So we have a new project, excellent news! Did you follow all the steps in the Project Kick-off?
We have a variety of clients and projects, and everyone knows that multi-tasking isn't all that productive. We work in half days to help everyone stay aligned and not have to context switch too often.
We need to collectively:
- Check the current Client Days sheet in the SotU to see when a half day can be scheduled. This in-progress process is super new, but it's helpful to have a bit of an overview of when we do what.
- Propose the day in our Weekly Meeting to check for potential conflicts and unknowns.
- Of course it's not always feasible, but schedule client meetings on their designated day as often as possible.
We try to make sure the client knows all of us, but sometimes it isn't efficient to have everyone in all meetings with a client. Internally, we need to know what the expectations are – the Project Leader is always at client meetings, but is anyone else? Is a collaborator at one kind of meeting but not another? Some examples:
- We have a project in which 3 people co-work 95% of the time. They have an internal co-working half day. They all go to all scheduled meetings, unless one of them is off (or at the dentist or something). On this project, if someone wants to work alone, they're welcome to, we'll see the results at the next co-working day. The client knows all 3 people well and interacts with them individually as well as collectively.
- We have a project in which the Project Lead is the only person who communicates with the client on behalf of WAO. Co-working happens mainly for feedback and the Project Lead is proactive in asking other members for any sort of collaboration, but doesn't expect it and the collaboration is more “on-demand”.
- We have a project in which the Project Lead is seen as the “Lead” by the client and expected to fulfill that role, but we have internal co-working and the client has at least met the other members working on the project.
Our gold star project uses a Kanban board (currently Trello) to keep track of everything we're doing. This board is updated collectively in co-working sessions. When running a project, we need some way to make sure any member can step in and work should the Project Lead need relief.
We need to get into the habit of updating divvy ups weekly. Divvy ups are updated at the end of co-working sessions.