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.

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.