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”.

Take care of your team

Needless to say, that’s the most important thing any project manager needs to do. Your team is your asset. Each one of you brings in different set of qualities, experience, expertise. Each project manager needs to know about that.

Here are few things a project manager could/should do for his/her team:

1. Identify your key members
   • You need to know each of your key members to the maximum extent.
   • Do the SWOT analysis for them and use it during your conversations with them.
   
   
2. Regular meetings with your key members
   • Make sure you talk to those individuals on a regular basis in a structured meeting where you discuss the strengths, weaknesses, achievements, goals, alignment with project goals etc.
   • Also talk to them about their key members. This will give you a deeper view into their teams.
   • Seek feedback for yourself and for projects. Make sure you take appropriate action on that feedback and it gets communicated to those individuals.
   
   
3. Informal meetings with a diverse group within your team
   • These meetings have good potential to bring out if something is going wrong within the team.
   • Arrange some team events where people open up, talk about their personal likes/dislikes. Grab an opportunity to know them more.
   
   
4. Do little things that make your team happy
   • You announced a very good release – get some goodies for the team. Have a quick meeting, praise them openly and let everyone know that you appreciate their effort.
   • Remember important days in their lives – birthdays, anniversaries, kid’s birthdays etc.

Bottom line – it is a recurring investment, more you pay [attention], more you reap the benefits.

Communication Tips

Every communication needs to address some basic points. The communication may be with your team, your manager, your customer or your peers. If you keep this in mind, you’d avoid long mail threads resulting into lot of time savings.

1. “What”, “When” and “How” form the three tips of the tripod on which you can build a successful stream of communication.
2. For example if you are addressing your communication to your manager for an issue at hand, it would take following form:
   • Mention what is the issue that you are facing. If this is first communication about the issue, then you need to provide details of the issue as well. Otherwise, you can just refer to any earlier communication and state what the current state is and what you are proposing to tackle the issue.
   • To resolve the issue, you certainly have thought of some timelines/triggers etc. Mention that. If there’s some external dependency needed to be resolved by certain timeline, spell it out.
   • The most important part would be to mention how you are going to handle. This could be a list of points that you’d want to execute.
3. If you are conveying something to your team this would take a different form, but the basic points that you need to include would still remain the same.
   • Mention what issue you want to get resolved.
   • Mention when you want that issue to be resolved.
   • Mention how you expect that issue to be handled. May be you have thought about certain individuals to take the ownership of the issue or may be you want a group of individuals to collaborate heavily to resolve the issue.
4. The fourth tip which would add stability to your communication is to understand and/or address “Why” part. Many a times, individuals just don’t get why certain task is required or why certain process is in place. If that is the case, he/she may do a shoddy job or will execute the process in a most crude/ineffective way leading to a failure. This is the reason one should always address “why” aspect as frequently as possible.