Category: productivity

5 Secrets to Improve Your Meeting

Work meetings can be stressful and often perceived as a waste of time for your whole team. Finding the best moment, coming with a clear idea of the meeting purpose, taking important decisions, define a project’ plan and all designated resources: all these points can decide if your meeting will be a complete failure or a success.

If you are about to schedule one with your team, you’d better pay attention to these 5 secrets to improve your meeting in order to get a happy and effective talk.

Use a project management software with shared agendas Finding the best moment to schedule a meeting is very important. It could be obvious, but it is not just a matter of finding a day when the team is available, it’s about finding a day when none of your colleagues have important deadlines, scheduled appointments or high priority tasks to close. Having a software that lets you check all of these will help you having a focused team.

Before the meeting create an ideas board If you have to manage with important matter, it will be really helpful having an idea of your colleagues’ thoughts before the meeting. You can use this to understand which of your colleagues share your ideas. An ideas board is also very helpful in order to give to all your team the possibility to share their opinion, even to those not so familiar with meetings’ animated discussions.

Listen to all points of view and understand them Having an open mind is really helpful during meetings. You have to be open also to those that will probably tell you that your ideas are not so brilliant, remember that your goal is to finish the meeting with taken decisions and a plan of what to do next.

Use a draft manager software Write down everything said. The draft management is very important to remember all decisions that have been taken and all discussions leading to them. With a draft in your hand you will be able to easily detect which are the key points for your team and why.

Transform decisions to a real plan Once everything is decided you will need to define a project plan, so use some time of your meeting for a recap, read the draft in details and create a to do list, you can use a project management software for this purpose too, assign these to-dos to your team and schedule deadlines.

Effective meeting are difficult to achieve, generally because you are taking away resources from their “real” projects. Organizing it properly, involving all team members in the decision process and transforming discussions in thing to do will incredibly improve your team culture.

Try Twproject to manage your meeting.

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We need to talk: collaboration trends and mistakes to avoid

Companies becoming “liquid”, teams spread over thousands kilometers: workspace has changed, it is wider and faster. This is the reason why you need the right collaboration tools to… make the work work!

Collaboration tools: what is happening right now

It has already happened and it is happening.

Despite being a big, medium or small company, the concepts of colleague, team, meeting are now different.

And, despite being a big, medium or small company, one of the most important trend – and need – is about being everyone on the same page, at the same time.

And, believe it or not, this trend has something ancient within.

Ockham’s razor in today collaboration

William of Ockham was a Middle Ages (c. 1287–1347) Franciscan monk, a philosopher and theologian.

He is still famous for his Ockham’s razor, a principle which reads:

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

The original use of the principle was in theology, but it is a heuristic technique as well, and it definitely is a principle which should be applied to your collaboration environment.

To have your whole team on the same page, at the same time you need a cloud and a real time communication tool. The cloud allows you to have the whole team working almost literally in the same (yet virtual) place.

A real time communication tool is what you need to break space and time barriers between the team members: it is the way to have everyone knowing everything is needed when it is needed.

So far so good, isn’t it? And everything seems so easy and smooth. But you still have to avoid the dark side of cloud and real time communication: the lack of management of the workflow and communication flow.

This is the reason why cloud and communication tools need a project management tool: a “meta level” of organization, another – wider – virtual place which ties the tools together. And what do you need from your project management tool? To track changes: you need to trace everything that has been done and still needs to be made. A great project management tool has to show you the path to follow helping you getting your projects done.

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6 Qualities Of Great Leaders – Infographic

In our experience with thousands of great companies, that we’ve met thanks to Twproject, we have analyzed so many teams at work, encountering always the same characteristics defining great leaders with successful and happy collaborators. Being a leader is not an easy job, you have to carefully balance humility, strength and integrity, being always steps ahead and empathetic with your team. This interesting infographic show 6 characteristics on how to be a great leader.

Have a Vision – Communication is a key point being a leader, a vision is not enough, you have to be able to describe it to your team in order to transform it into an executable plan. You need to anticipate problems embracing change. Read the following post if you want to know more about more about improving communication within teams.

Be Modest– being a great leader requires humility, you need to admit mistakes being open to criticism and ready for improvement.

Manage Emotions – Emotions lead a team like a leader, and for this reason you have to be able to manage them, in particularly yours, in order to always positively effect others.

Be Honest – Be always sincere to build lasting trust in your team.

Appreciate the journey – Show commitment to your team and stand by your ideas.The key to making things work, is hard work

Help Others – Helping your team growing will help your projects too, acting with generosity always affect positively your people.

We found this infographic really helpful, summarizing all main qualities you need to attain for being a great leader, read below for the full list of tips.

If you want to manage your projects efficiently and improve your team communication you can try Twproject, the best project management software that helps thousands of companies getting things done everyday!

 

Infographic courtesy of: Eliv8group

We have the tools, we have the culture.

Give Twproject a try!

Murphy’s Law VS Remote Collaboration

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Even when you work remotely. No fear: this post is about how to save the day!

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong: these are supposed to be the words of Edward Aloysius Murphy Junior (1918 – 1990), words that became an ante – litteram meme and the inspiration for a huge amounts of variants in almost every fields of human activities.

Nevertheless sometimes bad things (we are not going to use the s. word in this post…) happen. And yes: it seems that “bad things” happen always in the worst possible moment.

IT stuff, computers, the internet can’t avoid Murphy’s law, and the collection of Murphy’s Computers Laws is a lot of fun. Well: it is not, actually, while it happens.

If you are involved in remote collaboration, if your teammates are peppered across the world, your Achilles heel is, of course, the internet connection.

And, according to the Murphy’s law view of the world, probably you are going to experience a problem when a deadline is close, or when there is something very urgent to do.

First things first: no panic.

It is very likely that the problem you are experiencing is local, or maybe only your service provider is involved. Then try to contact the service provider’s customer care. You will know immediately If it is really that bad, because it won’t answer…

You must not waste your time, so just pick up your smartphone, tablet and laptop and… Run! What for?

To find a wi-fi connection of course. Because, it is the only thing you really need.

Good remote collaboration tools such as Twproject don’t even need a computer: you can check the workstream just via the smartphone app, and a tablet is more than enough to do everything else, to interact with the team just like nothing had happened. So, just look for libraries or coffeehouses – in some cities even public transports have a good wifi connection, in that case: jump on a bus! – and everything will be OK.

From an Italian point of view, one for which coffee, il caffè, is quite an important thing, you could tell that some coffeehouse companies actually sell wifi connection, because that is not real coffee… 😉

So just give Twproject a try!

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Plan Your To-Dos with Twproject

Organizing work to-dos is probably the hardest part of self organization, we read every day so many articles about haw to stay organized managing time productively and creating effective to-do lists. Here at Twproject we face the same problem as you do, because we are developers, marketers, designers exactly like you. When we started redesigning Twproject 6 we sit around a table thinking about how to really solve this every day problem, how to really help people organizing their to-dos?

For this purpose we introduced 2 very effective tools, the to-do planner and the Kanban tool, but today I want to focus just on the first one: Twproject ToDo planner:

Let’s see what you can do with this amazing tool: first of all, at the top of the page you have a filter that gives you all the power to find and refine the list of selected to-dos. This is up to you, you can decide to organize your to-dos task by task, or all together, you may just want to see the most urgent ones, or the open ones, as I said, it depends on you. Twproject filters are really flexible and all filters can be saved and reused.

Your filtered to-dos will appear on the grid on the left, or in the box of the day in case you have already planned them for a specific day.

Now what you have to do is simply drag them to the day you want to schedule it.

Having your to-dos-planned will help you also keeping track of them, the impact bar will show you if you have expired to-dos, something that you should have done and that is still open.

This tool is helpful even more considering that you can then prioritize all the to-dos you have for a day.

The Twproject toDo planner is even more powerful because it can be used in a shared environment, so you can add more users to the list moving to-dos from one resource to another. This is very useful if you work in a smart team that shares thinks to be done.

Create your work list according to your tasks, plan your to-dos with Twproject planner staying always organized, prioritize them day by day, add comments, screenshots and get things done!

Convinced right? So just give Twproject a try!

Manage your projects and to do list in Twproject

Try Twproject now!

6 Project Management Blogs You Need to Follow

OK you know it, the community of Project management is full of great bloggers, podcasters and experts but there are some of them that you really cannot miss.
This list of course includes some gurus, some of the blogs that are known by all of us, but it includes also those we have always read since we started, our “personal” gurus. These people give us a lot of ideas for our project management software inspiring us every day.
Some of them are focused on increasing your productivity day by day, some are focused on project management methodologies, but all of them worth your time.

 

A Girl Guide to Project Management www.girlsguidetopm.com
This blog is managed by Elizabeth Harrin offering not only opinions and suggestions about project management but also tool reviews, free eBooks for managing your projects and much more. This is an incredible resource for all project managers.

 

Ricardo Vargas Blog www.ricardo-vargas.com
Here we go a little bit in depth. Ricardo Vargas is a Guru of Project management and in his blog you will find not only posts but also videos, podcasts, presentations. He is a specialist, he is the author of fourteen books of project management which have sold over 300,000 copies throughout the world.

 

The Lazy Project Manager www.thelazyprojectmanager.com
This is actually a podcast by Peter Taylor and let me say it: an amazing podcast. He is also a blogger and a Project management speaker. His mantra

“work smarter and not harder”

is one of our favourites 🙂

 

Project-Management.com Blog project-management.com
Written by a group of project managers giving tons of advice about project management. This is a website dedicated to providing useful tools, latest news, and best practice references for every project professional and business organization.

 

Twproject Blog twproject.com/blog
Written by the team of Twproject software they answer constantly to their customers management problem in the form of blog post. What is better than real life management problem answered?

 

PM Tips pmtips.net
This is more than a simple blog, here you have a collection of tips guiding you through the hard life of a pm, a very hard life  🙂 and if you think you have something to say too, you can even became a contributor. We love this because it deals with real problem of real pm life.

 

Herding Cats herdingcats.typepad.com
And here we came with another guru: Glen B. Alleman , we follow him since our beginning, his blog is focused on increasing the probability to having success with your activity. If you’re seriously interested in a scientific approach to managing projects, you can’t miss this blog.

Continue reading “6 Project Management Blogs You Need to Follow”

Collaborative working environment: the Gandalf way to success

If you have to get inspiration about collaborative working, think big: Gandalf, CEO of The Fellowship of the Ring Startup, has been probably the best ever…

If you have to get inspiration about collaborative working, think big: Gandalf, CEO of The Fellowship of the Ring Startup, has been probably the best ever…

The Fellowship Collaborative Work System of the Ring

The Collaborative Working Environment entry on Wikipedia quotes the Michael Beyerlein definition of collaboration:

the collective work of two or more individuals where the work is undertaken with a sense of shared purpose and direction, that is attentive and responsive to the environment.

In The Fellowship of the Ring you have a couple of individuals with a great project in their mind.

Gandalf: a not so young hipster more interested in books and pipe-weed when he literally stumble on the next big thing.

Aragorn: the last heir of a company that has seen its better days more than 3 thousand years before.

Despite mistakes, with different skills and a great team they will make what will become the best case history ever in Middle Earth…

Starting up a start-up: do the right mix

The Fellowship of the Ring starts up at the Elrond’s Council. It’s like the start of a new project, a project that involves different “departments” (the Free Peoples of Middle Earth).

Sometimes it happens: the departments see themselves not as parts of a whole, but as… well: gangs.

This attitude can destroy a project. This attitude could also destroy a company.

You have the Elves. The IT guys. You have the Dwarves: administration. I’d say that Hobbits are the web marketing department: they had drinkabouts ages before the 3 Beards, they are definitely “social networkers”.

And then you have humans. Basically, the humans can be whatever they want. Probably they are the sales department, but they can be at ease with Elves, Hobbits and Dwarves.

The “departments” at Elrond’s start up meeting don’t like each other. The greatness of Gandalf as project manager is to understand that the project is doomed without a great team working and, even more important, to share that vision with the “departments”. It’s all about motivation. If you have motivation you have a good team, if you really have a team, it can manage crisis…

 

Crisis management: disruption and lack of knowledge

Disrupt* got turned into a misused and overused buzzword in the startups environment. Everything is probably fine if someone else is using it for you. But if you use it for yourself, it just seems that something has gone wrong and you are trying to tell that the “wrong” was on purpose…

Anyway: a good team can face disruption. And can you imagine something more disruptive than the fall of Gandalf at Khazad-dûm, or the death of Boromir and the breaking of the Fellowship?

Again, what matters is the team: the get the f*ing job done attitude. If Gandalf has been a great CEO / Team Manager, Aragorn is a great Co-Founder / CTO. He is where he is needed when he is needed . He is definitely disruptive when it is needed (the Paths of the Dead) and he has another quality that is so much needed in management: he doesn’t fight battles that he can’t win (leaving Frodo and Sam to their own… task).

The Frodo and Sam voyage to Mount Doom can tell us another important thing: something about knowledge sharing. Nowadays you don’t need to send a Great Eagle to get info. Nevertheless, if the team is not working in the right way, it can happen that you feel like Frodo and Sam after the destruction of the Ring: lost and clueless about the future.

You can have the best management tool, you can put lots of stuff in it, but team members are humans, and you have to stay human when you have to deal with them, even more if the team can meet only virtually: communication within the team is the key to make it work, not to find a scapegoat…

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Work environment and Papuasian tribes: how to solve team conflicts

You can think of open space offices and flame mails, but team conflicts are a little bit older than that: Cain and Abel, you know..? Since that time we learned the lesson: conflicts can destroy a team.

You can think of open space offices and flame mails, but team conflicts are a little bit older than that: Cain and Abel, you know..? Since that time we learned the lesson: conflicts can destroy a team.

At the present time the concept of team is reshaping itself: open space offices are not for everybody (and, if they are not your cup of tea, they can also affect your performance: good insight about this issue in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain); tons of emails are not for everybody; almost – digital – only relationships (I am currently working also for people that I have never met in person, did it never happen to you too yet?) are not for everybody as well.

Nevertheless we are still speaking of teams, and a team is supposed to be a group of players forming one side in a competitive game or sport. And business is the most competitive sport on this planet. If you don’t find a way to make out a team from a bunch of people, you are going to lose the match.

 

A team is a system of relationships and different personal needs.

Without a way to bring together that relationships and needs, the system fall apart: it is the concept of Schismogenesis, ”the generation of opposition” a concept developed by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1930s while studying the Papua New Guinea Iatmul culture.

Your team and an Iatmul village are a system. There are two different ways to destroy it: the Complementary schismogenesis (dominant-submissive behavioural pattern) and Symmetrical schismogenesis (same behavioural pattern, as in the arms race).

In the passage rite named Naven, Iatmul people create a context in which the usual roles are “played” in the opposite way: male becomes (disguising) female. The key of the Naven rite is to allow men and women to experience – in the context – the emotional lives of each other, achieving a psychological integration.

Finding a way to bring this kind of experience to your team is a good way to keep it not alive, but lively! Programmers and creative designers (but it can be sales and buyers, or sales and logistics, HR and administration…): these are probably the men and women of your “village”.

All of us are under pressure. But finding an opportunity to experience a different pressure, the pressure that “the other guys” are experiencing, is a great way to improve the team manager: we have the tools, we have the culture, we just have to build up the opportunities. Because a lot of what makes the difference between success and failure in teams is a matter of empathy.

Think about it next time you are going to share a pizza with a guy of a different department… Meanwhile, a tool that helps team – working is a good way to keep low the schismogetetic fibrillation level…

tour-operator-load

 

Easing work relationships on a project-by-project basis

Twproject is a project management tool, and as such it represents work relationships in form of projects, assignments and roles.

But what it can do better with respect to classical hierarchical and role based modeling is that organizations can be projects – related: the same user can be project manager, worker, stakeholder and tester at the same time on different projects. You can get suggestions in a project you lead, and make suggestions in a project you follow.

And indeed you can set up projects where the manager / execution roles are exactly specular, so that users can compare the two experiences. It is not by chance that Twproject is used as a didactical tool in so many universities.

User and projects can spawn different areas, and you can involve resources from other departments in cross area projects: just in the “Naven” ritual, it’s a matter of point of view!

This contextual role playing can be a way to experiment and understand problems relative to your position in a project in different cases, just like in the rites above.

 

We have the tools, we have the culture.

Try us for free!

Eight project management problems in search of solutions

Project management problems and solutions

Handling teamwork by project management requires expertise, skills, experience and flexibility in time. In our fifteen years of development and support of Twproject, we have found some problem patterns that are repeatedly found in teamwork management, and we have hence created corresponding solution support in Twproject. Some of the problematic patterns found are:

  1. Too much information at once
  2. Communication slip-ups
  3. Compatible with a single methodology
  4. Productivity slumps
  5. Not enough resources to run bigger projects
  6. Different apps for different things
  7. Risk of unauthorized access
  8. Task changes difficult to track

Finding solutions with Twproject

 

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[av_iconlist_item title=’Too much information at once’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue83f’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-ego956′]
Twproject solves this by using  powerful filters and role based structures which allow users to focus only on what they are really involved in – filtering by topic and time.
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[av_iconlist_item title=’Communication slip-ups’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue85f’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-cuf7be’]
E-mail notifications constantly interrupt you? Minimize the risk of productivity slumps keeping track of all your activity with Twproject. Communications is easy and collected in your tasks, reducing need for one-to-one communication by email and chats.
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[av_iconlist_item title=’Compatible with a single methodology’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue8db’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-bjx196′]
Designed to adapt to your organization’s processes, Twproject supports different methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, XP or classic waterfall. Twproject is so flexible that it lets you map projects, tasks, issues to people and customers, in the way that better fits your needs.
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Twproject time tracking tool lets you insert (quickly!) and monitor time spent on tasks, so that managers can check tasks progress and users can assess their own productivity.
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Use Twproject interactive Gantt to split the work into sub-tasks with achievable aims, use Twproject to assess what is most time consuming (and react when necessary), use quick messages for ad hoc communication, and last but not least – let everybody work the way they want.

But what makes Twproject unique is that you can change project structures and assignments while production runs, without losing anything of the information introduced so far.[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Different apps for different things’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue83e’ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-581l6i’]Finally Twproject offers one login for one platform with tasks, issue tracking, time tracking, integrated agenda, shared documents and much more.[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Risk of unauthorized access’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue824′ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-3lblsa’]Twproject fully customizable roles/permissions allow users to maintain control over sensitive areas. Role based on assignments let users have different rights for different tasks.[/av_iconlist_item]
[av_iconlist_item title=’Task changes difficult to track’ link=” linktarget=” linkelement=” icon=’ue845′ font=’entypo-fontello’ av_uid=’av-26697e’]Twproject task progress is easy to track, statistics are always available, giving you an immediate perception of task health.[/av_iconlist_item]
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Still in doubt? Well you can try yourself with a free demo.

Give Us a Try!