We all have memories of working with the team to get to a decision, then wait, a colleague has been left out and we have to start again. Or maybe you were once that colleague, and secretly felt enraged. Or you have spent days on detailed kick-off documents for a new project, but then no one reads them and you end up doing lots of 1-to-1 on-boarding meetings.
That’s “organising teamwork” for you. The”why do I have to go through this” chore that comes with projects big and small. You may have a well-staffed project management team, but they could…
Because teamwork is more than communication. You workday cannot be driven round by incoming communications distracting you, or important information transmitted with interruption or corruption.
You need quiet self-work time to think things through, to design strategies, and to feed into teamwork. And you need well organised information at hand to start self-work.
For these reasons, you need low-noise, high-organisation teamwork tools in your toolkit. And among the different tools in this category, Industry Box is the only one designed specifically for general day-to-day use. From kick-starting an extensive team of work-from-home stakeholders to participating in multiple projects.
We will…
Have you counted the number of productivity tools you use at work? Email, conference call service (e.g. Zoom), instant chat (e.g. Slack, MS Teams, Whatsapp), work phone, work management platform (e.g. Monday.com, Wrike), CRM (e.g. Salesforce), cloud/shared drive, plus your area’s specialist tools.
It’s a packed toolkit, and it looks perfectly balanced to maximise your productivity in every aspect of work. You may say that it’s all good, there is no need, and certainly no space or time for a new one.
Why not spend two minutes on the next section, and see if you resonate? If so, you have…
When was the last time you felt in control of all the projects you were working on? Such that you were making major contributions to the projects without dreading deadlines? Such that you had a good grasp of the projects’ developments and could plan ahead?
It’s perfectly normal if that feeling is distant to you. When we are project leads, we spend a lot of efforts keeping the core and extended team of stakeholders engaged; whereas when we are supporting other projects, we rely too much on the project teams to organise communications and activities. …
You may disagree that you have “perfect communication”. Perfect is a goal that humankind aims for, but never reaches. But your work communications setup is miles better than what it used to be even just five years ago, and you probably have already adopted the best tools and practices out on the market (perhaps leaving just a few latent gaps when remote-leading projects). That counts as perfect.
Again, you may disagree that you have a “productivity breakdown”. You have instant access to reams of information (even real time analytics on teamwork efficacy) and the entire pool of colleagues. Your business…
We are going to borrow the punchline from another software company’s advert (Asana’s, to be clear), since it corresponds so well with this topic:
“You can track where your pizza order is and when it will arrive at your door, so why not your project?”
Indeed. Data helps us plan better, and enjoy more in our personal life. The same should be true of our work life. If you are a project lead, opening up data sources that help you make leadership decisions should be a high priority.
Industry Box’s user analytics function generates data that help you make project…
What is the hardest part in juggling multiple projects? Not missing the slightest move. The moment you miss a single task deadline, your tightly but perfectly choreographed work schedule goes into disarray and other deadlines will also drop. Or you put in 10x efforts to get back in form, at the cost of your work-life balance.
As an experienced professional, you know this well, and must have built up a toolkit of skills and preferred digital tools that maximises the number of projects you could juggle at any time (if you are leading a project, see these articles on how…
If you are attracted by this article’s title, you are likely to be a stakeholder/contributor in multiple projects, in parallel. And you find yourself having space for productivity growth, but are frustrated by the project teams’ subpar project organisational capabilities. As a result you are struggling to juggle the projects.
You have our sympathy, and our full support. There are plenty of blog articles and management theories on how to organise a project efficiently as project leads, but surprisingly few on how to participate productively in projects as stakeholders. This article will fill the gap.
You could be an executive sponsoring projects, a head of a department that support multiple projects by nature, or a manager offering subject matter expertise in a red-hot area. In either case, you are working on many projects in parallel as a stakeholder (or contributor).
You want to contribute great value to each project, without draining time and energy unproductively. Somehow the projects never grant this wish, even though they are not disorganised to the brink of failure. Endless meetings, repeat conversations, irrelevant email chains, or sitting around for activities to happen. Or clashing deadlines, last-minute requests, fragmented project information…
There are always bad eggs in a basket. You could be running a crack team on a high profile project, but get constantly stumbled over by a handful of uninterested stakeholders. They are there to make small but critical contributions, but takes you endless efforts to persuade them to work with the team and hit milestones is a chore.
If you want to be a high performance, high productivity senior manager, this is the number one stumbling block to get good at handling.
The conventional wisdom of “satisfy uninterested stakeholders” is a poor investment for your efforts
Scott Lothian
Founder of industrybox.io — stakeholder engagement best practice without the learning curve.
