Encourage your team (and yourself) to spend a specific time each week in tidying their desk. This should include:

• Stacking and filing piles of paper neatly.
• Putting papers into sections
  • By priority
  • By category

Possibly do this every Friday afternoon before leaving work so that desk is clean and ready for concentrated work on Monday morning. This should reduce the stress associated with not knowing what is on your desk and what needs to be done next.

If it is an enforced policy you will hopefully find everyone becomes more organised. It is important to remember that if your company is looking for people to fire (when in economic difficulty) a messy desk can make you look unorganised and unreliable.

What is your experience with work efficiency with a messy or tidy desk?

Tagged with: organised • tidy desk

Filed under: Documentation • Human Resources • Planning • Time

Find a way for everyone in your project team to get to know each other’s names and each other’s roles.

This will help the team to work better together, and help in retaining staff through them being more comfortable at work and developing friendships,
It also speeds up communication when people know who to talk with for what.

Tagged with: names

Filed under: Communication

Learn to use the tools you require
Do a short course in the use of software such as:

• Excel (or whatever spreadsheet program you use)
• Word
• Project (Microsoft, Primavera etc)
• PowerPoint
• Access

Learn to touch type (this can dramatically increase your work efficiency)

Tagged with: courses • software • tools

Filed under: Training

Consider using wiki software as an internal intranet.

Particularly for a company with no intranet yet, or for a large project.

• Is fully search-able
• All changes are recorded and stored (by user name, so you can see who made the change).
• Changed documents are backed up.
• Can allocate who has access to what.
• Is very fast if stored locally.
• Easy to use.

Tagged with: intranet • wiki

Filed under: Communication • Documentation

Make sure team members are given access cards, login passwords etc as soon as they start on the job.

An induction should be done as soon as possible, including giving access cards to the building.

It may seem to save some money by only doing the induction and card granting process once a month, but the difficulties associated for the employee to wait for someone else to open doors etc means less time they spend on the project.

Temporary cards are not good enough if they don’t give all the access the person should get. (Many temporary access cards don’t work or set off the alarm outside office hours, if the person needs to start early or work late, they cannot).

Tagged with: access card • induction • login • passwords

Filed under: Human Resources • Time

Clarify with all project team members what they should book their time to.

When they start working on the team they should be given a printout of the cost codes that they should book time to.
Don’t assume they will already know.
This will save time and provide more accuracy for cost accounting for the project.

Tagged with: accounting • cost codes • time sheets

Filed under: Cost • Human Resources • Time • Training

If you set a task for someone to update or change a document, you should clarify:

• What the purpose of the document is
• Who it is for, who will then use it or read it
• Who else will be altering it
• What is its priority over other documents (if info is different, which takes precedence?).

A person may be tasked with updating information in a spreadsheet. When they have done so, what do they do with it?

• Leave it on the server?
• Inform certain people it is altered?
• Move it to a “completed” folder?

Much of this information could be kept as a second work sheet in the spreadsheet.

Tagged with: altering documents • priority

Filed under: Communication • Documentation • Training

Make sure you and your client agree on the deliverables expected for the project.

Sometimes a contract may specify deliverables without enough detail. This could lead to you delivering something quite different than what the client required.

If the scope is not clear, or if deliverables are not clearly listed, you should clarify with the client as early as possible.

Tagged with: deliverable • deliverables

Filed under: Client • Communication • Contract • Scope

To overcome blind spots in your project, get other project managers (from outside that project) to review your project.

This should be done regularly as part of a scheduled process.

It should include giving that PM a summary of the project and showing them around the project (if a construction site). This is particularly important if you are new to that industry. They may spot problems that you have overlooked.

Tagged with: problems • review

Filed under: Testing

Make sure as the manager of a project that you are aware of and understand not just the financial and contract risks, but also the technical risks of the project.

E.g.

• Flooding risks
• High wind loads
• Risks associated with the use of new or unproven techniques or technology
• Construction techniques that your company or workers have not done before

Tagged with: technical risks

Filed under: Risk

Good reliable internal and external network connections are important.

As an organisation, project office or program office, it is important that both internal and external networks work well.

It costs a lot of money in lost time if the office connection to the internet is offline or very slow. Managers, designer, drafters, procurement, and many others need external access to look up supplier information, maps, site info, government websites, standards, definitions, dictionaries.

Blocking access to sites using Net Nanny or similar is better than blocking all external access.

Although the company might have to pay high bandwidth costs for a faster connection, that is probably cheaper than the lost time of people having to wait for pages to load.

Tagged with: bandwidth • connection • download • internet • intranet • network • offline • online

Filed under: Cost • Time

Get your organisation to implement an electronic authorization system.

This is where each person that must regularly sign paperwork can instead authorize documents in electronic form.

This will reduce the time taken to authorize actions (forms)

The originator could prepare an electronic form and send the link to all the people that must sign it. Those people log on, review the document, and authorize it by ticking a box. Confirmation would then be sent to the originator on which authorizations have been attached.

This will save a lot of server space, bandwidth, and ink as people would not have to print in colour, sign, scan, and email back again.

It can also reduce processing time from weeks to hours or minutes.

It should reduce the processing costs. To chase signatures can take the full time work of a person for each type of form (if done regularly). By doing electronic authorization, I would estimate 90% of the coordination time and cost could be saved (excluding the software cost).

Workflow packages are often used to implement this function.

Tagged with: authorization • forms • paperwork • signatures • workflow

Filed under: Communication • Cost • Documentation • Time

At the start of a project, take the time to make sure the documentation system is as simple and easy to use as possible.

Ideally, you shouldn’t have folders within folders within folders containing spreadsheets and documents on the computer system.

Preferable would be a well managed enterprise project management system, or at least a database system from where most things can be accessed.

Reduce time wastage by making sure files are stored as close to where they are accessed as possible. If your server is based in one city and most of the project team that accesses it is based in another, make sure you either have a very fast connection to it or have the files stored locally instead. A delay of 30 seconds to open every file can add up to hours of wasted time each week per person.

Proper complete training should be provided to all members of the project team on how to find and access files. A standard filing system should be used across all projects so people can easily start work in a project without wasting time. Standard templates should be easily available to cover most common uses, including change or variation tracking, costs changes, and anything that would commonly be used to store information.

You don’t want lots of people using their own style of spreadsheet for the same type of information. It should be standardised and known by all, yet as simple as possible.

Changes or updates to these templates should be easy yet centralised. It should not need lots of signatures and days of waiting. Anyone should be able to easily submit a change to template proposal which will be enacted as soon as possible. (This could be a difficult process to manage, it is better to get the forms right the first time).

Tagged with: database • document system • enterprise project management system • filing • folders

Filed under: Documentation • Planning • Time