Practical ideas to help you manage your work with less overwhelm and more confidence |
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Welcome to February! Pause for a moment and take a deep breath; the year still has that “new calendar” smell. 😌 It’s a beautiful time when all the goals and plans you’ve laid out still feel attainable and realistic. What could possibly go wrong? Well…love it or hate it, part of our job is to wonder—and plan for—just that! As project leaders, we can't let our guards down as we run projects and manage stakeholders throughout the year. If we do, then those shiny new goals become painful heavy burdens when the team is straining to make them all happen at the end of the year. The good news is: It doesn’t have to be that way. Whether you helped shape the annual goals or they were simply handed to you, these five steps may help you plan your roadmap and reasonably pad the timelines so you can cruise through the year in stride. Write out the goals that your leadership team has defined, and put them in your own words. I’ll sometimes ask myself, “By the end of the year, what do we want to be true?”
Create milestones. Within each goal, ask yourself: “What would be some indicators that we’re making progress toward that end goal?” These can shape or become your quarterly milestones.
Identify work interruptions and slowdowns. Before going further, look for patterns in the year where work may not progress at its usual pace, including Clusters of holidays, Summer vacations, Company-wide gatherings, and In many cases, the latter half of your fiscal year! This is often when more time is needed to write proposals, grants, and plans for the next year. So, planning ahead now for that influx of work will help when it hits.
Break down the quarterly goals into monthly ones, keeping #3 in mind. This is where I begin padding extra time around the Christmas season, summer breaks, and the RFP season. At this stage of planning, it's important to keep your monthly goals clear enough to be meaningful, but not so detailed that you lock yourself in to an inflexible deliverable. For instance,
Write this: “Roll out employee wellness initiatives.” This goal allows you flexibility to define and refine the number and type of initiatives as you prepare during the year. Not that: “Roll out 5 employee mental healthy, wellness, and fitness initiatives." This specificity locks you in to a number and type too early and doesn't allow you flexibility to research, learn, and refine.
Take a step back and look at the monthly list. Do these milestones feel concrete enough and achievable in a way that you could communicate them to stakeholders and leadership? If so, then you’ve effectively laid out your high-level roadmap for the year, and you can use this as the guide and framework as you meet with the team, update stakeholders, and move the project forward.
In the next issue, I’ll share ideas for staying connected as a team through the year. And for our Leap Day bonus issue, how to keep the key stakeholders involved (but not too involved!) throughout the year. 🙂 On the journey with you, |
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What factors do you take into account when doing long-term planning and goal setting? |
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Managing Stakeholder ExpectationsBy Carolyn Wildermuth, Communications Director |
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One of our favorite resources we use to help manage stakeholder expectations throughout the life of a project is the Gantt chart. But, not the complicated ones that fuss with tasks and resources and dependencies. We’ve created our own simplified Gantt chart in Google Sheets that shows stakeholders a high-level view of the project roadmap with phases, key milestones, and deliverables and provides a status so they can see at a glance the state of the project and where each deliverable stands. It’s super-fast to create and doesn’t require a lot of updating. Most importantly, it allows the project manager to spend their time leading the team instead of obsessing over minutia to keep a Gantt chart view updated in a project management tool. (In case you’re wondering, we DO manage the project details like tasks and resources in our clients’ PM tools (such as Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp, etc.). | | |
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Take Time For A Color-full Brain BreakBy Liz Presutti, PMP |
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Between school sick days and a snowstorm, my two young children and I were stuck inside the house for an entire week at the beginning of January. By day three, we had already played all our favorite games, watched movies, baked brownies, gone sledding, and folded the laundry. We were officially bored! The only thing left to do was break out the crayons and do some coloring.
I don't usually sit down and color with the kids, but I decided to give it a try. It was surprisingly refreshing! As I detached from my phone and laptop screens, I noticed I felt more relaxed afterwards.
It turns out that adult coloring has several health benefits such as working both sides of your brain, improving your focus, and relaxing your amygdala—the part of your brain that produces feelings of fear and anxiety.
Let me encourage you to try this simple childhood pleasure. Print out a free coloring sheet, grab some crayons or colored pencils, and see how you feel afterwards! (Photo by Customerbox on Unsplash) |
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