Speaker 1: The first time managing a big project is exciting. It can also be a little overwhelming. But in this video, I'm going to give you some top tips that are going to help you manage your first big project successfully. And stick around to the end because I'm going to tell you how to get your hands on a free guide on ensuring your projects don't fail. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. My name is Adriana Gerdler and you have landed on the best practical project management channel out there in YouTube world. Again, my personal opinion, but I hope you agree. Now, on that note, if you're interested on how to get through your first big project, let's get to it. Bring your A game and your A team. Big projects bring out a lot of complexity, more so than smaller projects. So you really are going to have to make sure that you are on the ball and you are constantly on top of things. You have the complexity of the project itself. You have a lot more team members probably. You have tons of more contingencies, additional risks. There's a lot that you now have to think about. So with your smaller projects, not that you didn't do a good job, but you just had less balls in the air and juggling. And with the bigger project, there's definitely a lot more. Even probably more eyes on it from above. So you really have to ensure you bring your A game. And you also want to make sure your team are the A team. You want to make sure that they have everything that they need. They understand what's going to have happen. You're in constant communication with them. Really, really developing a solid team so that you have your A game and you have your A team. And together, they are a powerful combo. Plan and prepare to adjust. All projects, you have to do planning. But with larger projects, there's a little bit more planning that you have to do and a lot more adjusting. With bigger projects, as I said before, you have more eyes on it. There's more that's going to come to you about changing stuff. So you really want to be prepared. You want to be planned out. Do a lot more thinking around timelines. Really break things down into the different sections that you probably have within your project because it's a lot more complex. You're probably not delivering just one thing. You're probably delivering multiple things, and you're probably delivering multiple things amongst multiple groups. So there's a lot more of what you would be doing on a single project probably multiplied by two or three because you have to do additional things in order to make sure that it is tight because that's what's going to make sure your success on this big project. Utilize collaboration tools. Now that you're on your first-time big project, you're probably dealing with a lot of people, probably even outside of your office, maybe even outside of your time zone, maybe even outside of your country that you're living in. Bigger projects usually pull on a lot more resources, and it usually pulls on resources in a lot of different areas. So collaboration is going to be really important. This is not something where you can just pick up the phone quickly and talk to someone or drop by their office because you are all in the same building. You now got to think differently. So there's amazing collaboration tools out there that you can use so that you can be chatting with people instantaneously. You also want to be thinking about a central point to house all of your documents so that, again, everywhere from wherever they are, they can access all the same documents. And even more importantly, my favorite collaboration tool that's something that I have control over as a project manager is my WBS Action Plan. Now, whoa, what is that? Are you saying? Well, if you go to the search bar in YouTube, go Adriana Gertler WBS, I'll explain all about it, but it's a very specific way of capturing all your tasks and putting it into a central document. I actually use Excel. Most people have access to that, and that's why it's an amazing collaboration tool because it's not only about tracking tasks but also communicating too because that is going to be the key that you need to do with collaboration is communicating with everyone everywhere in different time zones because you got this big project. Now, if you're liking this video so far, I would be so grateful and appreciative if you give it a like, subscribe. It tells YouTube we're doing a really good job allowing us, me, to give you more videos. Break it down into smaller chunks. Okay, what do I mean by that? Your activities need to be broken down in smaller chunks. Your time ones need to be broken down in smaller chunks because if you look at everything in your big project, the complexity is probably going to be huge and slightly overwhelming. And who knows? You may have a big project that's two, three years of work because that's usually what big projects tend to be. So if you chunk it out, it's going to help you immensely to ensure that you can focus in on what you need to focus in on. Now, as a project manager, when you chunk things out, you can then sort of piecemeal it to your team, but then you can also kind of keep ahead of the game and see what's coming down the pike so that you can feed it back into your team as things are wrapping up in that particular section of the project. So that is something as project managers, it helps us take really complex activities and making them more manageable. So definitely something you need to start looking at doing. Have an accountability partner and or a mentor or both. Why not? So what is an accountability partner? It's someone who you have complete trust in. Probably someone, ideally it would be nice if they were in your project because they know what's happening. An accountability partner is just that. Someone to help you be accountable. Maybe prod you if you forgot to do something or give you feedback to make sure that you're doing the best job that you can do because as a project manager, we need to rise to the challenge of ensuring that we have everything buttoned down. And sometimes we're human. Sometimes we don't necessarily feel like doing everything, crossing the T's, dotting the I's, and that accountability partner can just help and provide us, okay, that's right, this is why I'm here doing it. And the mentor is just that. Someone who you can go to and go look at, here's what I'm experiencing, any suggestions, any ideas, so that you can do an amazing job on your first big project. Okay, now that you have the tips on how to manage your first big project, you have to listen to this. This right here. These are the common mistakes project managers make. If you are running a big project, you need to get this. It is a must. I can't even tell you how critical this is going to be. How can you get it? It's for you, free, under this video in the link below. Check it out. I promise you, it's going to help.