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Executing on a simple idea is always much easier than executing on a complex idea. After all, it is simple. So, simplification was the first step in making this project a success. It was also the first step towards creating an immediate milestone success.

Now that we had a simple project to work on, we needed more simple tasks. The first major milestone became very simple: Display a product with all of it’s product details, technical specifications, and photograph on a page. At this point, we didn’t need to have formatting down. We didn’t need to have add-to-cart buttons. We didn’t need to have categories and departments and links and upsells and other ecommerce features.

So, I (yes, me. Remember, this is a lesson on successful micromanagement) went to work. The guy with the marketing plan rolled up his sleeves and started coding again. Within two days, I had a page ready that did everything we needed it to do. It displayed the product details, technical specifications, and photo. It was really ugly! But the team now had a victory. They had something that they could look at and say, “We can do this.”

Granted, I would never want to show anyone what the page looked like. Imagine Yahoo! from 1997. Actually, go back a year. Yes, Yahoo from 1996. It was even worse than that!

Still, we had a victory. The team was back on their feet (well, actually… at their desks) and working. The next step was to fit this all into an over all architecture. With a motivated team, it was much easier. I’ll cover the team motivation in the next part of this series about Successful Micromanagement in Information Technology.

To quickly sum up the first step to successful micromanagement:

1. Simplify the project
2. Create a small, attainable, yet significant milestone that only you can do
3. Execute immediately and show that this project will move quickly

I want to be sure to reinforce that I am not advocating permanent micromanagement. The goal of a manager should be to utilize micromanagement to get a project back on track. Period. Then you walk away and let your team work their magic.

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