Austin Hay, from Ramp, on driving projects to completion
Ramp, the finance operations platform, has grown quickly over the past few years and as with any other successful company operating at scale, they have felt the need to redefine their expectations of what it means to “get a project done”.
On a recent blogpost, Austin Hay, its Head of Marketing Technology, broke down some of the operating norms that operators and managers use to get stuff done despite their organisational complexity, converging priorities and asynchronous/remote schedules:
1- Document your thoughts to drive clarity: It is generally good practice to scope what’s in your brain to paper. He suggests coming up with a dump of “here is what what we are trying to achieve and why” plus “here is what I think we should do”
At a minimum, include 1) business/broader context, 2) what you’re trying to achieve, 3) why it matters (impact) and 4) a proposed hypothesis or path forward.
2- Assign ownership: It is critical to understand who is responsible for each part of a project.
Be explicit, and clear about these owners. Don’t be afraid to ask the question “So who is owning X?” If nobody owns something, be explicit in assigning ownership.
3- Work backwards: This point resonated with me deeply as I am actively working on improving goal setting skills. The premise is to start with your goal and the deadline and then work backwards in time (week by week) and ask: “What would need to be done by this week in order for this project to be successful?”
Think about all elements of the project including scoping, aligning, seeking consensus, reporting out to the broader team, updating your peers, updating your leaders, potential blockers or delays, testing, shipping and monitoring AND [very important] communicating out again what has been done.
He then continues describing probably the essence of project management:
You have to be able to commit to your peers and managers about getting something done on a timeline and then creating a structured plan for how to do it.
4- Follow through: In Austin’s own words, “getting shit done means being fearless and somewhat unapologetic in driving towards an outcome”.
Do not be afraid to ping people aka write in Slack “Hey X, in our call MM.DD.YY you asked about X and said you would do Z. What’s the status?” and … more important “How can I help?”
Being fearless doesn't mean being an asshole. It means being courageous to lead.
5- Be clear: We already established that creating clarity at the start of a project was important. The same applies when driving a project forward.
People can’t empathise or help if they don’t understand. It’s bad practice to assume they have the same understanding of what you see in their heads.
Thats’s all for today 🙂
Thanks for reading this far!