In “Making things happen”, the author (Scott Berkun) states that he assumes that the reader is not stupid, is curious and pragmatic, does not like jargon or big theories, and does not take herself, software, or management too seriously. Well, we do the same in Teamwork.
Still, you may have no or little experience in managing team work. Whatever work you will be doing, you may have some requirements, and some dates. if your company has no notion of project / task / issues, you can start this way: list all the things you are doing in your organization. You could separate internal work / external work. In the list obtained, group dependant activities: each group can be called a project, and the people that should work on it are the assignees.
You may notice that when you are listing “thing that we are doing”, you may also include “things we should be doing”. Notice which of these are stated in the form of concrete actions, like “call X”, or “write Y”, and which are still to be transformed in actions. You should try to transform everything into actions, and get rid of the rest. And still among actions there are simple, brief ones, and others that group many others: you could model the simple ones as issues, and the ones comprising others as tasks (that is, projects which are child of other projects). This is a start of management.
Often we get asked by people evaluating Teamwork:
How do companies really use Teamwork?
In the new user guide you will now find several examples. Here are also some good books where to start learning about personal and project management.
Some reference books:
This book by Berkun is our main reference:
Making Things Happen
Mastering Project Management
By Scott Berkun, publisher O’Reilly Media, 2008
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517717
From a personal productivity perspective:
Getting things done
By David Allen
On the Agile/Scrum theme:
Agile Project Management with Scrum
By Ken Schwaber
http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Project-Management-Microsoft-Professional/dp/073561993X
