Four Techniques I Use to be a Better Manager

When I founded SmartDraw.com I was a software developer not a manager. Not that this mattered much because the only person I needed to manage at the time was me!

As the company grew, management was "thrust upon me", and I learned four techniques I still use to manage people and projects effectively.

1. I Organize my Thoughts with a Mind Map

I'm a visual thinker (as you might imagine) and I use a mind map at the start of any new project I am working on to organize my thoughts and ideas.

A mind map is a visual outline. Using SmartDraw of course, I just dump out my ideas onto the page and then re-arrange them into logical groups. I use SmartDraw's keyboard shortcuts and automatic formatting I find this even easier to do than using Word to make a traditional text outline.  Here's an example of one of my mind maps.

Watch my screen cast on drawing mind maps with SmartDraw too.

2. I Organize my People with Organization Charts and Team Charts

There are two ways we are organized at SmartDraw: into a traditional reporting hierarchy and into teams for specific projects. I use the traditional top-down org chart for the former and a team chart for the latter.

Your company organization chart is actually a device for showing positions and their responsibilities rather than people. Sometimes in a small company one person may be the "incumbent" for more than one position. I have written about this in a previous post.

A team chart is an effective way of making sure everyone working on a project knows what part of it they, and the other members of the team, are responsible for and what's expected of them. Just because it's clear in your mind doesn't mean it's clear in the rest of the team members' minds.

Watch my accompanying screencast "How to Draw Organizational Charts and Team Charts with SmartDraw."

3. I Organize my Operations with Processes

As my business grew it soon became evident that we needed to formally define the way we did routine things so that the result was the same each time and we could train new people more easily. Whether it was something technical, like the way we built software releases, or something simple like the way we shipped product, we needed to define a process that was followed each time. 

I use flowcharts to define our processes. With SmartDraw 2008 that we released in September, this is so easy I can actually revise the chart on the fly as I think it through.

Watch me do this in my screencast "How to Map Your Business Processes with SmartDraw."

4. I Organize my Work with a Project Chart

In my experience the biggest reason projects are completed late (and over budget) is because all of the steps involved were not considered up front. Managers specify tasks that are big and vague like "Create Website". A big task like this is actually made up of many small tasks  and can take months. You cannot properly estimate how long a task like "create website" is actually going to take without breaking it down into smaller more specific tasks.

My rule is that if any task takes more than three days it's too broad and needs to be broken down into smaller tasks. As I go through this process I always think of new things that I need to do and that add time to my initial estimate. Something that sounds simple is often not so, once you get down to the nitty-gritty.

I use a mind map to start the process of identifying all of the tasks. I break big tasks into smaller tasks. The natural outline format of a mind map is perfect for this. Then I convert my mind map into the traditional project chart (or Gantt chart) format an assign a time to complete each one. SmartDraw makes this particularly easy because it does it automatically and lets me go back and forth between the two views with a single mouse click.

Watch my screencast, "Managing Projects with SmartDraw" to see this in action.

All of these techniques help me keep multiple projects on-track, and the people working on them informed and on the same page.  For more details read the companion PDF from our Working Smarter series: Four Ways to be a Better Manager.