I started climbing again today. Sitting on the ground stretching, my climbing shoes and my chalk bag at my side, I watched a few people prepare for their ascent. On goes the harness, then the rope gets looped in and tied off in some crazy fancy eight knot that should save your life as you plunge into the abyss. Your buddy checks you. Each buckle gets reviewed, your knot is inspected. Chalk bag, check. Additional cams, clips, check. You approach the wall.
“Is the Belay on?”
“Belaying”, replies your buddy, pulling snuggly on the rope to confirm tension.
“Climbing”, you state. But you don’t grab stone yet.
“Climb on.” Ok, it’s time to begin the ascent.
For a lot of beginning climbers, this routine feels ridiculous and a hindrance. Each step is choreographed, an intricate dance of preparation. That ritual of communication was truly annoying to me until I got dropped 18 feet on my ass. Turn out my buddy was busy with a different ritual, introducing himself to the belayer next to him (and a might beautiful belayer she was).
The point: if you have a business team, do you have a communication ritual? How about with your clients? Is consistent and reliable or are you about to get dropped on your ass?
We have 14 different projects running right now, not including sales and bidding efforts. I wrote about fear a few days ago when I mention our goal to gross a million. My biggest fear: we loose control of all the flying balls and disappointed a lot of people. So Peter & I are working on communication systems. Frankly this is not our strength. We are both highly independent. I am writing this post more to me than to you, though I figure, it will be good for both of us. So, what could we do to make the dialog explicit and manage with more planning and intention rather than firefighting?
A weekly meeting?
We tried this and I have to point fingers. Peter often resists the structure of a required meeting preferring the flow of an organic approach. It doesn’t fit with the ebbs and flows of our working patterns. During rushes it is an encumbrance, during quite times it isn’t necessary. After all, we are constantly talking. There are pros and cons of each approach. The question I keep coming back to: is the consistency of a specific regular date valuable in its own right? Could there be value in having a time in which we review and analyze the health of the business rather than just trouble shooting? Knowing it is coming, we mentally gear towards it? Jury is out. I’d love to get everyone’s opinion.
A start up and postmortem checklist for every project?
We have a project evaluation score sheet we use to decide if we want a gig.
I think this is something different. I got this suggestion 3 days ago while reading the TRW small project handbook, courtesy of my mother (thanks!). A bit more formal than I am used to as they call a small project anything with 20 or less people or grossing up to 2 million. The start up checklist would include those key steps involved in launching each project.
For Setup, the things we often cover (somewhat haphazardly):
Milestone & Detailed Schedule
Budget & Risk Management Plan
Team Organization
Communication / Project Management System Set-Up
Facilities / Equipment / Software / Asset Review & Acquisition
Configuration / Data Management
QA & Review
Customer Relations
For Shutdown:
Billing
Archiving Records
Updating Component Library
Lessons Learned
Closing Accounts
I’ll probably do a blog on this in a whole lot more detail as I dig through this workbook and learn more.
Take a business retreat.
Ok, this was one of the best ideas we have had and it has been quite practical. We stepped away from the urgent, so that in the quiet lull (like 3am) we could work on our business, not just in it. We focused on goals, on metrics to measure progress, and current issues and upcoming concerns.
USE your project management system.
A lot of us at some point or another have paid the money to get a project management system, be it basecamp, copper, redmine, active collab or any of the many options out there. The irony is that we rarely actually use them. Why? Because they are build to be used by many people, which means they were not built for you. They don’t think like you think.
When you are truly solo, that’s fine, because it can all live in your head. When you run a team though, not only does it become impossible to hold it all in your dome (which causes enormous stress), but it is detrimental to the business. You can’t have a Mac Truck person. Thats what we call it. Someone who is so valuable that if they get hit by a mac truck the business grinds to a halt. I mediated on the fact that we had a hard time using our PM system (we use copper). About 6 months ago Peter I decided it was time to stop whining about it and just USE it. If they day comes when we have a brilliant idea on how to improve things, then we can build one (we will) but waiting for that day is sheer lunacy. We seem to have to keep remaking that decision on an almost monthly basis. We are getting better and the system truly is helping communication with our remote team.
Learned Lesson: CC’ing someone doesn’t mean squat.
On a more practical note, I have learned that CC’ing someone does not mean they saw it, nor ingested it. In fact, a direct email may not have even registered. Sometimes, a conversation in passing doesn’t even click. Make sure that there is a confirmation / checkoff process on dialogs that are important. I can’t say we have figured this one out yet, though Peter’s post on not holding your breath was a good start.
We want to know: What do you do?
So you strapped on your PM system harness. Your business team and tools are on belay. Business on. The fact is that these systems of communication save lives and save businesses. No man reads mind (verdict is still out on women). As we begin to grow larger and have more projects and people, this becomes vital.
So let me ask, what are you doing to structure your communication and make it explicit? What has worked and what failed?
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Great article and a topic that’s been on my mind for quite a while now. While there’s several huge benefits to working remotely, two things that are almost inevitably lost are of communication-efficacy and the structured company culture that a 9-5 office can provide.
I usually try to combat this with regular phone meetings as you guys do; during or not during projects I general like to call around and keep a good report with clients and teammates… but as you mentioned, this becomes somewhat unrealistic when you have as many major projects in the air as you guys do. PM software is helpful… but can sometimes be as much a hindrance as anything else if you don’t have someone to constantly keep it up to date (and that’s if you can rely upon team members using it reliably). Having said that, the PM software we’ve been using so far actually has been reliable… so you’ve got a good foundation there.
What’s more interesting to me though is looking at how you guys are reaching the capacity at which two people can manage an entire business on their own while still having their fingers in each dish. At some point delegation, not more hard work and long hours, becomes the only way to grow. This makes the question more about how to have sustainable growth inside of a company and make the jump from a small business (under 25 consistent workers) to a larger one with the least amount of “growing pains”. As you suggest, perhaps the key to keeping each ball in the air is to have more people juggling fewer balls, not one superhuman juggler who can balance 50 bowling pins and a couple flaming swords at once.
as a single-person design studio my project management system can sometimes seem like overkill (i use basecamp). in fact i am about to cancel my contact management system with highrise because though it does its job, its not worth it for one person.
but that aside i actually use basecamp quite a bit. i try to funnel everything for projects through there, and do a good job.
my problem is trying to get clients to appreciate what the system can do and use it! it is a very easy tool to learn, but clients are used to their old methods of emailing and cc’ing people that they don’t want to try something new.
surprisingly it is my most ‘high-tech’ clients who seem to have this problem. others seem to be open to trying new things.
in the meantime i keep using basecamp and hope they will soon see its value and hop on.
I’m another sole proprietor, and discovered this blog just as I was formalizing all the steps in my own business. It’s really been very helpful, a big thanks.
As a one-man show, I’ve found that having a formal, standard procedure for every step of a project does as much for impressing clients as it does for actually improving the quality of the output. A fair number of my clients still see “web design” as what they paid a 15 year-old $90 to do 8 years ago, and even once they realize they need something much better the initial project estimates can still be a bit of a shock. Handling the process like a professional doesn’t just cover you legally, it’s a cue to the customer that they’re paying for a professional service and result that will boost their business in measurable ways.
As for project management, I use an OSS activeCollab fork. Basecamp has some nifty features, but I can’t justify the expense when a free solution already does most of what I need, especially when it stays on my server and let’s me fine tune it to suit my needs. Noticing a trend of comments on PM software, though:
———-
quote (brandon):
PM software is helpful… if you can rely upon team members using it reliably
quote (brad):
my problem is trying to get clients to appreciate what the system can do and use it! it is a very easy tool to learn, but clients are used to their old methods of emailing and cc’ing people that they don’t want to try something new.
———-
I think one of the problems is that while a PM system *can* be extremely helpful, it’s done entirely on our (developer’s) terms. Clients might not want to give up cc’ing people because, whether they use it or not, they feel secure having copies floating around on their email servers.
I recently switched a client over from email to PM for their internal communication, and for the most part they love it. Unfortunately most of their external communication isn’t worth the effort to manage PM accounts for, so invariably any non-phone/fax communication with them gets done through the old email/CCing, which only leads to a mass renege - the old system wasn’t perfect, but at least it was consistent. What I really need is a way to easily integrate emails into a project manager, if not under automatic conditions than at least with a streamlined manual process. Assuming it wasn’t too complex, integration could really help lower the barrier to entry while meeting more needs in the long term. And of course the pipe dream is to somehow fit phone and fax into all this, but I don’t even want to think about what that would involve.
This went a bit longer than I intended, so I’ll quit while I’m ahead (or even, or not losing by too much).
@harlan: Great response and thanks for sharing your experience… you bring up a hugely interesting point of being able to integrate emails (and possibly IM’s) into a PM software. I’ve used everything from basecamp (pretty, but can be inflexible) to copper (expensive, and kinda intimidating) and they all pretty much have their own pros and cons… but I’ve gotta say if I were able to select emails to feed into a PM system it would open things up quite a bit and fill in the communication gaps that Shane’s bringing up in his original post. That’s actually a pretty big idea and I’d love to see if it gets developed in the next year or two.
On Basecamp: for me, the expense has paid for itself in the few places where I use it… certain clients who feel the need to have that intense organization and “herding” work well with PM systems like Basecamp. I brand it to look like their project, and even though it usually gets long forgotten halfway through the project, it establishes that “professional” feel that you brought up: distinguishing you from the $150/site cousin in law’s of the world.
@ Brad: It’s true! Clients who are already entrenched in their own systems are likely to just flat out ignore invitations to new systems and stick with direct emails and CC’ing… especially high tech clients. This is probably because they’ve already honed in on their own systems and feel overwhelmed by the tsunami of “self help” software out there. I was actually pretty skeptical of systems like Basecamp for a while just because there’s so many of them out there and it’s hard to make heads of tails of what they actually do unless someone sits you down. The fact is there’s really no way around that and you’ve just gotta be on the ball when you know you have active projects for clients who work through non-controlled communication methods.
That’s all external communication though… internally, our team has also used a lot of Google Groups (and some homebrew apps) in the past 6 months or so. It’s not as pretty as Basecamp and it’s certainly not doing anything close to what Copper is doing, but for individual projects that require a lot of internal reviewing and QA, it really gets the job done and does something that email’s don’t do: it provides a single piece of real estate for several people (all remote) to view a project and rally around during a phone meeting.
So, that’s my own experience with PM apps. Funny thing is that, like you mentioned, unless you constantly and religiously update them, it’s so easy to forget about them for a week and then it begins to feel pointless to have to return and spend time updating them. I guess the larger point is that at some point in a businesses growth (I’m talking 20 people) there really needs to be a system (online or off) that keeps track of the chaos and documents the major timelines of each active project…
Otherwise you enter into the Mack Truck situation where the entire business is being balanced on the shoulders of one or two people and it becomes extremely difficult to bring new people in to help with the situation because there’s no written documentation on the day to day projects.
On a lighter note: Anyone have any great success stories or tips with PM software or any other system for managing huge numbers of projects at once? Horror stories? Lessons?
I have my own web dev business and one of my more recent clients is huge on phone calls and in-person meetings. I have no problem with meetings or phone calls when they are necessary but this client will send an email to say, “Can you call me” and then go through his latest greatest idea of his. After an hour-and-a-half wasted, it seems to me it would have been better in an email. The calls are basically a way to get affirmation for his ideas. He constantly asks me if his ideas are good ones. Some I agree with and some I don’t but I always tell him these are business decisions and I cannot be his business coach. I will give advice and feedback where it relates to his website and nothing more as that is not what I’m being paid for. Another reason I prefer email communication to in-person/phone calls is I like to have a record of everything.
re: basecamp. I’ve tried it and I just didn’t get into it. I used it for several projects but it just isn’t a solution I can see myself using all of the time. I have also tried activecollab which I also had the same feelings about. I think there is definitely still a void in PM software and I hope someone fills it soon!
Ok first - I’ve been a slacker and a bad boy and I’m sorry. Julie is off at a business conference and so I have been surfing and climbing and loafing and then crashing. But guilt took over and I’m here. And yes, it is cuz I love you all. Because I really want to go back to my loafing. So this will be short.
@Harlan, Brad & Brandon: Hi guys!!
@Sara: I completely and totally agree with you on the void. In fact it is pretty clear within everyone’s comments that this is a common dissatisfaction.
I definitely want to hear the war stories on Pm systems.
Along with that I want to ask you all:
what is a dream system? What should it have or should it not have?
@shane - What is a dream system? IMO, flexibility. There should be a core group of things that each project has to have, but most options should be selected by you. Not every project needs file uploads for example and I have found if you present people with a system that they aren’t sure what to use, it can either scare them away or they use everything they see. So my preference would be the ability to dynamically add and take away functionality available for each project.