Working Smarter : Team Charts

Visuals versus Text: What Makes You Say “A-Ha” Faster?

Rich — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:31:00 GMT

In a previous entry, “Why Communicate Visually,” it was asserted and backed by scientific study that communicating visually is a far easier and quicker way to comprehend both simple and complex information for 8 out of 10 people.

Skeptical? Would you like to see for yourself? Below are three side-by-side visual versus text comparisons of the same information. Which of these engages you more quickly and creates the “a-ha” moment first?

Restroom Location at a Family Restaurant

VISUAL

TEXT

Directions to restroom from front door

- Walk towards the kitchen for about 15 feet.

- Make your first right past the tall palm tree.

- The first door to your right is the restroom for Women.

- The second door to your right is the restroom for Men.

Company History

VISUAL

TEXT

- In 2005, Standard mobile phone sold approximately 22.1 million units. In the same year, 6.1 million units of Smart Phones were sold.

- In 2006, standard phones sales dropped by 7 million units compared to the previous, while Smart Phones increased by over 2.5 million units.

- By 2007, Smart Phones passed standard phones in total units sold by nearly double.

- In 2008, Smart Phones sold 24.7 million units, while standard phones continued to decline only selling 5.7 million units.

Department Organizational Structure

VISUAL

TEXT

- Bill Jones is the Marketing Director for the company.

- Natalie Ryan reports to Bill Jones and supervises the Graphics Coordinator Samantha Davis.

- Connor Michaels is also a mid-level manager serving as the Website Manager. Travis Duncan, the Web Coordinator, reports to Connor.

- Jan Smith is the head Copywriter and Editor and manages one other Staff Writer Jeremy Yates.

- Thomas Dodd manages the internet Marketing strategy and supervises Carlos Lopez, who serves as the team’s Marketing Analyst.

As you can see, bulleted information is not always the easiest way to absorb and comprehend information. With visuals, one is able to comprehend more quickly an abundance of information and recall it from memory more easily.

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The Synergy between Process and Roles in Your Organization

Rich — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:48:00 GMT

You may know your coworkers' place in the organization, but where do they fit in a process? How has disorganization and proper role comprehension disrupted your business?

As a manager, you know in theory and within your own mind how a particular project should move forward. And you know how each person on your team plays a part in that process leading to the final completion of the project. But, are you communicating both of those items clearly to your team?

Be honest. How organized is your team? How organized are your projects?

Most of the time, when an employee begins at a new company, or begins a new role within a company, that person is handed an organizational chart illustrating who each person in the company reports to. And most of the time the explanation of how this new person is to contribute to a particular process is never mentioned. The manager simply assumes that the new person already knows, or that the new person will ask the appropriate questions for clarity when the need comes up. Beyond that, roles and process are seldom revisited in conversation. And they should be part of your daily conversation with your team.

Each role filled by a member of your team contributes in varying ways to multiple projects and tasks. So, why are these conversations not taking place? And if they are, how can you clearly communicate to each member of your team their role and the relationship it has to each project?

Let’s answer a question with a question - Why not return to the tools you already have (or should have) at your disposal for the solution? Here’s an example:

Ok, so you are a Marketing Director, and you are developing a new campaign for your product line due to the changing of the economic conditions. Since there have been so many changes to your department recently, you decide to create an updated org chart and present it at the next department meeting.

This visual obviously works well in identifying the roles people will play in producing the deliverables for the new campaign; however you want to be clear that everyone understands the proper process the campaign needs to go through so you create a process map and walk through it with your team.

Click here to see a larger version of this image.

The process above illustrates the general procedure of the creation of the new campaign, and the initials in the boxes along with the color coding indicate the team member(s) responsible for the associated task; ultimately leading each person to a better understanding of how the building of the new campaign work is to flow from start to finish.

What you are able to do now is communicate to your team the role they play in the organization, and how that role fits into this particular project process of creating a new campaign.

From our example you can see that Jeremy Yates is responsible for beginning the drafting of the campaign message following the presentation of the research given by Thomas and Carlos, and then submit to Jan for proofing and editing (see below).

You don’t have to necessarily recreate the wheel in order to have better understanding of roles and functions from the people you work with. You simply need to focus on how to better communicate with your team on how each is an important participant to the team and the process by revisiting the subject on an ongoing basis.

What you will find is that your processes will improve, your projects and tasks become more organized and your people work smarter.

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The Art of Assignment

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:23:00 GMT

In our most recent article, we talked about how to schedule tasks using project charts. If you read it then you already have a good idea of how to correctly order and prioritize tasks. In today’s article we’re going to discuss how to build a team around your project and appropriately assign tasks to your team.

We begin our entry today with an example project, designing a new website for a product offering, expressed as a mind map:

I haven’t fully decomposed all of the tasks involved in this project for the sake of keeping the example short; in practice, you should always decompose your tasks into very small, specific tasks. Our project looks relatively straightforward—we have some people who have to work on content production, some on artwork and design, some on IT infrastructure, and some on outright marketing activities.

I’m going to repeat what we did last time and create a project chart which illustrates the dependencies and start dates of all of our tasks:

I cut off some of the Gantt Bars—otherwise the image wouldn’t fit within the blog’s template. But I don’t think they’re really necessary for this lesson. So what do we know about how we’re actually going to implement our project so far?

Duration – we know how long each task is going to take.
Task Sequence – we know which tasks are dependent on others and which tasks can be completed at the same time as others.

One of the things that we hinted at in the last article was the concept of how resource constraints can affect your delivery dates. In today’s article, we’re going to address the issue of human resource constraints.

First, let’s talk about the “proper” way to set up a team.

Using Your Organization’s Established Roles to Build Project Teams

Let’s suppose my org chart looked like this:

This is what my organization looks like. My project is to launch a new website for a new product that we are offering, so I’m going to make sure that I assign the correct tasks to the appropriate people based upon their job descriptions.

Projects shouldn’t be treated like some alien groups of tasks; the tasks from projects should be assigned according to people’s job descriptions just like any other assignment. If your project requires that something be shipped, have the usual shipping person fulfill that role on your project team. If your project requires some new pieces of graphical art, have your graphic artist take care of it. This is straight forward.

The correct tool to use to take people from your organization and form them into a team to complete a project is a team chart. Here’s what a team chart for this project would look like:

Let’s take a look at how I formed my team using the roles found on my org chart:

Content Planning – The project aimed at launching a new website to promote a new product; the person who will be planning the content for this website is obviously going to be our VP of Product Development, Torsha Rhodes. The new product is her baby, she knows it better than anyone, and it should be her who specifies how the website sells the product to new customers.
IT – The IT tasks are divided amongst the members of the IT team. Michael Jones, our system administrator, is responsible for managing the hardware and Leah Svenkin, our web developer, is responsible for handling any back-end programming needed to get the website off of the ground.
Design – Herb Gosher, our webmaster, is in charge of building the graphical layout for every page on the website for the new product.
Graphic Artwork – Chet Barre, our visual media specialist, is in charge of putting together all of the product photography and video demonstrations.
Copywriting & Content Production – Jon Ramirez, our copywriter, follows the content plan produced by Torsha and produces the written content itself.

Putting a team together isn’t complicated—treat tasks from any project just like any other tasks that might come up during the course of your daily activities. Don’t force people to move out of their organizational roles just because they’re part of a project; instead, issue the assignments to accommodate their roles.

Human Resource Conflicts and How They Affect Scheduling

Now that I have my team together I’m going to add my team members as resources to the “resources column” on my project chart:

Click here to view the full Gantt chart – it might help clarify some of the examples below.

In the mindset of project planning, that’s how we view our team members: as resources. Just like any other necessary resource for a project, we have to determine if those resources will be available on the days that we have set on our project chart.

What would happen if it turned out that Torsha was gone for the entire week beginning on November 3^rd? With the exception of the IT team, everyone else is dependent on her content planning. What happens to our project? We have to respect the dependencies on the project chart—they cannot be changed, so the only thing we can do is push the project start date back.

On the flip side, what would happen if the IT team had a more critical project due by November 5^th and they couldn’t start work on the project until two days later than projected? As it turns out, this delay wouldn’t impact the final delivery date of the project at all as the IT team’s deliverable would still be completed many days before Jon Ramirez is done producing all of the content.

The issue here is that after you set your project chart and assign team members to specific tasks, you must confer with them to determine if there will be any work stoppages or delays along the way and plan accordingly. What most project planners fail to do is account for team members who are committed to other ongoing assignments; thus, the deadlines for those over-committed team members are unrealistically short if the project manager fails to accommodate the delivery dates for those other commitments. Your project does not exist in a vacuum.

Next time we’ll cover how to properly set milestones and delivery dates.

If you want to try making your own team charts, project charts, org charts, and mind maps, then try a free trial of SmartDraw.

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Four Techniques I Use to be a Better Manager

Paul — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:00:00 GMT

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.

Screencast: How to Draw Organizational Charts and Team Charts with SmartDraw

Paul — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:49:00 GMT

Organizational Charts (Org Charts for short) and Team Charts are excellent tools not only for clarifying the structure of your organization, but also for directing the growth and evolution of your business. In this screencast, I explain what the differences are between org charts and team charts, how both types of charts are used most effectively in a business setting, and how to quickly and easily produce org charts and team charts using SmartDraw.

Download a free trial of SmartDraw here.

Learn More

If you'd like to learn more about this topic then be sure to read our companion PDF - Working Smarter with Org Charts.