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Tactical Execution Best Practice 3 – Timely Reporting of Activity Status

StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Best Practice ArticleRarely does unique, creative, or exploratory work complete on-time and on-budget (accounting for personnel, material, and financial resources). Although planners make every effort to accurately predict task needs, the many variables and uncertainties associated with these types of tasks make highly accurate planning nearly impossible. Even highly repetitive tasks can suffer from unforeseeable circumstances that delay their performance or raise costs. Subsequently, buffers are often added to work plans to accommodate for the uncertainty. At times, these buffers aren’t enough. On other occasions, excess time and/or resources remain. Only through timely communication of activity status can managers proactively prioritize and adjust their operations or project plans to accommodate the unknown and recover excess time and resources.


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Project Management Best Practice 4 – Team Calendar

Project complexity seems to increase exponentially with team size. Larger teams require greater division of work and additional managers and supervisors to oversee these disparate efforts. Subsequently, the number of meetings increases to coordinate and align efforts between work groups, communication with stakeholders, and gather requirements and ideas from the organization’s subject matter experts. Absent meeting coordination, team members and line organization sponsors and participants become increasingly double and triple booked; causing individual frustration and diminishing the team’s effectiveness credibility.


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Management and Leadership – Managing Your Virtual Team

People used to think that “working from home” was code for “getting paid to eat Oreos in pajamas”, but with the recent recession, getting paid at all isn’t anything to take chances with. If you’re engaged in virtual project management you can’t physically just drop in to check on your workers – at least, not without a lot of gas, possibly a jet, and the risk of some extremely unpleasant surprises. But with the right web based project management software it’s entirely possible to keep tabs on your employees – without them setting their Twitter status message as 1984.

The main problem with online collaboration is that your staff, by definition, must have a reliable access to the Internet. Aka “The Infinite Distraction Engine.” Administering employees online can be like herding cats, except the cats are all in different countries, and invisible. The cats also have access to YouTube. How can you remotely manage them?


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Elmer Thomas blogs primarily at Thinking Serious which focuses on programming, design, business and productivity content for tech entrepreneurs living in a 2.0 world. That is, when he is not tickling his entrepreneur itch or consulting. To read Elmer’s complete biography, click here.

Leadership Inspirations – A Call for Innovation

“To get what we’ve never had, we must do what we’ve never done.”

Anonymous

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Albert Einstein
Theoretical physicist, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (1921)

Innovation, the act of introducing a new product, service, and/or method, brings with it the opportunity for great success and equally great failure. And while some failures result from unsuccessful attempts to introduce the new and different, no great achievement has ever been born without an act of innovation. Subsequently, a failure to offer something new or to do something differently will at best result in the continuation of today’s outcomes and will more likely result in diminishing returns as highly aggressive competitors offer more and more for less and less.

So what can you do today to become more efficient, more effective, more strategy driven?

Management Observation Program Best Practice 1 – Immediate Feedback

Can you remember what you ate for dinner last night? Last week? Neither can many others. How well then will a worker remember the nuances of his or her job performance days or weeks earlier on which feedback is now being provided? Probably not very well.


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