Welcome again to this month's rolling Q&A. We will take questions throughout the remainder of the week.
Q&A Summary
Introduction
Q&A “Favorite tool to overview/project manage that's compatible with O365?”
Overview
Supporting Processes and Consistency
Microsoft Options
Excel
OneNote
To Do
Introduction
Here's a broad list of where we feel our expertise sits:
Recruitment (and how best to use external recruiters),
Remote work and managing remote teams
Outsourcing and managing outsourced teams and freelancers (APAC focus)
Time management (a recap + a few more Au techniques)
Time management and processes for sales & sales roles
Managing stakeholders in family business' (carry the donkey)
How to design process (broadly)
Having said that if we'll always take a look and if something is outside our wheelhouse we'll do our best to refer out to another BowTied or somewhere that can assist you.
As always if you'd prefer to submit (more) anonymously, you can reach us via
bowtiedhippopotamus@gmail.com
Or on the bird app (Direct Messages welcomed)
@BowTiedHippo_
Q&A
To open proceedings here's a question that we've received in the last month. As always, we've edited it to add clarity where possible and to help preserve anonymity.
Q
"We're rocking a SharePoint ecosystem, what's your favorite tool to overview/project manage that's compatible with O365?
Small team but different disciplines, time zone differences so assume fairly disjointed."
I'm working with developers (devs), but the focus is more on internal communications (informing the devs as to what's happening) and giving 30, 000 foot priorities and letting them figure it out.
Right. This one here could've been, and will realistically be multiple notes to cover in sufficient depth.
Overview
First things first. In most cases for small teams and small organisations, generally, the project management software isn't the core issue here. Unless of course, you're managing multiple million USD budgets with interlinked dependencies then you definitely need something that can track milestone progress, spin up Gantt or PERT charts, automate your reporting and control spend against budget.
(A POLARIS launch. From memory / abject rumour the dependencies and bottlenecks from managing this program gave the project management discipline the PERT chart).
If you're partly overseeing devs and dev work then we get into DevOps / Product Manager territory (i.e. GitHub / Jira)pretty quickly and that's generally out of our scope currently unfortunately (however perhaps see BowTied Product Guy).
Now to answer your question at a high level.
Realistically to run something that size you could do it off a napkin + a table cloth + 3 post its + a whole lotta Au if you had to.
Like most ecosystems, "vanilla" O365 probably has enough functionality already for what we think you need, and even formal Program and Project Managers in larger enterprises lean very, very heavily on ppt slide decks and visio (for flowcharts).
This "answer" above is obviously a bit vague and high level and more aimed at "current" state or stabilising. Longer term it's probably worth considering something web based and more specialised (few reasons - but main one is that it'll work with your tech stack via a browser and be accessible). Options here that we'll cover in a later note include the usual suspects; Trello, Asana, Teamwork (more of a CRM but can do it) and other things like Notion, Monday, Jira and others.
Supporting Processes and Consistency
Now, back to the core issue. It's actually going to be your supporting processes and consistency - it's not necessarily about your tools (in fact we've seen similar themes recently).
Streamlining as much as we're emotionally able to do so: the short version is that we'd recommend focusing on your process first. At a high level you need to be the most consistent "animal" in that whole shop.
You need really good follow through and really good follow up. Every meeting should have an agenda. During the meeting take notes and identify action items and timelines.
Regularly review the outstanding action items and what's required, follow these up and hold yourself and others to account. Nothing in the above few sentences is a complex or a revelation, but the act of consistently doing this is very rare. A lot of this fortunately will either graft straight on to MS To Do or something equally available.
Microsoft Options
Very briefly here's some options:
Excel
If your sharepoint supports cloud based MS docs then a shared word doc or shared excel sheet can hold the project and set out the task owner, the sub tasks, dependencies, due by dates, and milestones etc.
Excel's probably a bit better as the formatting is a bit more forgiving and it's much easier to display visuals like rough timelines or gnatt charts with something like cell shading. This is very, very manual however and if it's not automatically synced across users you're going to run into a number of problems quickly.
OneNote
In this case OneNote could substitute in a pinch as basically a structured word doc index (in our view) and lends itself well to anything that requires a bit more documentation or written updates / discussion.
To Do
In our view, your best option will actually be MS To Do. Create tasks and subtasks (projects) either for yourself, or invite collaborators and assign tasks to other people. You can build a daily "to do" list out of this as well as define milestones and repeating tasks. This is probably the best of the not great options immediately available however it won't be able to display anything visual for you unfortunately. It looks like it only syncs across with your Outlook tasks, not actually with your Outlook calendar. In our view this is a bit, Odd, however:
MSFT
We’re not as strong here and may need to look closer at this
Further questions or comments are welcomed in the comments below.