In the world of project management, we often focus on timelines, budgets, and stakeholder communication. However, there’s one critical skill that frequently gets overlooked:
The ability to do your own footwork and status checking. When you can independently investigate, gather insights, and verify information, you become far more effective in your role and less of a burden to your team.
As a project manager, you should be able to:
- Track and raise issues and tickets with whatever system your client uses (ServiceNow or what have you).
- Track sprints and work allocations in Jira (or any other tool) for any team, not just your own.
- Review automated business process statuses (success or failure) after a new release goes live.
- Understand logs at a high level, even if you’re not the one managing a system.
You might not need to dig into every technical detail (like sifting through Apache logs), but you should know where to look and what to look for.
Most modern project management and cloud-based tools offer robust logging, reporting, and monitoring features. If you have the right access, you can keep tabs on your project without constantly interrupting your team.
How Research Skills Make You a Better Leader
Stay Informed
Having the ability to quickly pull reports or check logs means you’ll have a real-time understanding of your project’s status. You’ll be the first to notice if something looks off, which gives you a chance to investigate further and proactively address issues.
Avoid Getting Deceived
When you rely solely on others to inform you of problems or progress, you risk missing critical details. By verifying information yourself, you’ll be much harder to mislead, intentionally or unintentionally.
Ask Better Questions
Instead of starting a daily stand-up or group chat with, “Where are we today?” do some quick research beforehand. This allows you to ask more targeted questions, which leads to more productive discussions and less frustration for everyone involved.
Earn Your Team’s Respect
Your project team members are often subject matter experts; they expect leadership that understands (at least on a basic level) how systems work. By showing that you can pull a quick report, interpret the data, and escalate issues properly, you’ll gain credibility.
Getting the Right Access
One of the biggest barriers to doing your own research is lack of access. If you’re unsure of how to proceed, follow these steps:
Request Reader Rights
Even if you can’t edit or contribute to certain systems, having reader rights allows you to see logs, ticket details, and reports. This is usually enough access to get an overview of what’s happening.
Learn Basic Navigation
Make sure you know how to navigate the tools your team uses: ServiceNow, Jira, etc. Practice pulling standard reports and locating the areas where jobs or tickets might be flagged.
Stay Updated
Tools change frequently, and new features are added all the time. Keep yourself updated on any new views, dashboards, or analytics that might help you monitor your projects more effectively.
Contributing During a Crisis
In critical situations, like a production outage, tensions run high. Instead of interrupting your team’s efforts to fix the issue:
Dive into the logs yourself.
Check job statuses, error messages, or recent updates so you can give higher-level managers real-time updates.
Consolidate Findings.
Summarise the situation for senior stakeholders, reducing the time your team spends reporting.
By doing so, you become a valuable contributor rather than an extra layer of overhead. You free up your technical experts to focus on solutions, while you handle stakeholder communication and status updates.
Final Thoughts
Doing your own research doesn’t mean you need to become a full-fledged developer or system administrator. However, by taking the initiative to learn basic investigative skills, you’ll:
- Make more informed decisions.
- Command greater respect from your team.
- Present clearer updates to stakeholders.
- Minimise downtime in a crisis.
Ultimately, self-sufficiency in information-gathering is a game-changer for any project manager. Challenge yourself to gain basic reader access in all key project tools, and practice using that access daily. The payoff in efficiency, respect, and overall project success will be well worth the effort.