Being a project manager for a software development project isn’t all about running sprints and leading daily meetings. There’s a lot more that falls on your shoulders as a PM: answering emails, keeping track of your team’s hours, staying up-to-date on industry trends, and more. Here are 7 things you’ll be doing as a PM outside of a sprint.

1. Respond to client emails/messages

You as the PM should be the central point of contact between your team and the client. Whenever a client sends an email or Slack message, you should answer as soon as possible. If you can’t immediately answer or resolve any questions or issues that were surfaced in the email, then you should respond and say you saw the email, promising to follow up soon with more information.

2. Schedule ad-hoc meetings

Sometimes, the weekly recurring client meeting may not be long enough to resolve open items. Maybe the client wants to talk through a detailed design review or explore analytics requirements. You should be able to recognize when a topic of discussion is too long for the weekly meeting and propose a separate meeting to discuss that specific topic.

When you schedule this meeting, keep in mind how available your team is and the time zone difference with the client.

3. Prepare a Statement of Hours Worked

Every week, you should review the time entered on your team’s time management app (e.g. Clockify, Connecteam, Timely) and prepare a Statement of Hours Worked.

The statement should capture time spent on the client project during the previous week (Monday — Sunday). You should name each statement consistently for clarity, i.e.: client_statement#_SoHW_date.

Once the statement is ready, send it to the client, the management team, and any other stakeholders involved.

4. Monitor team utilization rates

As a PM, you should track the utilization rates for each individual contributor. Utilization rates are what percentage of their billable hours team members are reaching each week.

Why are these important?

• Your team should each reach a certain amount of billable hours per week. If you’re deviating from these expected hours, it’s better to understand that early, instead of letting the deviation snowball and result in downstream losses later.
• Tracking utilization rates also tells you whether or not the targets for billable time are reasonable for each team member.

A contributor’s utilization rate is: # hours worked this week/target. For example, if someone’s target is 40 hours and they work 35 hours this week, then they were at 87.5% utilization.

5. Contribute to manual testing

Throughout the sprint, you should contribute to manual testing for your client. Why?

• As the PM, you should have the best understanding of the product. This makes you an ideal person to spot incorrect flows or issues others might miss.
• Testing also helps you understand the product’s progress and development.
• It’s useful to involve non-engineers in the testing process, as they often miss small mistakes like misspelled words, etc.

Items move across the agile board and enter a “testing” phase when the engineers deploy the items to the Test/Staging environment at some point during the sprint. When that happens, you should schedule some time to load the Test environment and manually verify the contribution.

PMs should test for both positive and negative use cases. Positive testing involves using the product as it is intended (e.g., following the “happy path” that users are expected to go through). Negative testing is using the product in unintended ways (e.g., pressing random buttons). You should also test across different platforms, eg. covering the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE) or using different mobile devices as well, when applicable.

6. Research new tools and best practices

It’s important that PMs constantly up-level their skillset and stay informed of current trends and tools. You should read blogs and books and listen to videos and podcasts related to software development and project management.

You should also test out new project management, analytics, and customer service tools regularly. This research and learning may or not may be related to a current client’s project, but either way, constant learning is vital to stay up-to-date on industry trends and emerging technology.

7. Recruit and hire

Depending on the company you work for, you may be expected to help out with recruiting, screening, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding new team members. Due to your knowledge about projects, your feedback and insight can be extremely helpful when evaluating new candidates. You could either be assisting in testing a project manager candidate or helping the interview team to see if a new developer is a good fit for your team.

To be a successful project manager and complete these tasks, you have to have good client communication, organizational skills, and a desire to continuously learn. These skills, beyond knowledge about software development, are what will set you apart as a PM and make sure your team’s sprint runs smoothly.

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