4 Things Your Team Needs to Know BEFORE They Start a Project

I saw a funny sign the other day that read, “For Good Health, Wash Your Hands.” It wasn’t so much the common sense hygiene tip that struck me as funny, as much as it was where it was located, above a waste basket in a client’s restroom. And there wasn’t anything unusual about that, either, except for the fact the basket was tucked away in a dark corner of the restroom. Essentially, the only way you would see that sign would be AFTER you already washed your hands. Beyond that, if you don’t even use a towel (as many don’t) or the dispenser is empty, there’d be no reason to even go to the waste basket at all.  More or less, the message is there to comfort the most fastidious among us, someone who has actually taken the time to wash and dry their hands.

If people do indeed need a reminder to wash their hands, the sign really needs to be in a better location. Maybe on the door as people walk in, in the stall itself, or at the very least, hung more conspicuously for everyone to see. It has to do with timing more than anything; clearly, the message is meant to be read before someone washes their hands or leaves the restroom.

It got me to thinking about the timing of our directions and feedback to project teams. How many obvious tasks or expected behaviors do we neglect to properly inform our teams of? Do we give team members directions and feedback at the right time? Are reminders being totally overlooked and negatively impacting the project because they are given too late or not at all?

Below are some of the reminders, instructions, or direction we would want to provide sooner rather than later:

1. Where and How to Report Time

Reporting time against a project is critically important for a number of reasons, the first of which is the impact it has on billing. Companies that bill on a Time and Materials basis need to account for every hour billed against a project to increase their revenue. Accurate time reporting is also important in understanding areas where efficiencies can be introduced, identifying areas where bottlenecks occur, providing for more accurate estimates for the next project, and tracking employee performance and utilization.

When is the right time to make sure your project team knows when and how to report their time? Certainly not at the end of the project; I’ve seen it happen way too many times. Days, weeks, and sometimes months will go by without a stitch of time being reported against a project. Then there’s a last minute scramble to gather everyone’s time.

Nobody can remember what they did yesterday, let alone three weeks ago. People jump into Outlook to see what meetings they attended, what emails they sent, and what conversations they had in a feeble effort to cobble together a less-than-accurate record of how they spent their time.

Tell your team members how and when to report their time at the beginning of a project. This is especially important if it’s a new team that hasn’t worked with you before. They need to understand that you require time entered AT THE MOST on a daily basis, if not more often throughout the day. This is really the only way there can be any semblance of accuracy. It also prevents the mad scramble of inaccurate (or even false) time reporting at the end of the project. This is no good for either the client or the company.

Make sure everyone has the right access to report their time as well. They should have no problem logging into the system and knowing where to look to report their time.

2. When and How to Raise an Issue

Things are not always going to go perfectly smooth on a project, so it’s important to know as early as possible if something is veering off track. Your team should know, prior to the project starting, how important it is to raise issues. How and when do you want your team to bring issues to your attention? Perhaps you have a weekly status meeting designated as the time and place to bring something up. Or, you may prefer that at the first wind of something going off track somebody bring it to your attention; this would allow you time to monitor the situation closely and make any necessary adjustments sooner rather than later.

Make sure your team understands your preferences, as well as how you like to discuss any issues that arise. It might be that you want an email, or are sufficed with a quick conversation in the hallway in order to keep the information flowing before anything more serious occurs.

3. When and How to Deliver Bad News

Despite the best of intentions and efforts, risks may turn into issues and derail a project. A missed deadline, budget overrun, or technical problem could occur; in other words, just plain old bad news. Make sure your team knows the best way to deliver bad news before it happens.

When something does goes wrong, I’ve seen many people take delight with an almost “I told you so” response to the situation. They can’t wait to point out error, and offer no suggestions or options to get things fixed or back on track again.

Make sure your team knows your expectations before bad news occurs on project. Ensure they come with options and alternatives to fix the issue.

4. What to Say to a Client

It may be necessary at times for our resources to meet with a client on the phone or face to face. This is not a conversation that should be taken lightly. You may be used to working with clients all day long. You understand the fine art of communicating with clients, setting expectations, resetting priorities and generally keeping everyone on the same page. Your project team members may not have this same experience.

They may be accustomed to the rough and tumble, say-what’s-on-your-mind environment of the office, and are comfortable with their peers and colleagues. They may throw around words like can’t, won’t, don’t, shouldn’t and a host of other negative, black-and-white phrases among themselves that, if used with a client, can quickly shut down the interaction and forward momentum.

Make sure your team understands there are more appealing, constructive and eloquent ways to say the exact same thing to a client BEFORE they meet with the client. I’ve seen too many train wrecks caused by uninformed team members who feel they just have to open their mouth to set the record straight with the client. Spend some time teaching them what those more appropriate phrases and topics are, or develop a cheat sheet they can refer to before a client-facing meeting that will refresh their memories.  Also, don’t be afraid to let them know they should focus on their technical areas of expertise while you focus on the client relationship management piece.

Timing is everything. Just like the sign in the restroom that someone would see only AFTER they washed their hands, make sure your team knows what you expect of them before a project begins and your projects will be that much more successful.

Lets slove this problem

There’s a funny saying circulating with marketers right now on the current state of Big Data:

“Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”

Gartner recently released a report that 64% of companies are deploying or planning to deploy a Big Data project, yet 56% struggle to know how to get value from their data. As Matt Asay wrote about the Gartner study, “it seems that they’ve allowed the hype around Big Data to both motivate them to start but also confuse them as to where they should go.”

The promise of Big Data is significant and many predict that 2014 will be a breakthrough year for Big Data marketing. Yet, I’ve seen many companies struggle with Small Data, let alone Big Data.

Big Data doesn’t replace Big Ideas. It’s what you do with the data that matters. As Big Data matures and starts to deliver on its promise, big marketing ideas to leverage the power of those Big Data insights will be needed more than ever.

I’d love to hear some of your favorite case studies on leveraging Big Data in marketing.

Five Idea About Money Management

Even though the focus of my posts has been on consciousness, there's no escaping the link between success and money. Few people would consider themselves a success if they had little or no money (even though figures like Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates ventured very different ideas on the subject). The ability to manage money, allocate assets, and increase wealth plays a major role in the economy, as well as the lives of each person. Let me deal with the subject from the perspective of consciousness by offering five ideas that will feel quite new to anyone who approaches money strictly from a naked desire to make as much as possible or from the opposite desire, to escape debt and impoverishment.

#1 Money reflects who you are. It mirrors your psychological makeup.

#2 The highest use of money is to increase happiness.

#3 The circulation of money is a symbol for the circulation of ideas.

#4 To be free of money woes, expands your consciousness.

#5 Money equals success if you can handle the previous four ideas.

I'll fill in each idea a little to make clear why it's important.

#1 Money reflects who you are. It mirrors your psychological makeup.

The first idea is a core truth, and many branches grow from it. It says that money is never truly objective. The psyche, with its abundance of fears, wishes, hopes, and desires, is always coloring how each of us views money, to the extent that the great economist John Maynard Keynes considered all markets to be psychological in nature. What you think and believe will be automatically reflected in how you manage your money. There are hoarders who cannot tolerate the slightest risk, gamblers who can never save their winnings, along with free spenders, philanthropists, and so on.

Since money reflects the psyche, including its unconscious drives, people are secretive about their money in order to hide themselves. Few of us want to be entirely seen or known by others, and at a deeper level we are afraid to know ourselves completely. Yet the more you can accept yourself, the easier it will be to deal with money and the less anxious it will make you. There’s no objective formula that works for everyone. Even so, you need to spend enough time to know yourself that you find a formula that works for you, i.e., that allows you to not obsess over money, fear its loss, or take risks you cannot tolerate. Don't assume that your ability to manage money is the same as the people around you, and don't try to live up to the life story of some billionaire. The path to money, if that's the path you want to walk, begins inside.

#2 The highest use of money is to increase happiness.

The psyche is complicated, and once you know yourself, there is still room for confusion, because money has to be turned into action. Which part of your mind should you follow, the emotional or rational? Is greed something to ignore or follow? Should you mainly focus on earning, saving, or investing? It takes years of experience to untangle these issues - and many more, besides - but the most helpful guide is to use your money in the service of being happy. Rich but miserable is no way to spend your days, either now or after you retire. What will make you happy? Long-term fulfillment is built on short-term fulfillment. In other words, to be happy in the future, pay attention to your happiness today.

Does this mean that all those rich people who endured massive stress, who obsessed over building wealth, who cut corners and schemed, etc. were wrong in their approach? "Wrong" isn't the right term. The real issue is whether stress, greed, obsession, and amorality are enemies of happiness. One book on the secret to becoming a millionaire found that the common factor is simple: Be a stingy bastard. No one has ever written a book calling this the formula for happiness.

#3 The circulation of money is a symbol for the circulation of ideas.

The usual framework for managing money uses terms like earning, spending, investing, etc., which is an objective vocabulary. Since there is no true objectivity in regards to money, there needs to be an alternative vocabulary that hits closer to the truth. Your life, like everyone else's, is rooted in sensations, feelings, images, and thoughts - the contents of your mind, in short. The stuff of the mind makes life better when it is dynamic, open, free of fear, and creative. The stuff of the mind makes life worse when it is rigid, closed, stuck, and fearful.

Therefore, let your money reflect the mind's ability to make life better. Money circulates around ideas because money symbolizes ideas (as well as beliefs, hopes, wishes, and fears). As much as society worships money, it gets misused when two of the mind's most primitive drives - fear and greed - are placed in charge. This happens all too often, unfortunately, as front-page stories about Wall Street constantly inform us. Look at how your own mind works, and favor those aspects that make your life more dynamic and creative. Then your management of money will follow where your mind wants to go.

#4 To be free of money woes, expand your consciousness.

Life is like water. It stagnates if it doesn't flow. If your mind is tight, worried, and stuck on the same themes year after year, it will stagnate, and so will your money. There are rich people who can't find happiness in their wealth because they haven't learned how to connect it with personal growth. But if you expand your awareness, money becomes the representation of how you are evolving. This follows from the core idea that your money reflects who you are.

As your mind expands, you stop holding on to the conventional labels that we all use to define ourselves. Rich and poor are two such labels, and millions of people obsess over them, just as they obsess over labels of gender, nationality, religion, and so on. At its best, money mirrors a mind that is freeing itself from labels. In that way, instead of being at the root of all evils - anxiety being the primary evil - money can help you feel free, which is the ultimate good.

#5 Money equals success if you can handle the previous four ideas.

The goal at the beginning of this post was to link money and success in a better way than simply adding up your bank account. By absorbing the previous four ideas, success comes to fruition. This isn't a moral argument. Money is a mirror, and mirrors are neutral. They show you what is. The one advantage that money has over a bathroom mirror is that is magnifies what is. This becomes a source of misery if your money magnifies greed, insecurity, and egotism. It's a source of satisfaction if your money magnifies your highest aspirations and best intent.

I'd call this the dividing line between success and failure, not the amount of money you earn or even how much you give away. In a material world, the most important things - purpose and meaning - are immaterial. Instead of standing for materialism itself, money can stand for the invisible inner world on which every life is built.