These eight techniques and tools have worked great for me time and again, for projects to products, from single person teams to over a hundred. You may be familiar with some and some may be new. If something here is new for you, I suggest you give it a good thought and try it out in some project. If you are familiar with something, I invite you to implement it on your projects. If you are already using something, I suggest thinking ways of doing it even better!

To your success… here’s a hand picked list of tools and techniques that I swear by…

Brain Dumping

Brain dumping is writing down whatever comes to your mind. I use it mainly in two situations. First is when I am overwhelmed and can not think clearly. For example if I am not sure what to do next (from the looming zillion tasks), I would start writing whatever tasks comes to my mind. Big or small. I will keep writing. Then write more. And then some more. The key is to keep writing till your brain is emptied!

Dumping everything out of my brain makes me feel a lot lighter and lets me take a call on what are the real priorities and what to do next. I’ve been using this technique for nearly six years – with absolute positive results. It has always worked.

The best tools for brain dumping? Pen and paper.

Mind Mapping

Many of you may be familiar with mind mapping. It’s similar to brain dumping (and can be used for brain dumping too), but I prefer it when I want to structure my thoughts – and want the flexibility of reorganizing them. You’d find pages full of information about mind mapping on Google. So I won’t go in detail, but I’d like to say that they work really well.

I use mind maps to lay out plans and strategies for products / projects / businesses and even a particular problem at hand. Such a mind map serves as a guide to take decisions later on.

My favorite & free tool for mind mapping: Freemind

Sidenote: Outlining

If you made a list out of a mindmap, you’d get an outline. Outline is simply a list of things. I started using Omni Outliner some ten years ago, and it was also the inspiration behind our Planning module. I don’t use Omni Outliner much these days – but it is still the place where I keep a list of my annual goals! Outlining is so simple yet so effective…

Business Strategy – Lean Canvas & Business Model Generation

Business Model Generation is a technique of providing a shared, easy to understand representation of what your business does, why it does it and how it does it. Lean Canvas is slightly modified version of it – made for lean startups. While both these tools are for businesses, we’ve used them successfully for products and even projects. The main advantage of these tools is that they make you think. We tend to take our assumptions as facts. But when you question them, you learn how real they are. The thinking that you’d need to go through to create a lean business canvas gives you a lot more clarity about the project / product / business at hand.

My tip: Create such a canvas when you begin on your project – along with your customer / other stake holders. And don’t just create the canvas and hang it on a wall. Review and update it regularly as well!

My favorite tool: Lean Canvas PDF and Business Model Generation PDF. (there are also tools to do this online though)

Wireframes and Mockups

When we begin thinking about a new product or a new product release, we start by sketching it out on paper. Even back in the days when we mainly did custom web development projects, we wouldn’t begin coding until we’ve got approvals on wireframes from the client. The reason why wireframes work is because they help you convert requirements into something visual. All discussions and spec documents and meetings are just descriptions of what the client is looking for. And it lives as an interpretation in the listeners mind. When it gets down to paper as a sketch, or on your computer as a wireframe, it becomes solid. It transforms into something two people can jointly review, argue about and improves.

My tip: never begin programming work without wireframes or mockups. And if you are not into programming, never begin any work without visualizing the end goal!

My favorite tool: Balsamiq Mockups (btw, Balsamiq and Peldi are the inspiration behind my starting a products business!!)

Standup Meetings & Monthly Review Meetings

Everyday at 9:30AM, you can see our team standing in a circle, sharing what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today. This meeting is also a place to share new learnings or inspiration. Daily Standups are not new – most agile teams / SCRUM followers do them. They are short (who’s like to stand for an hour long meeting??) and to the point. And provide an opportunity for your whole team to rally together!

I’ve also found that keeping participants standing in any other meeting will keep the meeting on agenda and complete it quickly!

The other meetings I do with my team, are monthly review (and vision) meetings. They have worked extremely well for me because the team knows what we are up to for any given month. So they can work even in my absence. I’ve been out of office for extended periods, and have been busy doing my own work for long stretches, without being interrupted by team members – mainly because they know what they got to do and keep doing their jobs!

I do the monthly review meetings with each product team separately, but sometimes we create a “theme” that’s for everyone. For instance, “let’s break all records this month”…

Appreciation Notes

Another meeting that we have religiously is our Monday Meeting. We’ve been doing it for twelve years now and it’s where the whole organization gets together. Every Monday, 3 to 4pm. We share what we’ve learnt, take presentations on new technologies and geek out in general. But, the highlight of the meeting is Appreciation Notes. These are small thank you notes – that we get custom printed on thick card paper stock, and anybody can give an appreciate note to anyone else. People give appreciate notes to their teammates for helping through a difficult problem, for creating something awesome and even for organizing a party everyone enjoyed.

Appreciation Notes are prized possessions at times. I’ve seen everyone keep a stack of notes they received. Malay told me he uses it even as inspiration when he’s feeling down!

Version Control and Build Automation

If you are into programming / development and do not use a version control system, you’ve not evolved! We had to force people to use Subversion when we implemented nearly a decade ago, but it’s been a “way of doing things” from then on and a must for organized project / product development. And for our products, we’ve actually automated most of the build and release systems. Automating routing work reduces time – and more importantly the scope of failure!

My favorite tools: Git, Sourcetree and shell scripts!

Screenshots and Screen Recordings

Communicating clearly is probably the most important step of solving a problem. I use screenshots to describe a feature, point a bug – and even to sell a product! Annotated screenshots work best. What works even better is screen recordings. We used Jing for quick screen captures (mainly as steps to reproduce a bug) for many years. I now use Screenflow for all my video presentations!

My favorite tools: Skitch and Screenflow

Bonus: Communication, Teamwork, Achievement

No tool like communication, teamwork and achievement!

Do you want your team to perform better? Be more consistent? Do you want them to be more open and communicative? Do you want them to stay with you and be successful?

There are two keys to your success with your team.

Inspiration and Achievement.

Is your team inspired?

This can be tricky to determine because you may have to discard most of what your team says and focus on what you sense how they feel. Inspiration will show up in their enthusiasm. Inspiration will show up their courage. Inspiration will show up in their actions.

Inspiration arises when one foresees a magnificent future. The possibility of breaking old grounds. A grand vision and conviction in it.

So the next time you meet your colleagues, look out for inspiration. Check how inspired are they for the task they have at hand. For the project they are part of. Are they inspired by their leaders?

Then look at how you can bridge the gap between their current levels of inspiration and the inspiration that will move mountains. Inspiration that will propel them to overcome all challenges and make the project a success.

Is your team achieving?

Inspiration gives actions. Actions give results. Achievement nurtures confidence and self worth. Which in turn further inspiration.

To achieve something, we must first know what we are out to achieve. Unless we know what our goal is, we won’t even realize we achieved the goal – let alone celebrating it. The emotional and intellectual stimulation of completing a challenge makes people go for more.

When your team completes something, do they feel a sense of achievement or a sense of “one less item on the list”? Do you celebrate victories? Do you consciously create milestone that the team can achieve and then keep increasing the challenge?

Have you established a loop of inspiration and achievement?

Sense of pride, fulfillment and accomplishment inspire your team even more. Achieving a goal that you were inspired to reach plants a solid step forward in your growth. A series of inspired actions and achievements will transform your team from where they are, to where you want them to be.

When do you want to schedule some time to evaluate where you and your team are in this loop? When do you take the next action?

We are living in an age of distraction. There is a lot noise – and really bad noise. In this video, we share a little used technique that tremendously boosts attention and productivity not only for you – but also for your team mates.

Watch the full video to discover the details.

Highlights From The Video

• Results are a function of attention and focus.
• If a task demands higher level of attention than what we supply, we will fail at it.
• Moderate noise improves performance.
• Popular music is bad for productivity.
• Music without lyrics works best.
• Boring tasks become interesting with music.
• Start with upbeat music.
• Minimal music works best for focus and relaxation.
• Play music you like.
• Background music increases focus…

Compared to a relatively quiet environment (50 decibels), a moderate level of ambient noise (70 dB) enhanced subjects’ performance on the creativity tasks, while a high level of noise (85 dB) hurt it. Modest background noise, the scientists explain, creates enough of a distraction to encourage people to think more imaginatively.

Journal of Consumer Research report, March 2012. (details here)

Free Music & Resources

• 3 Hours of relaxing music
• Relax Daily’s 2.5 hour instrumentals – they have a great collection
• Rainmood – realistic rain sounds + other combinations (links in their tweets)
• Simply Noise – white noise and much more
• August Ambience – Excellent ambient, nature sounds
• Mix and play ambient / natural sounds
• Soundrown – best sounds to get work done – from coffee and rain to playground
• Music for Programming – growing collection of music for programmers
• 63 playlists for programming – good quality and variety
• Chillout on Digitally Imported – many swear by this
• Goa Psy on Digitally Imported
• Coffee Shop sounds apps – Good coffee shop sounds – morning, lunch and more
• Koan Music – Excellent source
• Relax Melodies free app for iOS / Android – more for relaxation, works great
• Star Trek Enterprise Engine ambient noise

Feedback Welcome

Do you use background music for yourself / your organization? Did you notice any changes in performance / engagement after trying this out?

We’d love to hear from you! Post your comments below!

Tasks Plus module for activeCollab lets you set up a support help desk system that both you and your customers will love…

Customers Will Love It Because The Helpdesk Is Invisible

Tasks Plus helpdesk system is invisible to customers. All messages look and function like normal email. No more bloated emails, no more robotic auto responders, no more needing to remember another username and password, no more frustrations.

Support Team Will Love It Because It’s Right Within activeCollab

Get all advantages of activeCollab Tasks – workflow labels, time tracking, sub tasks, file attachments, filtering, categories… – and more importantly the same familiar interface. All support tickets from customers become tasks within activeCollab and only your comments (along with any attachents on comments) are sent to the customer. Overall, the support team becomes a lot more productive.

Business Owner Will Love It Because Everything Stays Centralized

You can use activeCollab for project management and customer support both. No need for two separate systems all hassels of integration. On top of it, customers feel they are getting responses from real people and support team is more productive. It’s a win for everyone.

Here’s how a support incident may get addressed:

• Customer sends an email to support@yourdomain.com
• This email is imported as a task in activeCollab
• Support team works on the task, and posts a comment
• The comment (along with attachments if any) is sent to customer as a normal email
• Customer reads the email and replies with additional detail
• The reply email is imported as a comment on the original task in activeCollab
• Support team continues working on it – they may create sub tasks, add time entries, assign it to different members etc
• Support team resolves the issue and posts a comment on the task
• The comment is sent to customer as an email
• Customer is happy with the solution and replies with a thank you note
• This reply too is imported as a comment on the original task
• Support team is happy too, and closes the task

How does this differ from default activeCollab functionality?? How is it better?

You may think that activeCollab already does most of this. So what’s the big deal…

In fact, cleaner emails itself is a big step forward in improving customer experience.

• Tasks Plus solution does not show task IDs or project names in email subjects.
• Emails carry a much simpler, leaner format. They look like regular emails, and not some system generated notifications.
• Client can actually see complete thread of the conversation. It’s much easier to comprehend progress and context.
• This solution reduces the risk of emails being marked as junk / spam – a big advantage.
• Clients don’t get the annoying “new ticket created” or “new task created” email when they write to support mailbox. They also do not get emails when assignees change or any other activity happens with the task. They get an email only when a comment is posted to the task.

Think about the agony and time this can save your clients! Plus they feel a real human is communicating with them. Customer support helpdesk being invisible is indeed a big deal.

And frankly, this is just getting started. We will be adding a number of enhancements to Tasks Plus in future that will make managing support requests even easier!

Setting up an awesome (& invisible) customer support system – walkthrough

Imagine your customer has a question. He writes an email and sends it to your support email address. This email becomes a task in activeCollab – ready for your team to work on. Including any files customer may have attached. Your team can respond by leaving a comment. They can also use all activeCollab task management features – including assignments, labels, sub tasks and time tracking. Posting a comment sends an email to the customer – but in a style that feels human. Just like conversational email. No extra details or formatting. No trace of a software.

Customer’s reply is imported as a comment to the original task too. No need to login to another system or even leave the email client.

On the activeCollab side, team can mark this task as complete, since the question is answered.

That’s it! A helpdesk that’s invisible to the customer, yet gives all the flexibility and power to your support team. Possible only with activeCollab and our Tasks Plus module.

While we are at it, let me also show you how this is setup. Assuming activeCollab and our Tasks Plus module are installed, we need an incoming mailbox set up. The “account name” is used in outgoing replies. And email address is where clients send their support requests. Other details are standard POP3/IMAP settings.

Save and go back to Email settings, then, “Manage Filters”.

This is where we tell activeCollab that all messages arriving on support mailbox should be treated as support tickets. You may set rules for subject, body etc, but the most important is the action. We want to add a new support ticket in a specific project, put it in General category, and keep the workflow label as New. We allow non activeCollab users to send email to this box, so everyone can easily reach out for support.

By the way, if you have multiple filters, make sure other filters do not intercept support emails.

Another thing to ensure is that outgoing emails are sent out instantly. Background sending does not allow simple formating that Tasks Plus uses. You also need to confirm Scheduled Tasks are working, otherwise emails won’t be imported.

The mailing log lets you trouble shoot problems if any.

And that’s all. That’s all it takes to configure this simple yet awesome customer support system.

With that, I invite you to free everyone from the burden of complicated helpdesks. Wow your customers today!

I told you about 5 reasons why your team does not use your web based project management system.

In this video, I tell you four reasons why your projects fail. I also share strategies and practices you can adapt to get your team to use your project management system and succeed at projects.

This video is full of unnerving truths and insights. It’s also full of actions you can start practicing today. It’s the gist of my 15 years experience of managing 250 projects and 400 people.

You can read transcript below or turn on CC option in video player.

17th Feb 2011

Transcript of the video

OK, we now know why people don’t use your project management system. Now I am going to reveal four reasons why your projects to fail.

Reason 1: You don’t know where you want to go

Projects are journeys. If you are not certain about the destination, you can’t reach there. When we start on the project, we only have a top level view of what the project should accomplish. Most clients have a vague sense of what they want. No matter how well we try to define and document the requirements, we discover details when we are closer. We always learn the most about something when we are actually doing it.

A fixed, known target is easier to hit than a target that keeps moving. All estimates are guesses.

Lack of clarity leads to confusion. The easiest action in confusion is no action. And non action and resignation lead to failure.

The point to take home? Develop and propagate the vision of your projects.

Reason 2: You don’t know how to get there

No matter how much experience you have, every project is new. Every project has its own challenges. It could be a new market, team or technology. You or your team may not know how to execute the project. We may have a good understanding of overall implementation, but the devil is in the detail. And we generally have a tough time getting around those details.

Most projects start off well and start struggling midway. Some get stuck on the last 10%, and the last 10% takes 90% of time and cost. These are signs that we do not know what it takes to complete the project. We are shooting in the dark.

Sometimes you have a team that does not have much experience in the project. The challenges of the project are way beyond their skills. This will lead to frustration, loss of productivity and delays. Most projects begin with little risk analysis. And even if they do, they don’t execute riskiest things first. This leads to shocks and surprises later on.

Question for you: do you have clear direction for success?

Reason 3: You don’t track how far you’ve reached

We may take regular status updates, but are we tracking what forwards a project and what pushes it back? What are the key performance indicators for your projects? Are you tracking them on a regular basis? What action do you take when you notice an anomaly? Send an email to the person responsible, and then hope it will be taken care of?

Success is a big motivator. When team members know the project is progressing well, they are more likely to complete it well. Weekly iterations, big visible charts, reviews and follow ups – they are all critical to a project’s success.

Do people know what you are tracking? Have you setup clear and specific milestones?

You must allocate sufficient time every week for tracking and course correction. You want to correct the course of your journey before it’s too late.

Reason 4: Who’s project is it anyway?

Does the project belong to the client? Is it the organization’s project? Is it the project managers? What is your contribution to the project? Do you determine success of the project?

For most people, their contribution to the project is the work they are assigned. Small work that makes little different can not light fire in their bellies. If your team does not get a sense of ownership there is little chance you will succeed.

In our last Monday Meeting, my team members told me they love working on products because they can see their contribution clearly. They know the software they are developing is going to be useful to thousands of people. When the download counter rings one more, their hearts fill with joy. It’s no longer the organization’s product. It’s their own. They drive the show. They make customers happy. They make the difference.

When you can create this sense of belonging and ownership, everything else will fall in place. When they see this is their project, they will do everything to succeed. It’s just natural.

So What Can You Do About This?

With that, let’s move to the most important part of this video.

Now that you know all this, what can you do about it? What can you do to make your team use your project management system more effectively? How can you improve the chances of success for your projects?

Here are some things you can try.

1. Train your team

Train your team on business. About productivity. About technology. Share your experiences with them. Give them stuff they can learn on their own. Create a common vision. Start looking at things from their point of view. Demand the best from them and give them all the support and encouragement while they get there. Start a weekly joint meeting with your team. Let them know the impact of their work – how it affects the organization and customers – both positive and negative. Share tricks about how they can use the system better. Make them think about how everything can be improved.

Alter your attitude towards them and you will suddenly discover a new team!

2. Iterate weekly

It’s impossible to set clear and specific vision and direction for the entire project. Don’t try to. Have an overall vision and direction for the project. But then iterate weekly to define clear goals and action items. Take riskiest things first. Track and share key performance indicators. Change the project plan as you need to. Strike balance between features, time and cost. Have some deliverable every week. Iterate until you succeed.

3. Adapt the system to your needs

No system will be perfect. No system will do everything you want it to. What you can do is adapt it to your needs.

If you are using activeCollab:

• Uninstall modules you don’t use
• Define system and project roles so that people only see what they need to
• Are you using Checklists or Pages? Can you switch to Tickets and Discussions?
• Use template projects to create new projects. This will bring structure.
• You can use our Tickets Plus module to add workflow status to tickets. Or any of our other modules. We take extra efforts to make them easy and useful.
• Create private, personal projects for each of your team members. Let them use those for non project specific items
• Use the Incoming Mail module and route as much email through activeCollab as you can
• Create some informal communication channel to share success, insights and interesting items. Use a special project for this or use Status Updates
• Let activeCollab be the single source of truth

4. Be a role model

Be a star user of the system yourself. If people see you practice what you preach, they will follow you. Your team always looks up to you for inspiration. Share your insights with them. Tell them how you use the system. Appreciate it when they do good. Be their role model.

A Warning

Now before coming to a close, I want to give you a warning.

See, knowledge makes no difference. Knowing all these reasons or tricks won’t make any difference to you. You probably knew some of this already and it has made no difference so far.

Keep in mind that despite all this, things will not go as per your plans. Projects will be late. People won’t use your system. Everything will go haywire.

And there is nothing wrong with that. Instead of blaming situations and people, shift your attention on what you can do that will give you power.

Focus on a single action you can take that will move your projects forward. Take that action. Review the results.

And iterate until you succeed.

Close..

You can also go over this video again. Note down your insights. Pick one action you can take. Then do it.

I am going to work on the next video – where I will talk about starting your own business and developing products.

In the meanwhile, keep your comments coming.

I was frustrated why people did not use our activeCollab based project management system. I tried everything I could think of to get my team to use it, but had only moderate success. You may be in a similar situation – using Basecamp, activeCollab or any other system.

Then it hit me. I realized why people did not use the system. In this video, I reveal five reasons why your team does not use your project management system.

In the next video, I will tell you four reasons why your projects fail. I also share strategies and practices you can adapt to get your team to use your project management system and succeed at projects.

This video is full of unnerving truths and insights. It’s also full of actions you can start practicing today. It’s the gist of my 15 years experience of managing 250 projects and 400 people.

You can read transcript below or turn on CC option in video player.

17th Feb 2011

Transcript of the video

First, I want to thank you for your overwhelming response to the first video. For your comments on this site, on Facebook, Twitter and emails you sent. I am glad I did that video!

I promised I will talk about why your team does not use your project management system and why your projects fail.

Ok, so this is what happened to me.

It’s a Thursday morning. I check my emails, do a few follow ups and then start on the most important task for the day. I install our new web based project management system on the server. I create a test project and am happy with what I see. I think this tool can bring order to my life. I am looking after 40 projects and I need a good system to keep them on track. I’ve been looking for a system that works for a decade. I actually even created an internal project management system 8 years ago. But this is the best I’ve seen so far.

I am very excited I found it. I go ahead and create user accounts for my team. I also set up all projects and added people to them.

The next day, I show the system to my project managers. They are a little skeptical, but I think they will realize the benefits over time.

I use the system myself over the next two days and am even happier.

Now we have a full team meeting every Monday afternoon. 3PM.

I unveil the new system to my team. I go through how projects are setup, how milestones, tickets and tasks work; and how they can track time using the system. I announce that this is the system we are going forward with and it’s compulsory for everyone.

What do you think happened next?

I was the only one who used the system actively. Everyone else tried best to come up with creative answers about why they can’t get on with the system. Some even tried to, but the way they organized their milestones, tickets and tasks – it was better left undone.

I described how I envisioned the system to be used to my project managers in our Thursday meeting. And we came up with an interesting idea.

The following Monday Meeting, we announced that logging 8 hours in the system is absolutely positively necessary. If an employee did not enter 8 hours up to next day 11AM, he or she will be marked absent for the day. They won’t be paid for the day.

Our usage spiked that week. I was happy.

Unfortunately, this did not last long. The very next week, it started dropping. And some smart guys started adding a single entry for 8 hours.

So I went ahead and wrote a script that will check if people entered 8 hours, and if there was any single time record of more than 2 hours. I even checked if their total exceeded 12 hours for the day. On all these events, my script would trigger an email notification to that employee, keeping me in CC.

I started getting dozens of notifications the next day onward. With little improvement in how people used the system.

Over next several months, I tried to incentivize good usage and punish non usage. I met with moderate success. Especially when I created the project plan and followed up closely.

But it was frustrating. I kept wondering why people do not understand the importance of organizing their work. Why would they not enter their time logs? Why could they not understand the simple relation of milestone, tickets and tasks?

Are you in a similar situation? Have you also tried everything you could imagine to get your team to use your project management system? Or to “effectively” use it?

Over the last 15 years, I was directly responsible for over 250 projects, leading nearly 400 people in all. I’ve always been obsessed with being organized and productive. I studied all project management practices, tried them first hand and actively promoted agile development methods.

And I figured why people did not use our project management system. And these are the same five reasons why your people don’t you use project management system.

Reason 1: Because it is boring

Your project management system is a “system”. It defines a set of processes people have to follow. Processes are routines. And routines are boring. We work in creative professions and creative people hate processes. Let’s admit, we don’t like rules. We don’t like a fixed way of working. We feel we are here to get the job done. Not to track time, or post updates on what I did in a system at the end of every day.

When people perceive a process as lengthy or complicated, denial is automatic. Denial is the default behavior for anything that seems big.

activeCollab, Basecamp, or any other system, can seem daunting to your team. It may seem like too much work. A burden to fill it everyday.

Here’s what you want to get: Whatever comes in the way of getting their job done, will become a boring overhead for creative people.

Reason 2: Because they don’t want to look bad

An open, web based, collaborative project management system is like a secret camera watching you throughout your working life. And when someone’s watching you, you don’t want to look bad. The easiest way to avoid looking bad, is to hide. If they don’t use the system, you won’t find out how good or bad they are. They can always cook up a reason for “not being able” to use it later.

One team member once confessed to me. She said she was junior and took longer than estimated times. When we estimated time for tasks, we entered that estimate in the project management system. But she did not log time against the task since she was afraid she would look slow.

When people think you have high expectations, you are watching them, and that their failures will work against them, they tend to avoid risk. Not using the system seems like a safe bet. The other choice is to do just enough to get away. Use the system to the minimal standards set so that they don’t show up on your radar.

The lesson? Most people are afraid of looking bad, hence stick to mediocrity. Your team is no different.

Reason 3: Because they don’t like to change

Why would you learn a new system when old will get the job done? People have their own styles of working, a system requires standards to be followed. Change means risk. Change means more work.

Even if you did not use any project management system earlier, you would have some un-documented / non-standard way of getting things done. You brought in a system because you wanted to standardize best practices and keep track of things. But that change may occur as threat to some.

None of us want unpleasant change. Some people even rebel and challenge the system when they can’t handle the change. It takes strong motivation to defeat inertia and establish new habits. Some people will go to the extent of proving the system wrong. Not because the system is bad, but simply because they don’t want to change!

In other words, if there is no clear advantage for your team to adapt the new system, they won’t.

Reason 4: Because the system is not embedded in your organization culture

For most organizations, a project management system is just another system. They have email, misc documents, project plans in Excel files, conference calls, review meetings, planning meetings etc. for project management. Then there are a bunch of other systems as well. Your project management system becomes an extension of existing systems. This also created multiple reference. A conference call would give a different picture of the project from an Excel sheet. There is no single source of truth.

Some organizations are also averse to failures. Someone who fails to understand or effectively use the project management system, may be criticized. An organization culture that does not accept failures will take ages to accept any change.

At the same time, for them, managing projects is not their job. It’s the manager’s job. So it should be the manager who uses project management system. Their job is to just get work done.

So: If people do not realize the importance of your project management system; if you don’t refer to your project management system in your day to day conversations, they will avoid spending their time on it.

Reason 5: Because of you

If you noticed, all four points I mentioned earlier, are your team’s perceptions. You and your team perceive the project management system differently. For you, it is a way to get organized, it is the tool to succeed. For them, it’s someone else’s problem they are stuck with. An unavoidable change they are struggling to cope up with.

It is not their fault. Neither yours.

Your perceptions are different. You are looking at this from two different sides.

Like me, you may be trying out every new technique to make your team understand the importance of your project management system. But we spend little time understanding them. We do not realize that their expertise and experience levels are different. Their aspirations and struggles are different. They will obey and follow certain rules, but you won’t get optimum results unless you develop deep compassion for them – the end users of your system.

This is the biggest reason why they don’t use the project management system. It’s because the system does not solve their problems. It solves your problems. When you look at the situation from their perspective, listening with deep compassion, then and then only can you get their buy-in.

And what you want to get, is that there is nothing wrong here.

Don’t let early disappointments deter you. Show them a new trick once in a while. Don’t keep switching project management systems because one did not work.

When you start seeing their side, things go much smoother.