By Doreen Malavanu, OnaStories
How You Can Start Learning by Doing
3 lessons our Project Manager learnt managing his first major project
Experience breeds perspective and competence. We see this in our work every day as a story-doing company. The practical lessons you gain learning by doing far outclass any theorising you may do. We’ve cultivated a bias for action-based learning. You’re thrown into the fray to gain firsthand experience and build competence.
This hands-on approach is transformational! When our now Project Manager Willy Nkya was a fresh recruit — still green, having joined us only a few months prior — Ona threw him into the deep end. An international organisation had contracted us for a huge branding and communications project. They wanted: a website, social media management, photography, graphic design, presentation design, and an international-class exhibition at the end of it all. Guess who was called upon to manage his first major project as his first real task at OnaStories?
By the end of the year-long project, Willy learned more than any project management course of the same duration could have taught him. And this both personally and professionally.
“It was the one experience that really revealed my greatness to me”
Wilson Nkya — OnaStories Project Manager
One of his main tasks as PM was serving as project liaison: communicating with the client on their desired output and then directing a creative team to deliver them. The creative team that he was leading in the project consisted of graphic designers, photographers, strategists and videographers — working to deliver client’s needs in high quality and within indicated timelines.
Looking back on the arduous year spent in the role, Wilson asserts to learning 3 main ingredients in making a successful project:
1. Communicate, communicate, communicate
Even studies show that most projects fail because of lack of clear communication. As project manager, his main job was to communicate — the project goals, team tasks and responsibilities, client expectations, performance and provide feedback.
“I came to realize that even though people hear the same sentence, they translate it in very different ways. I had to over communicate and make sure that every message I was conveying was clear.”
Wilson Nkya
Everyone being on the same page is a major determinant of a project’s success. Ensuring the clarity of every message communicated and received to and from everyone is of utmost importance in managing a project.
2. Set ambitious but realistic expectations
As a liaison, he juggled and balanced the expectations of the client and those of the creative team. The team members were sourced from the OnaStories Expert Network and had varying levels of experience, skills and abilities. After realizing this, he was able to get a realistic feel on what the team was capable of and that also helped him to work with the client and set realistic expectations.
When these two are liaised and aligned, it is guaranteed that both sides will be satisfied and the project will be completed successfully.
3. Right Team = Right Results
Recruiting the correct team members to implement a project is vital. In this particular project, a quality that team members had to possess was flexibility. The nature of the project necessitated many changes being made in the deliverables and timelines — as new tasks arose along the way.
“I had to work on really understanding the qualities of my team members. I needed to know who can deliver what in what time frame — and delegate those tasks accordingly”.
This became necessary as some of the team members were people he had not worked with before, so he was only getting to know them through working with them in this project.
Today, he can confidently add Project Management to his resume. Wilson’s experience proves and solidifies the validity of our belief in learning by doing.
At OnaStories, one of our goals is to breed a generation of creatives with professional skills necessary to take their careers to the next level. Many just lack opportunity , but when given it — like Wilson, they can grow their muscle and elevate.
The OnaStories Expert Network which was created for that same reason. The network now boasts 120 creative professionals with a myriad of talents.
When you join the network, we train you, connect you to others, and match you to client opportunities based on your skill level.
Want to work and grow? Join our ever growing network. Click here: http://forms.gle/DtPkLK6QdQxeWn7w6
