.
There may be excellent programmers, designers and speakers in a project team. The best thing is to assign the appropriate fields to the respective person. As an example if there's a person who is great in presenting, let him handle and decide the presentations and how the team is going to present. In that way every member in the team gets a part of the project that they really like and love. So no one would have a doubt that a particular area is not good since the experts are handling it.
As a group leader you should be disciplined. You can't tell someone else to be punctual if you come late. And simply you can't advise someone on something if you don't follow that in the first place. So once you have established that, you have to be gentle and motivating. And you should be listening and caring. That leads a team to always rely on you and feel confident of the work that they do. All the above things are good qualities that a leader can have according to my experience.
There are some things that you can do in order to maintain the quality of the team and also the project itself.
- Divide work load equally and appropriately
- Assign experts for different areas of the project
- Evaluate members and how they perform
- Give feedback to members so that they can improve
There is a thing to be told. A leader is also a human being. The members should know that as a fact. Most of the time, Leader is the one who is in stress that the project would not go well. But it is the responsibility of other members to share the stress with him by working according to plan. There are times when the leader gets really angry. Let's say "When you have a presentation due a day back and if a member comes and asks you how to implement an "ADD" function". At those times, what you can do is to let another member who has already finished his tasks to explain how that thing is done.
Likewise there are practical scenarios where your leadership skills are tested. You should figure out a way to deal with those and make the right calls. Leadership is all about taking right decisions at right time according to my personal view. Anyway this is a post I wrote according to my experience and you can get the good if you think there is any.
Good luck being Leaders!
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