Do more with less. Isn’t that a theme lately. You may have the workload of 6 people, but the company will not increase your team from 3 people. How do you do it? How will you make it? Is there any hope?
Get out the pen and paper – it’s battle planning time.
1) Plan Your Deliverables
It may sound like over-kill, but a project plan for your regular deliverables helps. It assists in thinking through the monthly process and allows the team to visualize how their goals are achievable. As a leader and manager, you can set up check points to ensure quality of the finished product. You can also set up smaller milestones so that if there is an issue, you can raise the flag early to your customers.
2) Coordinate Activities
Your people may have down time that you don’t even realize. There may be bottlenecks in the process that you’ve built. The best solution is to get everyone involved into a room, explain the constraints, draw a line in the sand when things need to get done and have everyone participate in the goal setting exercise. They’ll know what they need to get the job done and they’ll rally around their leader if they see you’re in trouble (assuming you have helped to motivate them in the past)
3) Share the Burden
Maybe it’s physically impossible to meet your deliverables – maybe there are too many expectations on your team. I’d recommend living by the following saying “under-promise, over deliver”. If you can’t meet the expectations, someone is going to be disappointed. If that’s the case, make sure that your team is being honest with their assessment of workload, and ask your boss what to prioritize. If there are available resources within the larger team, maybe they can help out. If not, there is a need to raise the flag and realign expectations for the deliverables with the end customer.
So you have too much time on your hands? Feel like learning about webservers, php, mysql and installing wordpress? Here’s a great project for you. Get ready to hyper-link (pun intended) your team.
1) Improved Communication
- shared place for team communications
- everyone get material at the same time
anyone can contribute important information to everyone else
2) Line-of-site to Important Information
- team members may have wonderful ideas
- there is a shared skill set amongst employees
- a great idea motivates another member to apply similar methods on another project
- reduces people working on redundant projects
3) Shared Calendar of Events
- outlook is a great tool but not socially minded
- a google calendar widget with team access is a great option
- anyone can contribute
- aligns deliverables
4) Reference Material
- team document repository
- always have the latest version at your finger tips
- removes hive knowledge
If this is your kick at something like this, I highly recommended a fully supported solution through a hosting provider, using an existing system like tumblr or posterous, or Wordpress on a stick
