Project Management’eur

The other day I attended a presentation on Time Management offered by the local Houston chapter of the Project Management Institute. This was an overview discussing how to manage your time considering all aspects of your life from a unique and interesting perspective. What struck me was that there were several attendees who were noticeably stressed and distraught, seeking answers to these two questions:

1. How to I get all of these extra monkeys off my back? Even though I am already overloaded with work, my boss keeps handing off more to me.
2. How to I manage the multitude of emails that keep showing up in my in box in ever increasing volume?

The presenter acknowledged that these are common problems in corporate America and offered some advice for each.

For the first problem, the presenter suggested compiling documentation of all of the projects you are currently working and seeking a meeting with the boss to discuss them.  During the meeting, present this documentation in a positive manner so that the boss can see the reality of what is expected of you and in what time frame.  Then the boss can either prioritize the list and/or offload some of the work to someone else.  The boss’s expectations of you then become more realistic and your stress level goes down.

For the second problem, the presenter suggested that you must control how people communicate with you.  As an example, he noted that he only gives his cell phone number out to his family and close personal friends.  But in the work environment, everybody has your email address.  How then do you control communication with you at work?

Project Management for the Real World , an online project management application, can assist with both of these problems.

For the first problem, your project data can be gathered into a comprehensive printer friendly report with a few clicks and printed for your meeting.  Better still, you can set up your boss as a project owner user, giving him/her the ability to view all aspects of all of your  projects online at any time.  With this ability to quickly reference the detail of all your projects, the boss can better plan how to prioritize and add new ones and prevent the extra monkeys on your back problem to begin with.  For a large organization where the projects of multiple departments need to be tracked, and account can be set up for each department.  The manager who must track the work of all these departments can be given the appropriate permissions in each department’s account to enable an overall view of the projects in a company.  This data is presented in a hierarchical view so that the manager can easily drill down to points of particular interest at any time.

For the second problem, you need a way to control how people in your organization communicate with you.  Large volumes of email can be caused by redundancy of requests and responses for information.  This redundancy can be caused by not including everyone who has a need to be involved on a copy list, by the difficulty of organizing emails by topic or thread, by not communicating effectively or thoroughly in your emails, and by individuals loosing important emails.  To implement some control on this, use the project discussion area of Project Management for the Real World to host your discussions, organizing them by project and by task. Insist that this is the place for these discussions. Set up guidelines to make the knowledge base developed by discussion participation more useful; for example:

• Read your task requirements thoroughly first.
• Search the project discussion posts to see if some of your questions have already been addressed.
• Be thorough about including all of your remaining questions to date in your post. Avoid posting one liners when possible to reduce the number of individual posts making it easier for the team to find what they are looking for.
• In responding to questions, address all questions, even if you have to say you can’t answer some now and will post the answer when available. I can’t begin to count the times when I have sent an email with a list of questions and the response will simply not address some of them, causing me to have to send a follow-up email for all the questions not answered in the first email.
• If your post applies only to one or more specific tasks and not to the project in a general sense, link these task to the post.

Combining a centralized discussion area accessible at any time by team members and the intelligent, thoughtful use of the content of your communication can go a long way to solve communication overload in project management. It is easy for an overwhelmed manager or team member to be tempted to quickly fire off an email that just gives minimum attention to some particular hot button. But taking the extra time to be more thoughtful and thorough in your project discussions can save much time and confusion in the long run, helping your projects to be completed faster and more efficiently with much less stress on all participants.