There are so many teams out there that don’t seem to win with their projects. Everyone sets out with high hopes but the results… they don’t seem to appear. Or, worse, the team achieves results which are then complained about.
Setting your team up to win builds motivation. Each success leads to the next success. If you are new to continuous improvement, this is an excellent strategy. Building momentum can be hard but with a few wins under your belt, it feels that anything is possible.
Here are a few ideas to help you set your team up to win using PDCA Complete. If you haven’t already claimed your free account, then you can do so here.
1. Creating a Project Initiation Document (PID)
A PID is a Project Initiation Document. If you have never heard of the term then you can learn more about them here.
In summary, a PID is a way to communicate with your teams exactly what you want. As you can see in the image below, PDCA Complete breaks the PID down into a simple form to fill in.
From who is on the team, to the business case, to clarifying deliverables, a PID helps to set expectations. It is this thinking activity that can help your team to win.
When you are crystal clear about what you want, your team can be crystal clear. This is step one of setting your project team up to win.
2. Discussion and clarification
Now it is time to discuss the project outline with your team.
They need to agree to the plan. You can pull rank on them, but agreeing usually leads to a better outcome.
Having a meeting with the team allows you to discuss and debate specific points on the PID. You may find that you further refine the PID as an outcome of this meeting. You may also find that some of your points are ambiguous. This often only becomes clear through a discussion like this.
Once you have gained agreement with your team it is time to brainstorm the actions.
In PDCA Complete we have three statuses for projects; Queued, Live and Complete. When you put the project into Queued mode, you can add tasks without having to assign them or add deadlines. This is a great mode to get the ideas out of your heads and into PDCA Complete.
Once you have the outline of your tasks, and you are ready to go, you can make the project live. You can go back through the tasks and add in the details. We have an option in PDCA Complete to add in task approvers. This means that you can choose specific tasks to have a second person to mark it as complete. This is a great option for critical steps.
Each project team member you list on your project becomes a stakeholder for each task. This means that they can contribute to tasks via the notes feature but cannot change the task. When the tasks do change, or they’re completed, the team will receive email notifications
3. Project review meetings
To wrap this article up, we can consider project review meetings. Whilst PDCA Complete has a separate meetings module, project review meetings are easy in our system.
Each project can have a meeting agenda added to it. This means that when you come to review the project, you can open up a standard agenda to keep you on track.
The filters in the project module allow you to view the tasks any way you want. You can drop out the completed tasks and focus on what’s live. The previous tasks are visible on the project so that you always know what you completed earlier.
Regular review meetings are essential to keep your team on track. Things change and when they do, changing the tasks is essential. Doing this quickly and dynamically is essential. When you define your PID at the outset, think about this as part of your communication strategy.
Claim your free account today
Hopefully you are doing these things already. If you aren’t, and you want a simple online tool to help you do this, sign up today.
Our free account is for up to three team members to collaborate. The PID and the projects module is waiting for you and it works great from a mobile device.
You can upgrade to a paid subscription if you want more features. These include expanding your team and adding files to your tasks and projects.
To get started today, for free, visit our signup page.
Good luck with you improvement projects and remember to set your teams up to win!
