Other small business owners like to create a team, and work hand in hand with their employees. This management style can work for some businesses, with the whole group working as a team to make decisions and get things done. Communication is very important with team management, and the whole team needs to get along to make it work.

Some small business owners focus on the job, and getting the project done. Project oriented business owners can be more difficult to work for, because they tend to be less personal. Their drive to get things done can sometimes come across as being short or harsh.

Still small business owners tend to be reactive to situations, instead of proactive to prevent negative situations from happening. A proactive manager will try to think of problems before they happen, and work to prevent them. Sometimes small businesses are so busy reacting to problems they have no time to try to prevent the problems from happening in the first place.

What type of management style do you use to run your small business? If you’re not managing in the style you’d like you can work with your employees to make changes and improvements.

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Post from: EveryJoe

What’s Your Small Business Management Style

Image: www.SXC.hu

Team leader have the big job of keeping their team motivated to succeed in whatever they are working on. Whether it is in a business environment, an factory or at the executive level. Leading a team requires you to be an encourager of excellence. As you encourage and motivate your team, I want to share some suggestion with you to keep team morale high.

• People are important. Remember that people are more important that pushing them to the point of exhaustion. Always put people first.
• Nothing is too small to celebrate. Be a celebrator of your team’s accomplishments regardless how big or small they are.
• Deal with team conflict. If there is conflict on your team, make sure you hear and listen to both sides and try to bring them to a point where both sides are comfortable with the solution to the problem.
• Delegate task effectively. Make sure that you assign team tasks to the best person who can handle them. Don’t play favorites when assigning tasks.

As you come up with how you will motivate your team to succeed, I’m sure that you will accomplish what you put your mind to do. In the video below, information is share to help your deal with a team you motivate them to succeed.

Post from: EveryJoe

How To Motivate Your Team To Succeed

This is the second installment of a two-part series. Read Project Management for Small Teams – Part 1.

Ongoing Planning

Let’s face it – planning is not a one-time activity. It has to constantly be happening to ensure things stay up-to-date and the entire team is in sync. Ideally, this means the entire team gets together on a regular basis and discusses their parts of the project and where they are at.

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I’ve seen this done numerous ways – daily stand-up meetings, weekly team meetings, breaking the team in to pieces and meeting that way, etc…

At the very least – for a small project, you need to get the entire team in a room at least once a week to build up accountability, a level of communication, and trust. If someone misses a deadline, the question “why?” must be asked. Remember, everyone on the team isn’t accountable to the project manager – they are accountable to everyone else on the team.

People will hate working on something if they are making their dates, but Person A continues to miss theirs and nothing is done about it. Get everyone in a room, hold people accountable – really, you just need to actually manage.

Stand-ups can be great too. It may seem like overkill to do, but in the long-term you can save a boatload of time with them. Here’s a general format:

• Keep them under 15 minutes
• Designate a member of the team to run them
• Have everyone give a brief update about what they did for the last 24 hours
• Have everyone give an update on what they will do for the next 24 hours
• Go around the room and have folks identify red flags they have
• Encourage people to solve problems with others right after the meeting

This can save a lot of time with sending unnecessary e-mails, procrastination, etc… and it can contribute to building a culture in the organization of getting things done efficiently instead of waiting.

Status Reports

With most projects, the manager is going to be communicating with stakeholders regularly. This could be senior management at a smaller company or maybe just the team working on executing the plan. Maybe it’s a client or external partners.

Regardless of who it is, you need a clear and direct way to indicate where you are currently at, if you are going to hit the dates and deliverables you said you would, and where things aren’t going so great. That’s probably the most important.

The easiest way to do this is through a red / yellow / green system. Things in green are totally fine and either a) done or b) going to be on time beyond the shadow of a doubt. Parts of the status report in yellow are in certain danger of missing their estimated delivery date and need to be looked at right away. Items in red are past the date and are actually severely affecting the project being successfully delivered and probably require stakeholder intervention.

In Closing

Keeping things lightweight and clear can’t be stressed enough. In addition, communication is paramount – regardless of the size of the team executing the project.

Be careful not to get bogged down in complex PM jargon and tasks like CV (cost variance) or order of magnitude estimation, critical paths, resource loading, and other things. Chances are, if you are running the project and your gut is telling you something is amiss, it is.

Adam Bullied has more over 8 years of experience working in start-ups and maintains a blog on product management at WriteThatDown.com.

Post from: EveryJoe

Project Management for Small Teams – Part 2

Projects can be extremely complicated – especially on small teams. There can be a seemingly insurmountable number of tasks to complete, several people (or groups) dealing with a ton of different things on any given day, priorities changing, and of course deadlines, estimates, and a ton more.

The trick is to keep things as simple, and as clear, as possible.

At every turn, you need to look for ways to streamline the planning and management of the project to make sure everything stays above water. I’ve found there are a few key things you can do to ensure project success.

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Identifying the Goal

Everyone may have their own idea of what the project actually is, so it’s important the goal is identified and communicated right up front. Why does the project exist, and why are people working on it? It seems so simple, yet so many things fall to pieces by not having this clearly documented up front.

Some teams may choose to write a project charter to communicate this information, but even that’s a bit formal. Ideally, a simple e-mail will suffice with a brief kick-off meeting so the team has a chance to ask questions and get a feel for what’s expected of them.

This shouldn’t be complicated or a burden – it should actually be fun. If you find the team is dragging to even do this, or stakeholders are unclear about why the project exists in the first place, that should set off some warning signs.

It would be wise to sit down and talk with your management team right away in order to clarify some basic objectives so they can be referenced regularly. Then the project starts off right – with everyone on the same page as to why it’s important.

Picking the Right Tool

Everyone will have their own preference about what tool is best to manage the project plan, but ultimately the project manager has to be the one to assess the situation and choose what’s best.

Speaking from long hours of experience, while working with a smaller team, stay away from mammoth beasts like Microsoft Project. They will only end-up hurting you in the end if you can’t use them effectively. It may sound lame, but Excel is probably your best bet.

Really, regardless of team size, you want to be selecting a tool that will still make your life easier and help with:

• Tracking when something was supposed to be done and when it will be done (variance)
• Communicating status to key stakeholders in a clear and efficient way
• Making sure all resources are loaded accordingly
• Having a clear picture as to when larger work packages will be complete

Some great packages to check out include: Omniplan, Basecamp, your existing bug tracking software used by your development team, and yes – everyone’s favorite, Microsoft Excel. There are plenty out there. Do your research, talk it over with your team, and make a choice.

Tne Plan, One Schedule

You only ever need to have a single place that details an ongoing plan / schedule. If you have more than one, roll everything in to a single location. If this fails to happen, even two copies of a single plan will fall out of sync extremely quickly.

For example, imagine you have a team of 4 people. You have the de facto standard plan. Then, 2 folks on the project team decide to go and replicate that document in another capacity that they are going try and keep maintained alongside the master. Now, they have to waste time updating that document – and chances are, they are going to put something in there you don’t know about, causing a breakdown in communication.

Get everything that may exist within your organization now down in to a single place and a single tool (if feasible based on the size of your company or business unit).

Small Teams: Leverage One Project Manager

There is a caveat to this – being that smaller teams only require one PM. But in reality, even larger teams are split apart, with each group working with one PM.

This presents a particularly ugly scenario if it’s not adhered to, which I (and many others) refer to as “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome. Before you know, you don’t have a single person responsible for maintaing a day-to-day plan of action, you have four.

Can you imagine the complexities of having a small team of 15-20 people, with about 7 or 8 of those people all trying to manage the entire project? It would be absolute chaos.

Like having a single schedule and plan, you need to par the team down so there is one single voice that controls gathering the priorities, and making sure the trains are all running on time. If your organization (or your corner / piece of a business) does not have this, you are surely headed for a mid-air collision that will end-up delaying the project a great deal.

Get Back to Basics – What to Track

The project planning can really be pared down. And usually, it’s better for everyone if it is. When creating your plan and managing it on a week-to-week and day-to-day basis, you probably only need to look for some key pieces of information:

• The task itself – what needs to actually be done
• The estimated date of completion
• An estimated sense of effort (days / hours / etc…)
• The priority of the task
• The completion percentage of the task (0, 50, 75, 90, etc…)
• The resource assigned to the task

Again, with a small team you are trying to make sure work is being estimated in a reasonable amount of time. Also, as due dates approach you need to validate they are going to be hit, and if they won’t be, you will need to ascertain why.

Tomorrow, we will continue with the rest of this two-part piece, finishing up with thoughts on ongoing planning, status reports and other details.

Adam Bullied has more over 8 years of experience working in start-ups and maintains a blog on product management at WriteThatDown.com.

Post from: EveryJoe

Project Management for Small Teams – Part 1