|
|
|
|
|
|
This content is a conceptual guide for those who want to maximize the value of TeamHeadquarters or the On Demand version at Entry.com. The software offers flexibility, so that it can be used in different ways by different organizations, departments, or teams. This flexibility also makes it possible to limit the disruption of change by introducing the software gradually. As a result, leaders need to understand what the software can do and decide how they will manage planning, execution, and reporting.
|
TeamHeadquarters unifies your work on projects, support, and whatever else comes along. The Project Portfolio can be organized for decision-makers. Individual projects can be managed with any level of detail and any project management methodology. Ticket queues can be used to manage formal help desks, informal support organizations, or groups of knowledge workers. The software can be used to organize all of your project and non-project work. We call this One Task List. |
|
Obviously, results will come from some level of successful adoption. This document describes a variety of ways to use TeamHeadquarters, depending on the organization’s role, size, and culture. Every organization is different, and every TeamHeadquarters implementation will have some unique aspects to their style of usage. Larger organizations may employ different techniques for different teams or departments. It is important to develop an Adoption Plan, monitor your progress, and refine the plan over time to manage success. Adoption can be rapid, or it can be gradual.
The Adoption Plan describes how work is to be planned and executed. For success, the Adoption Plan also needs to clearly describe how managers will monitor the results:
Executives monitoring their investments via portfolio reporting.
Project managers monitoring progress and maintaining realistic plans.
Support managers monitoring help desk queues and support teams for adherence to policy and successful resolution of support incidents.
These ‘management interactions’ are vital to running a successful organization, with or without collaboration software. TeamHeadquarters helps to implement a management approach that is easy to follow and monitor.
Consider that Personal Productivity tools are just that, personal. Their value can be assessed one user at a time, one publication at a time. Each user governs how they use word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Features such as automated spell checking, grammar checking, and formatting can make people more productive, and users can experiment with new features any time. Many organizations have improved productivity even further by publishing a “style guide” to standardize things like colors, logos, fonts, and layouts.
TeamHeadquarters is a Team Productivity suite. The value of the software can be assessed by the quality of organization and interactions amongst a team. Your Adoption Plan is like a style guide for standardizing things like project planning, time sheet charges, and management reporting. It will clarify expectations and reinforce consistency.
What are the best practices for using TeamHeadquarters? When should a large set of tasks become their own project? Should some projects be run less formally using Ticket Queues? Should project plans stay high-level with 100-hour tasks or become granular with 1-hour tasks? A good answer to all of these questions is, “Whatever will be maintained and managed?”.
There is no standard way to plan, execute, and report. However, decision-makers need current and accurate information in order to make good decisions. They need people and projects to be “Management-Ready”. The Adoption Plan should set usage standards that are reasonable to maintain, so that people and projects will always be Management-Ready. One of the benefits of this approach is that Management-Ready teams tend to be better organized and usually require less management.
What do you want to improve by implementing the software? Do you want projects to have more visibility at the executive layer? Should decision-making become less centralized? More centralized? Should billable hours be increased? Do you need to improve customer service? Should people become more productive through better prioritization of work? Is it about delivering projects on time and within budget?
Consider your organization’s culture in terms of work and decision-making. It is important to harmonize your goals with the Adoption Plan, setting realistic and achievable goals.
How does your organization function during a crisis, when urgency is high, when there is little time for formal planning, and when you need your best performance? Is that when the work is least organized? For some, a crisis is when their work is best organized. It is difficult to improve performance in a crisis because there are limited records left behind when the crisis is over.
The most rigorous and recognized approaches to managing work are very planning-intensive and simply do not apply to a crisis. The Project Management Office (“PMO”) concept is based on planning, organizing, and reporting to management. But when work is unexpected, we bypass the PMO and abandon the practices they support.
When developing an Adoption Plan, consider the next crisis. If the software can help to coordinate highly reactive and urgent work, imagine how it will help when you have ample time to prepare. It is possible to have a single tool for managing all of the work, regardless of how much planning is involved.
Project Portfolio Management gives executive decision makers the ability to compare project investments and manage the overall priority, funding, and focus. This process depends on having a consistent set of metrics applied to each project. What do executives want to know about projects in your organization? At Entry Software, our research indicates a common trend:
What are you doing? When will you be done? Are you on track?
What will it cost? Have you gone over budget? Will you go over budget?
Do you need my help? Is there anything else I should know?
These questions tend to be directed at the Project Sponsor or the Project Manager, and the validity of the answers is largely based on personal credibility.
If your organization requires that these answers be substantiated by a proactively planned, rigorously maintained, and scientifically calculated project plan, you should focus on approaches 1 and 2 (below). If your organization is more flexible, or places more focus on the credibility of the project manager, then your project portfolio can allow a wider variety of project management approaches to co-exist.
|
TeamHeadquarters builds flexibility into the project portfolio by allowing the details of each project to be managed separately. This drives a consistent set of metrics for projects represented in the portfolio while allowing for four different approaches to the actual project management: |
|
The Classic approach utilizes TeamHeadquarters for managing the fine details of the project. In this case, the project’s “Actuals” calculations should be accurately represented in Portfolio Reports (e.g. project % complete based on task rollups). This approach tends to work best when project managers are trained experts in the science of project management, and when executives embrace the notion that project management is a full-time job. This approach becomes more difficult if ‘project management’ is actually what Project Managers do when they are not busy authoring design documents, developing software, or acting as Quality Assurance testers.
The Third-Party approach allows Project Managers to use a different tool (or no tool!) to manage the details of their project, while providing regular Management Reports via TeamHeadquarters. This approach embraces project manager authority and your legacy of investments/expertise in other tools and methodologies.
The Manual approach allows project managers to report on the status of their projects with TeamHeadquarters without using any form of project management software. This may seem radical or inappropriate, but it is realistic: There are many experienced and successful Project Managers who do not build Gantt Charts or optimize Resource Histograms. When this is true but difficult to accept, consider the Ticket Queue approach (see 4, below) as an alternative because it more closely resembles this “unscientific” management style.
The Ticket Queue approach allows project managers to report on the status of their projects with TeamHeadquarters and utilizes TeamHeadquarters ticket queues for managing the details of project work. This approach consumes less project management time than the other approaches discussed here, and is easier to maintain. It is less rigorous in terms of planning exercises and “project management science” such as Gantt Charts and Resource Histograms. Ironically, the Ticket Queue approach can be more successful than traditional approaches in terms of fundamentals such as productivity, maintaining focus, and being Management-Ready.
What might your Adoption Plan look like? Classic Example. One Task List Example.
