Heaping on the Work – But Will Your Team Keep Up?

Posted on February 16, 2010

Can your team keep up if you ask them to tackle new challenges without giving them new resources to offload other tasks? Here are the key steps to moving a team through a detailed, integrated project planning process.

We CEOs and our top teams will have to double-time it for a while in the early recovery period until new opportunities turn into free cash flow. Simply put, we will be asking our teams to tackle new challenges without giving them new resources to offload other tasks. But will your team keep up?

I don’t feel sorry for them, and many will be eager to dig in knowing that such work means a return to health for their organizations. But will they really execute well? Will these key projects and opportunities be harnessed or will they be fumbled? The answer, in case you haven’t guessed it already, is that many will be fumbled.

Fumbled not because the executives in charge aren’t bright or well intentioned. But fumbled because many executives don’t take the time or have the skills to do basic project planning and project management. This concern may not be keeping you awake at night, but it should. In my years of consulting, I have had too many engagements where I see light bulbs coming on as I take a team into their own details, forcing them to break apart their intentions into actionable steps, with dates and names attached. I then help them search their own short-term future to anticipate conflicts, obstacles and surprises.

If you’re about to stop reading because you don’t think your team has this problem, please ask each of your executives to show you a simple sheet detailing each step of their top projects. If they hand it over, congratulations are in order. If not, continue reading.

Here are the key steps to moving a team through a detailed, integrated project planning process:

1. The team must debate priorities, isolating the most important and critical projects. Few teams have time and resources to tackle much more than the top priorities.
2. Break each project into five to ten steps, in chronological order, with a start date and an end date. Identify any cross departmental dependencies, and identify any contingencies or prerequisites for each step. A critical path may emerge.
3. An executive must be in charge of each step (the champion). That doesn’t mean that they do all the work, it just means they project manage the step and insure it stays on track.
4. Once all the top projects have been broken down and laid out, sort the action items chronologically. Each champion should look at all their tasks and see if they still believe they can accomplish them on time in addition to their day-to-day work. Adjust as needed.
5. The team should sit back, look at all the project steps holistically and search for obstacles that can be anticipated over the next six months or so. The pace of the projects should be compared to the firm’s business plan to be sure the most critical strategies and objectives are being sufficiently addressed. Adjust as needed.
6. You are done when the team (and the CEO) agrees that; “We can do this”, “We are doing the most important work for the company”, and “We’ve studied the near term future and there is nothing we can see that will derail us that we haven’t taken into account”.

If you click on the attachment at the end of this article, you’ll see an example of an excel sheet that is simple, easy to sort and effective in laying out the steps of multiple projects. Most all executives are comfortable with Excel, so they won’t get slowed down or distracted trying to use project management software. I’m not against such software, and it certainly is nice for showing the critical path, for tracking resource utilization, and for producing nice Gantt chats. But this is not a software exercise: The benefit (at least half) comes from doing the thinking into the future and being detailed and realistic about the bite-sized steps to take to execute well.

The other half of the benefit comes when you and your team follow up in weekly operations meetings, checking the progress of each step, making adjustments as needed, and holding people accountable for their performance.

Heaping the work onto good executives without strong prioritization and project management can burn out your best people. Carefully assess what they can handle & how their stamina is holding up. One of the best ways to blow several projects in one moment is to have a key player on your team walk out.

On a final note: This is not an excuse for CEOs to micro-manage. I’ve facilitated many teams through this process and find that the team themselves can problem solve easily, have strong mastery of the operations and make good decisions. The CEO should act more as a moderator, requiring the team to go through the process with discipline and without distraction, then hold the team accountable to their own decisions.