How are you doing on meeting deadlines working with teams? Do you feel like joint efforts with others are a challenge to your productivity and time management? You are not alone! Whether you are in school or a professional workplace, managing team with limited time waste and product delivered on time is a challenge to all. Teamwork can help or hamper your project completion. Here is some advice on how to do it better:
Set clear goals and priorities
When you are working on a project with a team, you have to start by agreeing on what the goals and priorities are. I remember (not so fondly) school projects when one person would be all about making the presentation look pretty, completely forgetting about the need for substance on them. Make sure your team knows what the important things are versus nice-to-haves.
And speaking of priorities: most (if not all) of us have other things going on other than the project on hand. Make sure you understand what competing priorities your teammates have. It will help you plan timelines and resources better, saving you a lot of headaches moving forward.
Create a project timeline
Deadlines! I know deadlines aren’t sexy, but they are necessary, especially when you work with others. Each team member needs to understand deadlines involved in the project. You may all be perfectly aware when the final presentation or submission date is, but you need a timeline for the entire project. Without this, people will move at their own pace, which can lead to progress being held up by one person who is thinking ‘but the deadline is months away’, without proper appreciation of work that needs to happen after they are done with their part.
Delegate tasks
Make a list of tasks to be completed and assign them to ‘owners’. The basic premise behind a team project is that the team is working on it, not that one person does all the work while others take credit.
When delegating tasks, make sure to consider each person’s strengths, weaknesses and availability. I don’t hear the last one too often in this context, but it’s important. Think of a school project. One of your teammates has to travel over the weekend, but it would be helpful for the work to start before that. Divide work in a way that they don’t have the tasks from early parts in the project, assign later ones to them.
Use a project management tool
You use tools to manage your own tasks, right? Use some to manage your team project, too! As technology evolves, the tools available to us become more ubiquitous and more robust. I recall days when email was state-of-the-art and it did help with exchanging information and files. But now, with the growth of services like Trello and Asana, you can assign tasks, check progress, share files etc in a much more efficient way.
Hold regular check-ins
Trust is a good thing, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Schedule regular team meetings, where you discuss progress and obstacles encountered. This way, people will have greater incentive to meet their smaller deadlines and others will see that they aren’t the only ones working towards the common goal. It will also help react quickly if the deadline becomes unattainable. Each team member needs to feel supported. Having them discuss their progress, obstacles and concerns will help achieve this goal.
Encourage open communication
People, talk to each other!
If you think of it, many dramas on tv and in books could have been easily resolved if some people honestly talked to each other.
Do you think your team could benefit from open communication? Sure they could! Your regular check-ins won’t be effective if people are not comfortable speaking up. You could get a much faster heads-up on a problem coming your way. You may also find out that one of your team members discovered a faster, easier or generally better solution to a challenge that others may benefit from.
I hope you are now feeling better equipped to manage time as a team! Good luck and let me know what your thoughts are 😊