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Organizing a project is a lot more than building or doing something. It is about managing people, expectations and the value itself the project will deliver. It takes a wholistic view and understanding of the people and the importance of all elements within the project.
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Most projects don’t really need what will be explained in this section, as managing three to six people is “relatively” easy and doesn’t really require much structure at all. But once that number increases and more voices start to be part of the equation, managing such a project starts to become a difficult task to handle.
Leadership within a 3 to 6 people project is usually handled in a distributed manner, where all members have a leadership role and their voice is equally as important. There is (usually) no such thing as one leader (and if there is, there must be a reason), the team itself distributes tasks, vision, goals, resources and expectation by themselves.
However, when projects grow, the need for a unified voice or person to provide leadership starts to become key for its success. This is only natural. If a project has lots of people, it is human nature that leaders will emerge naturally, as people gravitate towards one or more individuals who start to lead the team. These people might be the most experienced or charismatic people, but they will inevitably appear in most contexts.
In this section, we will discuss the leadership of a project and how to manage its components effectively. But first, what are the components that need to be managed in the first place? These can be categorized as follows:
Management is never about creating a dictatorship or controlling everything, it is kind of the opposite. It is about creating systems that enhance decision-making and ensure that you are taking into account all necessary information. Moreover, it helps distributing responsibilities so that no one person is the bottleneck of the project, as that 1. Creates a single point of failure and 2. makes it almost impossible to reach the best decisions, as one person cannot be an expert in everything. Governance should be seen as a tool.
The Following is a document that was leaked years ago where MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) explained to his employees what he expected from them and the company vision.
How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production.pdf
If interested in more In-depth things, here I will list several sources. But bear in mind that these are mostly very in-depth and technical sources. As I said at the beggining, you will probably don’t need and never use these outside of industry.
There are plenty of standards to go around. I note this because if you are going into industry, they will use them or a similar version. They all share kind of the same structure, but are different in subtle ways depending on culture and industry.