Onboarding

I started 3 initiatives in last 2 months, but nobody is cares.

I had setup process to update the project documentation where every team member needs to update it on a regular basis, but no one is doing it.

Oh, we have started with this campaign of blah-blah-blah for last 2 months, but hardly any one contributes.

Sounds very common, isn't it? Ask a simple question to yourself, did you onboard the stakeholders? Did you take their buy-in?

Did you explain the reasoning and logic behind your expectation to them? If not, then don't expect them to contribute. If you do not take effort to "onboard" each and every stakeholder with your initiative, you set it up for failure. 

And yes, same is true in your personal life too. Thinking of cleaning up the entire house this weekend? Ensure that you have onboarded your spouse, children and other family members. Else be ready for no-contribution or half-hearted contributions. 

Avoiding The Reminders From Your Manager

You might have seen your manager sending out reminders all the time and you might have really wished not to receive a single one. It would save a lot of time embarrassment if you could remember all such tasks, complete them at the required time and then inform it to your manager. This majorly falls in the domain of effective time management, but the intent of this article is more towards the usage of available tools rather than preaching effective time management.

1. Use a notepad - Simplest but somewhat inefficient and ineffective way. This will not give you any automatic reminder and is not useful apart from serving as a to-do list. However, since notebook is easily available to each one of us, it can/should be used to at least note down the to-do items. This should further be followed up with appropriate reminder mechanism mentioned below. [Recommended reading for managing ToDos - http://bhavin.directi.com/my-todo-list-the-most-powerful-weapon-in-my-productivity-arsenal/]

2. Email Reminder – Outlook allows you to set a reminder flag. Right click on the “Flag status” and choose “Add Reminder”. This will throw a pop-up which will allow you set the reminder for required date and time. Once set, the reminder will appear in the reminder window at the set time. Note that if you just “Flag” the message for follow-up, it will NOT give you any reminder service.

3. Outlook Task– Outlook also allows you to add a task with a specific reminder setting. You can add recursive tasks with various combinations of recursion. Once set, this also gets popped up in the reminder box.

4. Schedule an appointment in the calendar– Plan your day in advance. Assign appropriate time slots to the tasks at hand. The moment you make an entry in the calendar, Outlook will automatically set the reminder to a pre-defined time (usually 15 mins before the slot) and you will get a pop-up for the reminder.

5. Configure Recurring events– Outlook Tasks and Calendar Appointments can be scheduled as recurring entities and hence come handy for daily, weekly or monthly activities. For example – I have set recurring reminder for completion of Project Assessment Report on “First Tues of every month”.

Five Pronged Management

This is something that I learnt from one of the management training that I attended. When put in practice, I could see that it really works!!

When you are at your job, be it a managerial role or not, you need to keep on attending in many different directions. Typically we end up paying attention to our management, customers and the team and forget the rest two. Let’s go over these different areas one by one.

1. Upwards

This is a no-brainer. You need to meet the expectations that your managers have set for you. If you cannot help them succeed, there are rare chances that you can grow in your career. You immediate manager would have some set of expectations whereas your super manager would be expecting something additional. You organization management has some goals which you are expected to contribute in some or the other way. This calls for a lot of balancing act, but it’s only part of a big picture.

2. Outwards

This includes managing expectations with your customers. Your customers could be internal, external, organizations, or individual end users. As a solutions provider, service provider, you always need to keep in mind their expectations from your product/service. If your product/service is not going to solve their problem at hand, why would they embrace you?

3. Downwards

You would need a team to execute your ideas, to put up a quick prototype, to create a sales pitch or to create a kick ass demo. You surely can do it all yourself, but, if you collaborate with it’s going to make it time efficient and you can concentrate on something far more important.

4. Sideways

You work in an environment where collaboration can help you immensely. And to achieve that, it is really important to manage your communication, interaction with your Peers. When it comes to recognition, nothing helps like peer acceptance. If you are eying for that specific post and the corresponding manager/head gets to know about your demonstrated capabilities through your peers, it will give you an edge over others. Work with your peers and work on your peers. Both things are important.

5. Inwards

This is the most important direction which is usually overlooked by almost each one of us. However, the truth is, if we can’t manage ourselves, how good we be at managing something external? Inner discipline leads to external success. Take out time for your own sake, however busy your external schedule is. Decide your priorities in your personal life and give equal, if not more, importance to them as your external commitments.

Feedback

Me: “Anil and Saurav, let’s discuss how we handled the call today. Could we do it immediately?”

Anil (Experience Team lead): “Sure, Mandar. Let’s do it now”.

Me: “Saurav, what do you think about the call today? Did it go well? What do you think?”

Saurav (Recently started leading the team): “I think it went okay. We covered the points, we wanted to. I stumbled at few places.”

Anil: “Not really. We had carved out the structure of the call in our meeting prior to the call. However, you were appearing not-so-confident while you were talking to the customer. For every sentence, you were looking at me for confirmation or you were asking “correct?”"

Me: “Yes, Anil is right. Even if you were making a statement, it was being posed as a question, leaving the person on the other end clueless”

…

Dialogs like this are not rare while handling a team, however, at the same time, I must say they are not so common as well. Many project managers make it a point to provide the feedback to the team members, and many keep on procrastinating. This post is to bring about some important aspects of sharing the feedback.

1. Chose correct time

It is important to provide the feedback at the right time and the right time is always “as soon as possible.” In the example above, I chose to discuss the feedback immediately after the call, because I wanted Saurav to start pondering about this immediately. If he does so, I can hope to see the change in next 3-4 calls, but if I don’t, then there’s no way Saurav would know about this as a problem and would continue to communicate in the same fashion.

2. Receptive minds

To have a positive impact of the feedback, the recipient needs to be in a state to receive the feedback. Not every individual is open to receive the feedback. The manager needs to take extra effort to bring that individual to a state of mind where he/she can understand the feedback. If this is done, only then you can expect some corrective action to happen. If the individual is not in receptive state, he/she may start arguing, defending or just close himself/herself and whatever is being told, would go down the drain.

3. Frequency

The frequency for the feedback needs to be adjusted per individual. Some of them like to hear often than rest. While it is okay to fine tune the frequency per individual, it shouldn’t go below certain threshold.

4. Prepare

It is equally important that you prepare yourself for providing the feedback. You need to have all the observations noted down for handy reference, or have all the examples handy with you. One needs to interwoven these examples in order to make the recipient understand the real essence of the feedback. The examples, in itself, can be debated individually, but when more than one such examples are considered, they show a pattern and which is very important to provide feedback on.

5. Strengths/Areas of improvements

Lot of management trainings emphasize on starting with positive points and to gel it with areas of improvement to achieve better results. However, in my personal experience, what matters is the rapport with the recipient. If your team knows that you praise them for all the good things done from time to time, I haven’t seen people complaining when only areas of improvements are conveyed to them. If you are working with a new person, new team, then probably mixing the positive points and improvements together will have more impact, but apart from that, it doesn’t really make much difference.

Project Management Tool – Spreadsheet

Don’t get surprised, even a simple spreadsheet can become very effective project management tool, due to it’s extensive computational set.

One can easily put up a plan for a 2-3 weeks project in the spreadsheet, if the project is not that complex, if there are not many dependencies and is to be executed with only a couple of resources. Those who are not so familiar with MS Project like tool can use excel to their benefit and achieve the project management goals.

A simple table like this could also be useful:

Task Name	Resource Name	Estimated effort	Start Date	End Date	Status

End Date column can have a formula to calculate the end date automatically base on the effort column. And if you are really keen on using the spreadsheet only, you can append the above column list with other columns like “actual effort”, “actual start date”, “actual end date” and then put your skill to develop formulae to extract tonnes of information from this table.

I personally never to planning in excel as I find this very primitive. And most of the times I have access to MS Project, which does all the above mentioned things and loads of more like a breeze.

Project Management Tool – MS Project

To be successful in any kind of management, it is absolutely required to use right kind of tools. Right tools add to your productivity, efficiency, and convenience.

MS Project is one such tool which has been designed and developed for managing the projects from planning, scheduling, tracking and replanning perspective. I will be covering some of the aspects of this tool in coming days, however, today’s article only serves as an overview of MS Project.

Any project scheduling/tracking tool operates on three basic parameters – work, duration and resources. This is like a tripod on which entire planning and scheduling is structured. If you change any one of them, it is sure that you’ll need to change at least one other to keep this tripod balanced. E.g. If you change the duration of the task, then either you need to increase the number of resources to meet the new timeline, or you need to ask your resources to work or additional hours everyday to meet the new timelines. If you reduce the work, then either you can reduce the number of resources (or percentage thereof) or you can reduce the duration itself, so that some other task can be accommodated. MS Project also works on these principles.

MS Project allows you to create a blueprint of your project and save it as a “baseline” for all future references. This helps immensely for tracking the project. One can easily see how the project is progressing through the life of that project.

As everyone knows, when working on a project, we divide the project into numerous sub-tasks and many of these are interdependent, either due to the inherent nature of the task or due to requirement of resource with specific skills or simply because there are not sufficient resources to start that task in parallel. In all such cases, you can add the dependencies of various types between the tasks and arrive at a project end date.

Various reports provided by MS Project also come very handy, specifically “WhoDoesWhat”. This particular report tells the reader exactly what is happening on a given date.

Few other things that I would mention is various views which make the job of data entry or data mining pretty easy. Default view is Gantt View. For tracking against baseline, one can use Tracking Gantt, for resources view, there is Resource Sheet and Resource view. For entering actual data day-by-day, one can use Resource Usage view or Task Usage view. In fact, one can create his/her own view to suit the requirements.

I will be covering this tool in-depth as I have used to a large extent (although not extensively) and definitely have some tips and tricks to make your job with MS Project easy. Watch out this space for more.