Want a leadership report card? Look at your team. I started noticing some important things that leads us to where we are today. During the summer time, I have the responsibility supervising over 30 people in an every day environment. Besides the drastically different roles they all play, I started pulsing them all to find the same things across the board. These people had great  hearts, minimum management needs, and even less productivity on large scale projects. We were knocking out the small tasks without breaking a sweat, but the big back burner projects where no where in sight. You know what I’m talking about, the “one day when we get a chance to” projects.

For years we have been a big fans of checklists and procedures. They’re the backbone that keeps communication and execution straight. September started the study of project management for my team. (Learn to study something out of your comfort zone.) We started finding out that it wasn’t enough to make a to-do list, but true productivity was found when it was written a certain way and staring you in the face. One of the books that greatly helped me with this was, “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky.

Projects had to become more then post it notes on the wall. They had to be broken down to smaller bite size items. Something like “network in office” really had about 200 steps behind it in order to complete that project. We had to get the projects in plain site so we were able to truly get the best plan of how to execute those projects well. Here’s what we came up with. Use it. Abuse it. Etc.

• Think It– Think out the whole project before you start it. (camera angles, budget, paint colors, book publisher, etc)
• Verb It – Write down the tasks needed to accomplish these goals. Each thing on your list must start with a verb. It requires action. (Fix faucet, Go to store, Talk to Ryan)
• Pulse It– When finished with step 1 or 35 always pulse the project. (Is this how you expected it to turn out? If not.. Is that ok? Do you need to re adjust?)
• Drop It -Let the project set for a few days without doing anything on it. The way an athlete needs rest time so does a project. We did a project that should of taken 8 months in 3 because we gave it the space it needed. TheSuperKoolKidz.com
• Finish It -When you see the end in site make it a big deal! When we finish a show we have a cookie cake party. It’s amazing how the incentive of just a cookie cake gives us the fuel we need to push it to the end! 🙂

Tools To Help Productivity:

• ActionMethod.com
• Producteev.com
• Basecamp.com
• Freedcamp.com
• Index Cards
• Google Tasks
• White Boards (Make your own)
• Paper

It’s time to get the things done not because you want to, because you’re called to. Project management has changed the way we work. We are faster, more efficient, and enjoying work more then ever. Try it for 30 days and see what it can do for you.