‘Take Notes’—Lessons from a Project Management Internship
By: Madison Flanders
Tags: Internships, Project Management, Work, Workplace Culture, Organizational Culture

One of the most memorable parts of my childhood is flipping through the stack of New York Times newspapers my dad kept on his desk. I would strike pages with a red crayon pretending I was a mean newspaper editor whose writing staff just wasn’t up to snuff. At that time, I would never have guessed that years later I would get the opportunity to intern at the paper I had destroyed with red crayon. When I was little I always thought I would be a reporter, which isn’t surprising considering most 7-year-olds don’t know about project management. In fact, even when I first started at The Times, my project management knowledge began and ended with scrum ceremonies. I had no idea about all of the intricacies that go into such a pivotal role.

While I learned a lot during my internship, I walked away with five big takeaways that I think would be helpful to any incoming intern or project manager.

It’s okay to be overwhelmed

My internship with The Times was in technical project management. This was a new field for me and it was terrifying, to say the least. During the first week of my internship, I would leave meetings feeling as if everyone had been speaking a foreign language. When I was at the point of feeling like I was drowning in unfamiliar technical acronyms, I started taking notes on everything going on around me.

When I wasn’t in meetings I would research different programming languages, map out our stakeholders, read every wiki relevant to our project and even work on a glossary of those pesky acronyms (if someone emailed about SQL I wanted to be in the loop). I realize now that letting myself feel overwhelmed was what forced me to take action. I knew that I would probably not learn any backend programming languages over the course of my two-month internship, but understanding the general concepts would take me farther than I could imagine. By taking things one step at a time, I found that I learned things I didn’t think I could.

Listen first

I always thought a “manager” should dive right in and start telling people what to do. It never occurred to me that one of the most important parts of starting a new job as a project manager would be to take a step back and really listen to the whole team.

Listening to members of the team can highlight gaps in the team’s process, which in turn can assist the product manager with prioritization. Evaluating the team’s health is a project manager’s first priority, and understanding each team member’s mindset when it comes to their work can be essential in ensuring your project runs smoothly.

Organization is key

If you were to search the words “project manager” on the web, you would most likely find the word “organized” in the search results. That’s because it is a project manager’s job to keep track of all of the moving parts in a project. This may sound easy, but when you have internal and external stakeholders, plus the members of your team coming at you from all directions, it can be quite the challenge. It’s good to have a system in place so nothing gets lost.

One thing I learned pretty early on was to save everything. You may not think that brief email from a team member is important now, but trust me, there is nothing worse than being in a meeting and having to explain you deleted a resource that may be vital to the project.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

It’s easy to believe that your team of highly skilled engineers is close to perfect, especially when they rarely have tech debt and love going to scrum ceremonies. But even for perfect-seeming teams, everything can be improved upon.

Through my experience shadowing project managers at The Times, I learned these iterations can lead to improvement and innovation. Every team I had the chance to meet had their own way of iterating on process and not letting mistakes go unnoticed. Through learning reviews or long discussions in their retros, they always found different ways to improve.

A strong team isn’t built in a day

Great communication between team members requires constant tweaking and is something to actively monitor — building a strong community takes time. With that being said, the best advice I could give to an incoming project manager is to put processes in place that will continue to pay off.

The teams I shadowed during my internship had project managers who worked to bring people together. Whether they scheduled monthly surveys to check in on team health or created fun traditions in their scrum ceremonies (like playing a game at the beginning of each retro), the project managers established processes for team building.