The Money Files

Is the amount of unread emails in your inbox kind of a badge of honour? Time to rethink what you value! And I’m here to tell you that it’s not a selling point as a project manager to have lots of unread emails. Your inbox is not your to do list. It’s the first port of call for incoming messages (as well as all the other channels you have). But if you want to reclaim some bandwidth, then here are 7 tips to stay sane when email is out of control.

1. Batch process, don’t check constantly

Set 2 to 3 times a day for email review only. Block the time out on your calendar. Let people know that is your approach because you mention it in your status message or auto responder.

2. Use folders or tags that work for you

Come up with some folders or tags that work for you. I use a folder per project, and then break down that folder into subfolders, each related to a specific aspect of the project. So I’ll have a fold for budget and benefits, another one for steering group prep and correspondence, one per deliverable, topic or theme of the project, and so on.

You could have ‘for action’, ‘waiting’ (for where you are waiting on someone else’ or folders for different stakeholders. You can also flag messages, so if you don’t want to move them to a folder, colour-code the flags and create a system that works.

3. Craft better subject lines

“Action needed by Friday” is better than “Update”. Typically, we start emails with: For information, For review, For action and then state what the task is. Then people can decide when they want to read it, and for senior stakeholders, their exec assistant or PA can filter out the mails where their boss has to do something.

4. Default to clear, short responses

Try the 4-sentence rule: context, ask, next step, close.

For example: Thanks for coming to the steering meeting on Thursday. The ask of the group is to ratify the change proposed (see attached change request slide). We agreed to feed back consolidated responses to Elizabeth by Friday. Thanks in advance for your help!

5. Unsubscribe or filter relentlessly

I know we all have newsletters that we subscribe to, and they are a good way of keeping up with topics you want to learn more about, or from creators who inspire you. I’ve got folders for the newsletters I want to keep – when you find people who send stuff you want to refer to time and time again, you know you are on to a winner!

Move newsletters to a reading folder. Move reports to an archive and use search tags so that you can find them again.

6. Use flags/snooze/delayed send features

Too busy to deal with it now but worried you might forget later? Snooze the message or use flags to remind you to come back to it. Is it too early to deal with it but you’d rather get it done? Use the delayed send feature so your message gets sent when the time is right but you can draft it now – and cross it off your to do list!

Deal with inbox items on your terms.

7. Establish norms with your team

This is the thing that people on my training courses seem to find the hardest. Talk to your project team and your immediate colleagues about what norms you want to use. For example, if there are more than 3 replies in the chain, pick up the phone and talk to someone.

What are your boundaries about sending emails out of hours? When do you move a discussion to a chat channel so more people can see it instead of copying everyone in?

Email doesn’t need to run your life, even though it might feel like it right now! I’ll confess that I am not at inbox zero – I don’t think I ever have been in my 20+ years of working as a project manager. But I also don’t have hundreds and hundreds of messages in my inbox as that stresses me out. My goal is less than 50, so I can easily scroll through and see what’s top of mind at any given moment.

What about you, have you ever got to inbox zero? What tips do you have for keeping your inbox uncluttered? Let us know in the chat!

OK, we’re back to our mini-series on resilience in project teams! Today, I want to give you more practical tips for building resilience. We’ve looked at some of the things to consider for team culture and behaviours, but now we’re looking at more specific things that you can do as a project manager to help your team bounce back and deal with challenges.

1. Encourage a growth mindset

Talk about challenges as opportunities for learning and growth. If someone can’t do something or didn’t do it as well as they wanted to, it’s an opportunity for skill building and practice. The more you practice, the better you get!

Put regular post-implementation or post-project reviews in the calendar. Use retrospectives. Don’t blame. And if you haven’t read Carole Dweck’s book or watched her TED talk to the growth mindset, I highly encourage you to do so.

2. Take time for team building

I know, team building can feel a bit meh at times. But team-building activities and exercises can strengthen relationships and build trust among team members, so it’s worth putting a few minutes aside during team meetings for social chat, or activities, or case studies, or anything that won’t feel blergh to your team.

We are doing a series of pecha kucha presentations to get to know each other better, so even simple things like that can help.

3. Model work-life balance and make it possible for everyone else

Be the leader that logs off at a normal time and doesn’t expect everyone to work late into the evening or respond to messages before they should really have logged on. Manage resource capacity across the project so people aren’t overburdened, as burnout can reduce resilience. You can’t bounce back if you have no energy to do the things you should be doing.

Make sure there is flexibility for people to take holiday time away from work even in busy periods on the project. If you’re in a position to offer it, think about flexible work arrangements. Don’t book meetings when people might be out doing the school run. Encourage regular breaks, and support your colleagues’ well-being to help maintain morale.

4. Let people solve problems

Put aside the idea of hero project manager. You don’t need to solve all the problems for the team. Empower them to contribute ideas and solutions. You can facilitate sessions to encourage creative problem-solving, but you don’t have to have all the answers.

This might require some training or support on your part for the team. They can’t solve problems without the right tools or resources, so make sure they are equipped with what they need to handle challenges effectively (before they face the challenge). That might include facilitation training, or conflict resolution training or even stress management tools – you probably already have access to some of these through your organisation.

5. Recognise and reward resilience (you don’t have to call it that)

Recognise and reward achievements, especially when times are tough. Shout out someone who solved a problem on your chat channel. Tell someone’s manager that they did a good job at solutioning. Celebrate milestones and achievements together, particularly those that demonstrate the team’s ability to overcome obstacles.

You don’t have to say, “we’re celebrating resilience today!” as that not only sounds weird but might not resonate with the team. Call it out as whatever you want!

What else do you do to help team members and the team overall get more resilient? Have you tried any of these ideas and what happened? Let us know in the comments!

Last time I looked at what team resilience is and how it shows up for project teams in their behaviour. But that’s not very actionable – today we move on to actionable things you can do to improve the resilience of your team so you can bounce back and get over setbacks with a smile!

Here are 6 factors that contribute to team resilience. If you don’t already have these in place, what can you do to get them? They’ll all help your team feel more supported and able to cope with the challenges of project work.

1. A clear vision and purpose

Hopefully your project already has a clear vision and purpose. Is it time to revisit that?

The point of having clarity on the mission is so that you can all stay motivated and focused on achieving those goals, even when things are sticky. Maybe put the goals front and centre on your team meeting slides each week or as a poster in the office if you work physically together.

2. Strong communication

Again, hopefully you already have open and transparent communication. If not, why not (perhaps it’s to do with number 3 below?). Good communication within the team helps with sharing challenges and collaborating on problems. It’s hard to be resilient and get over a problem if no one talks to you! Get into the habit of sharing and linking people together so they can work collaboratively more easily, and when there is an issue, it will be second nature.

3. Psychological safety

Team members must feel safe to voice their opinions, admit mistakes, and ask for help without fear of judgment or retribution – that’s psychological safety. Without that in your team, no one is going to put forward slightly wacky ideas that might just solve a problem, or be innovative if it’s high risk.

4. Emotional intelligence

OK, this one is hard – you kind of have to recruit for emotional intelligence or give people the time to grow into it with appropriate support. You can’t wave a magic wand and have everyone on the team have amazing EI skills overnight.

You can surround yourself with people who demonstrate EI so think about who you use to fill your project teams. EI helps individuals better manage stress, communicate effectively and respond to crises. They are better at reading the room so can pick up problems before they start and they are better at reaching out to support others because they can tell it’s needed.

As the project manager, work on your own EI and lead from the front with this one.

5. Supportive leadership

Continuing the theme of leadership, be the best leader you can be. Leaders who provide encouragement, guidance, and crucially the right resources so people can actually do their jobs are important to creating a resilient culture.

Resilient teams need leadership that listens, provides timely feedback, and shows understanding during difficult moments. It shouldn’t just come from you as the PM. Think about the role your sponsor or steering group plays and how they can support from the top. Team leaders, workstream leaders and subject matter experts can also all demonstrate leadership – you don’t have to be in charge of a team to be a leader.

6. Flexibility and autonomy

Where you can, give the team the autonomy to make decisions and adapt their approach to best fit their preferences for working styles. With the knowledge that they have some flexibility to tackle problems the way that makes the most sense to them, they can go into those problems with confidence for dealing with them. That could also mean changing direction, if that’s the best answer.

What else do you see in resilient project teams that you would add here? Let us know in the comments!

I’m continuing my deep dive into continuous improvement this month as it’s such an important topic for project managers. There’s this expectation that we will use the retro and lessons learned processes to make improvements, and yet there is rarely the time to fully implement lessons. That’s one of the major challenges, and I want to talk more about challenges in making changes to ways of working today.

Resistance to change

The first challenge is resistance to change. Resistance can come about for lots of reasons, not least because people are worried about the extra workload of having to deliver project management process changes on top of their project execution activity.

Also, humans seem programmed to not like change. Having to learn a new way of working is a pain.

We can address this in the same way as you address change resistance to any of your projects: understanding the concern, clear communication, training and support and demonstrating the benefits. Plus a bit of management ‘this is the new way of working and you will follow the process’ can be useful!

Sustaining momentum

Improvement programmes might start out well, but it’s challenging to keep them going. After all, there are only so many improvements that are simple to make and easy to implement, so you might feel your goal of improving continuously is struggling because people have already suggested the easy wins.

Team members might not engage with it any longer. Keep celebrating success, keep recognising good contributors (without making those who cannot suggest improvements for whatever reason feel bad).

Pace out your changes so there is a small strand of work happening throughout the year instead of a big push and then nothing.

Resource constraints

I’ve mentioned this a lot throughout the series because I really do think it is the hardest thing to overcome. We have to balance improvement activities with project deliverables.  In resource-constrained environments (isn’t that everyone’s project environment?), you may find it challenging to allocate time and resources for improvement initiatives. Management might not see the value.

People doing the work might prefer to focus on their project work, which probably already has to be balanced against their business as usual activity. Now you’re asking them to do even more, and even if they are willing, they have to make prioritisation calls, and frankly, changing processes is probably way down the list.

They might be incentivised on other things. Their personal performance metrics or team objectives and KPIs probably don’t include the new improvement that has only just been thought up. So unless you’re going to work with line managers to write in a percentage of their availability to work on improvements, expect to see some up and down commitment throughout the year. People will do what they can, but creating the space for them to do that is important.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for helping teams find the time to overcome resource constraints for project improvements? Do you build it into their personal objectives or make it part of the expected ways of working for the squad? Let me know in the comments below!

That concludes my deep dive into continuous improvement. It’s an important aspect of project management practice, and it helps us create an environment where we can contribute to the business in more ways than simply project delivery. We can be the driver for change as project managers, and help our teams, and our organisations, deliver more in difficult times.

I’ve been looking at continuous improvement in project management this month, covering why it matters and ideas for building a culture where continuous improvement is the norm. Now I’m going to turn to look at what you have available to help, in terms of tools and techniques.

Luckily for us in project management, we have a range of tools available already that you are using across the rest of your project delivery work, and we can put those to use.

Tools for collecting feedback

First off, you have to make sure that you can collect the improvement ideas. We talked a bit about that in my last article (suggestion boxes) and there’s a lot more you can do – with techniques you will already be familiar with.

Surveys and questionnaires

We use Microsoft Forms for sending out lessons learned surveys and you could set up a form (on any platform) to gather feedback at various points in the project or simply have one on your team intranet page for people to suggest improvements when they think of them.

The trouble with ‘fill it in when you want’ forms is that you have to keep constantly reminding people it is there, so when they do have an idea they go to the form instinctively.

Retros

You’re probably (hopefully) already using retrospectives and lessons learned. Add in questions, if you don’t already have them, for the group to reflect on how project management processes could be changed to deliver better results.

Team meetings

Add an agenda point to your regular team meetings where you talk about what’s been improved, what improvements are being worked on and ask for suggestions. It doesn’t have to be every week, but once a quarter or something like that would work well as a reminder for the team.

Techniques for learning

Once you’ve got some ideas, you’ll want to dig into them and see if they stand up to scrutiny – and whether they are worth the effort to change. Luckily, again as project professionals, we have a range of techniques already in our toolboxes that help us do exactly that.

Root cause analysis

Use root cause analysis techniques (like the ‘5 Whys’) to identify the underlying causes of issues. Then you can focus in on what is genuinely going to address the problem.

Lessons learned databases

You’ve got a repository of lessons learned from each project, right? Take a look through that at the types of projects that have struggled in this area and what has already been done to resolve the problem. That should help prevent you from wasting time on solutions that have already been shown not to work.

Peer reviews and feedback

You’ve got experienced people on the team. They’ve come from different corporate backgrounds and industries, so make use of their knowledge and find out what has worked in their previous roles.

Project management tools

Don’t forget that we also have access to project management tools. Collaboration tools can help people communicate and work together to sort out issues. Planning and scheduling can be done for your improvements, using the tools you already have. Use your knowledge management systems to capture, store and share the ideas, improvements and lessons, so that everyone can benefit from any information created.

With all the resources available to us, it should be easy to make improvements to ways of working. So let’s say you’ve made the improvements, and you want to track how things are going and whether your improvements are having the impact you expected. That’s what I’ll be talking about next time.