Project Management

Conventions

Put down your PMBOK notebook—you don't need it. Reply to that email about that expense approval request—you don't need to send the intern to the scrum course by Latest Ninja Rockstart Project Manager Bootcamp.

The first step in getting teams to collaborate well together is to create conventions. The difficult change to implement is that team members have to sacrifice what's personally convenient—firing off a lazy, obscure email that doesn't push the project forward, but it does get the next step off your own plate—for what's better, more productive, more efficient for the team as a whole.

"The first concerns responsiveness to your needs. If you work in an environment where you can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately when the need arises, this makes your life easier—at least, in the moment. If you couldn't count on this quick response time you'd instead have to do more advance planning for your work, be more organized, and be prepared to put things aside for a while and turn your attention elsewhere while waiting for what you requested. All of this would make the day to day of your working life harder (even if it produced more satisfaction and a better outcome in the long term)." Cal Newport "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World" 2016, 58

Asynchronous Communication

Asynchronous Communication is the official permission—directive, even—to not drop what they're doing every time they hear a Slack notification.

Never having focus time to do the work that requires actual cognitive effort, thinking, and creative problem solving is killing the productivity of your team—even your A-players.

Contextual Communication

When was the last time you sent an email or G Chat or Slack or text or called someone or looked over the partition in your cubicle area to ask a coworker to ping on that doc you need that you can't find because you couldn't remember how it was sent?

The problem is right there in the question. There shouldn't be 12 different mediums of communication you need to sift because there's no convention for what mediums get used for what communication. Projects and topics need to have dedicated places where you can go and reference every related file or asset, every decision made, and the latest announcement, update, or other communication on that project.

Workflow and tools to facilitate the workflow

Everyone has their favorite tools. Or maybe they just prefer no tool at all and they want to just send emails when they need something, perpetuating the problem highlighted in the Cal Newport quote above.

There are a lot of project management options out there. Some are good. Some are less good. Way more important than which one you pick can your team's workflow be facilitated by that tool. Can you asynchronously communicate? Is your communication contextual?

Remote work isn't working

There are conventions for that, too. And they don't include a daily Zoom meeting to ask your employees what the status is on each deliverable they're responsible for.