mattstratton.com — Image via WikipediaIve blogged before about time management, especially my fascination with strategies/systems like Getting Things Done. The trick is, a lot of that stuff is geared towards individual time managementbut what happens when you manage a team of people and need to keep track of what they are working on?Ive devised a system for tracking this using a combination of Microsoft OneNote and Outlook. Bear in mind that I just invented this today, so a) its not really a proven system yet, and b) Im VERY open to feedback and suggestions for how it can be improved.The ProblemI manage a team of three people two sysadmins and one DBA. Their time and tasks are a mixture of day-to-day support, planned projects, and unofficial projects. Since its my responsibility to do resource balancing across the team, I need to know at a glance who is working on what, so I dont over-allocate a resource.I also need to be able to go back at review time and easily list out all of the cool things my team did for the year.Day-to-dayIn some ways, this is the easiest area to manage, simply because it defies management. Im not a micromanager, so I dont need to track every small task that my employees perform that is in response to a support ticket or system issue. There is time carved out for this type of activity, so I simply trust my guys to manage those types of requests themselves and I dont need to track this over time.Planned ProjectsFor me, planned projects are either business projects that my team is supporting, or infrastructure projects just within our team. These are activities that span over multiple weeks, might have various phases, and (this is the key part), were planned. I knew there were coming and when they were coming (for the most part) and already resource-balanced for their requirements. For this type of activity, I want to a) know who is working on which project, and b) capture some basic status/activity information. For example, if Business Project X required my sysadmin to design and implement a cool new single-signon server farm, I want to make sure I capture that, so I can brag about it in his review.Unofficial projectsAh, the nefarious unofficial bucket. What goes here? Well, this is pretty much anything that doesnt fall into the above categories. A project is anything that really takes more than a reactive response (for example, a break-fix issue in production is not a project). And unofficial really means unplanned. Most unofficial projects tend to be things that I have assigned to my team to follow up on in areas like process improvement or system efficiency. One example would be implement a 3G modem on our monitoring server to send us SMS alerts instead of email on critical systems. Thats a project, sure, but it wasnt in our plan.The SolutionsIve tried three different ways to manage this (including the one I just came up with this morning), and they all have varying levels of effectiveness.Solution 1 The Mental ListFrankly, this is how Ive been doing it most of the time for the past two years, and I think its a very common method. Its just like it sounds keep it in your head. I generally know what were working on, so I can have a pulse of who is really busy and who has spare cycles.The problem with this solution? It totally sucks. Theres no method for follow-up, and it relies upon my memory. It means that every time a new request comes in, I have to go to my team and basically say Hey, who is really busy right now? Thats not effective OR efficient. So this solution gets a D-minus grade.Solution 2 The WhiteboardI picked this up from a fellow manager. He has a big whiteboard in his cube, where he lists out all of his team members, and underneath them, lists the stuff they are working on. Its a good solution because its super easy, and VERY visible. The visibility is great for the manager, since he can just glance at the big honkin board in his cube/office and see who has a lot of stuff under their name. And likewise, the entire team can quickly see what everyone else is working on.So whats the problem with this? Its ephemeral. It doesnt last. When things get completed, they are removed from the list, so its not good for a tracking archive. Additionally, its a freakin whiteboard. They get erased.Solution 3 Electronic ListMy solution for this uses Microsoft OneNote and Outlook (the Outlook part is a nice to have, which Ill get into when I describe the solution in depth below). Fundamentally, I have a bucket in my list software for every team member, and then a bucket for each team member as archive. When a task/project is completed, its moved to the archive bucket. Theres nothing magic about using OneNote for this you could use another note system like Evernote, or even just track it in Excel with multiple tabs.The beauty of this system is that everything is captured, and it has an archive. Additionally, since its electronic, you can edit the information (in a paper/whiteboard system, its a lot harder to make changes to it after the fact without being destructive). You also can include a lot more rich content, such as links to documents or diagrams, etc.How Im Doing ItAs I mentioned, my new solution uses OneNote, so thats what all of my examples will build upon. You can easily extend the same principles to any electronic organization system though, but you might miss some of the extra cool integration points by doing so.OneNote ConfigurationAt a high level, the first step is to create a dedicated notebook for your team. This notebook will contain all of the lists you will use in this example. Inside that notebook, create a section/folder (hereafter referred to as section) for each team member, and then another section for each team members archive as displayed below: In this example, there are three employees named "Barry", "Chris", and "Ray"Inside each of the main sections for each employee, Ive created pages for the planned projects, as well as a page for what I call Activities/Tasks, which would be unplanned projects. Barry is working on three projects, plus Tasks/ActivitiesThe Plan In ActionIts pretty simple. Once this is set up, for every project, I simply input status and information on the associated page. Once a project is completed, I move it to the Archive section for that team member (in OneNote, just right-click on the page and choose Move).Im still working out the Tasks/Activities section, however. Im expermienting with creating sub-pages for each task, which makes them easier to move around (the current plan would be to simply strikethrough the task on the page when it is completed; that doesnt really get it into the archive, however). This is how the subpages would look: Each task has its own page inside the section, which makes it portableMore to ConsiderOne neat thing about using OneNote is that it has awesome integration with Outlook. For example, if I get an email that generates an activity for a team member, I can easily send it directly to OneNote from Outlook, which will create a page with all the info in that email.I also havent really looked into the tagging features in OneNote; by tagging things, I can easily search and filter on certain kinds of tasks/projects. I need to be careful to not make this system too complex so Im starting out with this very basic structure, and Ill see where it takes me.As I mentioned before, this is a work in progress. Its NOT a complete solution yet, but Ill keep revisiting it and revamping itand posting as I polish it. But now I really need feedback from my readers on how I could be doing it better. Im not necessarily looking for OneNote specific tweaks (although Id love any you have), but more about how to organize this information in a useful way. Do you manage a team of people? What are you systems for keeping track of resources and task-followups?
Jul 13, 2010 View in Crawl 4
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