In project management offices (PMO), things often go haywire: All teammates are very focused on getting projects completed as best as possible within the given deadlines. This work pressure often has a negative impact on the productivity of the entire team.
Stephanie Birnstiel, Senior Manager Strategic International Customer Success at Acterys, the specialist in collaborative work management, shares five tips on how project management teams and team leaders can practice mindfulness, focus their attention on the “here and now” and be considerate of everyone involved colleagues can take to ensure successful and productive collaboration.
Everyone as they like it best.
Your colleagues feel comfortable in different work atmospheres because everyone has different personality traits that have experienced different forms of categorization in the past. It’s not just the atmosphere in the office that has to be right: every employee must have the opportunity to customize the tools he or she uses for work to suit their needs. If the tool of your choice offers the feature of customizing and filtering the view and dashboard, this can have a positive impact on the user’s efficiency.
Positivity is contagious.
Even in the workplace, there is always the risk (and chance!) that employees get lost in discussions about certain topics. If you find yourself in a conversation like this, it is particularly important to give other opinions the same respect as you would for your own opinion.
To counteract potential conflicts, the best solution is a “single source of truth” – common in IT – for the entire project. Of course, this document must be visible to everyone involved in the project. This means that if there are uncertainties or misunderstandings, you can check what status the project is progressing at, what has been discussed and what tasks still need to be done.
Be prepared for changes.
It is not uncommon for the team to be forced to rethink and reallocate its priorities during a crisis situation. In these situations, it is important to keep a cool head and play your strongest trump card: your own adaptability.
If your company provides a digital collaboration program for its project management teams, you will quickly realize that no one has to be afraid of changes because they can be managed digitally very easily. Deadlines and deadlines, for example, are automatically adjusted to realigned priorities. You can also take a look at Power BI write-back to take help for the writing changes.
Concentration is key.
There are no digital solutions that will prevent you from being distracted by emails and other applications. However, as soon as your team decides to use a collaborative work management tool for project work, you will not only have the opportunity to keep an overview of your planning for the next few days and your workload and to concentrate on the most important things. If you and your team share your tasks and plans on a daily or weekly basis, the entire team can better manage their time together. Meetings that only serve to review project progress could be eliminated because the tool means everyone is already up to date.
Breaks are simply part of it.
As part of an important project, tasks, meetings and deadlines can be very busy. However, neither your health nor that of your employees should be affected.
On the one hand, stress and time pressure can help you work more focused and successfully overcome challenging situations. On the other hand, too much stress poses an enormous risk: not only will the work suffer, but also the health of the affected employee. Therefore, team and project leaders must allocate and manage the available resources in such a way that employees are only exposed to the amount of stress that promotes performance and is healthy.
Mindfulness leads to contentment
Happy, satisfied employees are productive employees. Every employee wants the entire team to pay attention to them and their needs and take them seriously. These include: the working environment that you can set up individually; your opinion; how to deal with change correctly; Respect that comes from being fully focused on priorities; Awareness of your time and your health. A collaborative work management tool provides an excellent complement on the technical side by helping you create the best possible work environment for the entire team.
These are the tricks of agile project saboteurs
“The little handbook for the project saboteur” has now become something of a classic. No wonder, as it clearly demonstrates how projects are manipulated by their opponents – and thus provides companies with a kind of instruction manual to protect themselves from this. However, the book refers exclusively to classic project management. But what applies here also applies to agile software projects: There are often actors for whom the project is a thorn in the side and who are therefore extremely interested in it hitting the wall.
Management
A safe way to manage a specialist or IT department is to install a project manager software, such as Netsuite Power BI in addition to the product owner and scrum master, even though this role is no longer intended. To be on the safe side, select an alpha male who is as dominant as possible and differentiate his tasks from the Product Owner and Scrum Master as vaguely as possible. This means that disorder is inevitable – and with it the end of a successful agile project before it has even really started.
Product Owner
If he wants to sabotage the project, his top priority is that the development sprints do not deliver satisfactory results. One way he can achieve this is by consciously avoiding important decisions; Don’t let sprints that have started run, but get involved and demand short-term changes; or constantly insist on ever more detailed documentation. The fact that Scrum does not impose any obligation on the Product Owner to attend meetings can be easily abused to disappear for a while; only to then say afterwards: “That’s not how I imagined it.”
Developer
One of the most effective levers for developers to overturn an agile project is to estimate the story points that will be implemented per sprint, as this determines the speed of a sprint. If these story points are deliberately set high before the first sprint and lower and lower in the following sprints, it will appear as if the speed is continuously decreasing; and management must inevitably get the impression that the project is getting into trouble.
Specialist department
The product owner is nominally responsible for the backlog, which contains the tasks to be completed. Through it, the specialist department has the opportunity to intentionally incorporate more and more technical requirements. The same applies to the developers and their technical requirements. Either way, the number of backlog items will continue to grow instead of declining. This signals to management that the project is completely out of control and will hit the wall.