One of the most useful things I have learned leading teams is that pictures are a very effective way to help people understand complex ideas. I am sure you have all heard that there are auditory learners and visual learners, but in my experience, a good visual is much better than audio for most people. I have been in countless meetings where a discussion goes on and on with no apparent conclusion or convergence toward an answer until someone goes up to the board and draws a picture of the ‘situation’. The dynamics in the meeting immediately transform. Understanding increases, more people are engaged to help draw the picture, and things get moving again. People need a way to form a mental image of complex problems, to connect abstract ideas with things they already understand. This is why drawing even a simple flow or relationship diagram can help people understand the most difficult concepts. Continue reading
Category Archives: Tools
Project Progress Trend Analysis
If you are like most project managers, you wish you had a better real-time handle on the progress of your project so you could predict when you will finish or when a change is needed in order to stay on track. I have used a simple yet powerful method that is applicable to most projects and can tell you months in advance if you are off track or if scope creep is threatening to destroy your schedule. The method is straightforward and only requires a detailed task list and that the tasks are checked off as the project progresses. If you spend the time with the project team to develop a detailed work breakdown schedule (WBS), you have all the data you need for this method. WBS data should be available for even the simplest projects and is often in spreadsheet form as a simple list of tasks, making the method described here very easy to implement. The method is far easier to use to monitor progress and identify when things are going awry than either PERT or Gantt charts. Here is the method:
Communicating Effectively in Virtual Teams: Part 4 of 4
In this final part of my series on communications in virtual teams, I will discuss the most important medium to evolve so far during the computer revolution: e-mail. Pretty much everyone has an e-mail address these days, and many of us have several. E-mail is the primary information channel in corporations across the globe. It allows us to send everything from short text messages to detailed project proposals with product specifications to anyone, anywhere on the planet, at any time. It is a non-real-time mode of communication as messages are queued up in one’s inbox for reading when convenient. Continue reading
Communicating Effectively in Virtual Teams: Part 3 of 4
In this part of the series on optimizing virtual team communications, I’ll cover Instant Messaging, or IM as it is commonly called. IM has evolved a great deal from the early consumer versions in the mid 90’s. It is now recognized as an important additional channel of communications in the corporate world, filling a hole between the telephone and email. A phone call requires extra time for greetings and salutations and often includes casual, non-work chit-chat. For this reason, those of us under pressure to meet critical deadlines will use IM to get an answer to a quick question rather than make a phone call. The other option we have is email, but most people do not reply to email immediately, so urgent questions go unanswered. Continue reading
Communicating Effectively in Virtual Teams: Part 2 of 4
In part one of this series I talked about the problems with speakerphones in virtual teams. In this installment, I’ll discuss the problems with another type of phone, the Cell.
Most modern cell phones have a built-in speakerphone feature, and will therefore also have the problems mentioned in the previous article when used in this mode. I won’t repeat the problems and recommendations for speakerphones here, but cell phones do have several other nasty problems that I will discuss. They are: latency, dropouts, and signal fade. Continue reading
Communicating Effectively in Virtual Teams: Part 1 of 4
We all know that effective communication is critical to every well-executed project. Everyone involved in getting that next product to market must constantly exchange bits of information with many people. Everything from project proposals to release-to-manufacturing documents must be created, discussed, edited, reviewed, approved and distributed. All of these information exchanges require clear communication for the outcome to be a good one.
Speech Recognition and Instant Messaging
I have been using speech recognition (SR) software for many years, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that I discovered a fantastic use for it: Instant Messaging (IM). Until I stumbled onto this combination, I had used SR primarily for transcribing handwritten notes or composing long reports. When I first tried SR with instant messaging, I was surprised by how effective it was. I could chat with someone for long stretches without ever touching the keyboard. I could say things like, “have you reviewed the presentation for today’s meeting question mark enter key”, and my message would be sent. I found I could chat for many minutes like this without errors and without ever touching the keyboard. And, if I didn’t change window focus to work on another document, I could do this without even touching the mouse.