Your Guide to Building a Sustainable Project Management Team

In my journey towards becoming an empathy-driven TPM, I’ve had adjust my Amazon mindset and look beyond the lenses of timelines and launch dates and delivering immediate results. You will want to avoid burnout, turnover, and inefficiency by being able to sustain a pace of work.

For those of you coming from the agile world, you will be familiar with this philosophy but you need to not focus solely on tactical but strategic people management. I think of this akin to me being a football coach, you don’t want your best players playing twice a week against the top team, but to rotate, add rest and spread out training sessions.

Building a sustainable project management team requires a deliberate approach, balancing productivity with well-being, fostering a culture of resilience, and ensuring operational efficiency. So how do you build a team that thrives over the long haul?

1. Prioritize Well-Being & Prevent Burnout

A well-run well-fuel team is a productive team. A team that constantly gets P1 urgent asks, gets overloaded with twice as much work as their sprint capacity is one of the largest demotivators. A survey conducted by Blind, an anonymous professional network, revealed that 57.16% of tech workers reported experiencing workplace burnout.

Prioritize wellbeing as much as output, by encouraging and promoting work-life balances such as flexible hours, WFM Fridays, and monitor workload in JIRA or other tools to ensure equitable balancing of work. For those days where you have a war room, provide recovery time, through recovery sprints to let your team recharge.

2. Introduce Mental Health Initiatives

May seem like something your HR department throws down your throat as part of its annual requirements, but taking the lead in providing mental health awareness is actually a powerful instrument. I used to offer a weekly meditation session for my team on the rooftop of a startup in San Francisco, and over time got quite a cult following. When teams feel supported, and their mental state is continuously nourished, their productivity and morale improve substantially.

3. Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning

I talked about earlier about recovery sprints. This would be a great opportunity to insert continuous learning initiatives to up-skill your team. Investing in knowledge-building opportunities, certifications, cross-training not only ensures your team’s skills are kept sharp, but builds redundancies through expansive knowledge, and most importantly motivates employees to become more impactful.

In the same bucket I would encourage senior engineers to mentor junior ones, facilitate lunch and learn sessions to demo tools and processes, and finally some time to work on side projects that are of interest. Instead of being in a firefighter mode, find time to switch your team to a builder mode.

4. Invest in Process Optimization

Nothing kills a team like inefficient processes, and this is not just me speaking as an SRE TPM. Manual processes is death by a thousand paper cuts which takes away from focusing on impactful work.

Here I would consider investing in automation. Look at tools that can automate repetitive tasks for engineers and project managers alike. Make it easier for engineers to report progress by integrating GitHub into Jira for instance to allow git commits to automatically update the status of a ticket.

I use sprint retrospectives to come up with ways to continuously improve how we do work and incremental improvements.

5. Build a Resilient Team Culture

Don’t overlook resilience, and not just in your systems but in your people. Resilience is something that takes time forged through many building blocks.

These blocks would include building a psychological safety net, an environment for teams to feel they can speak up without fear of retribution. This requires building a culture of trust over time. Recognizing and celebrating success is another block, providing positive reinforcement and attribution to boost morale.

These blocks if you come from agile once again is something you would be familiar with.

6. Encourage Regular Feedback

Finally, for all the tips I’ve given you above, it may amount to nothing if toy are operating on a one-way street mindset. In other words, a manager just puts forth his or her ideas but a leader thoughtfully listens to their teams. Provide regular check-ins with your team to calibrate and tweak your processes. Tailor knowledge building and up-skilling with what each team member is looking to learn. A regular feedback loop helps the team feel heard while allowing you to address their true pain points.