I’m often called in as a last resort. I don’t take it personally! In fact, I’m happy to be the last resort. It means that my client has tried everything else, and I admire that kind of tenacity.
What I usually find, coming in “at last,” is that they were trying to find the wrong solution.
Their problem is that their business (or life in general) is chaotic so they assume that the solution is to make it as organized as possible. It’s a fairly good conclusion, and it’s certainly the advice they get whenever they do an internet search for “how do I organize my business?”
They try out a variety of apps (Monday, Asana, Clickup, Trello) and different types of systems (GTD™, Eat the Frog, Start Finishing) and countless spreadsheets (Oh! The SPREADSHEETS!). Nothing is perfect, nothing seems to organize all the chaos. They scrap what they’ve cobbled together and try out something new.
Unfortunately, what they’ve run up against is the unachievable Promise of Perfection. It’s the idea that if they find the right planner or app or system, everything will click into place and become organized. Tasks will get done with time to spare. Utopia!!!!
…alas, that rarely happens.
What is the solution they really need, then?
It depends on the actual problems they are having. “Chaos” is a symptom, not the source of the trouble.
I step in and ask: What are the specific pain points?
Often they can only give me general answers. So instead of asking general questions, I assign them homework: a process audit.
It is the best and most comprehensive way to narrow in on what the actual problems are. A process audit is simple to do, on the surface of it: you (and everyone on your team, if you have one) writes out everything they do, step by step, for a whole damn week. It’s aggravating and distracting and everyone hates doing it, but it will make it very clear where the fault lines in your organization’s project management exist. Sorry-not-sorry, but you gotta do it.
Word of caution: If you have employees, make it clear that this is not their performance evaluation. It is very easy to turn a process audit into a witch hunt, which will negatively affect both morale and productivity (trust me, pulling out of that downward spiral is nearly impossible once it starts). When you do a process audit, go in with the assumption that employee non-productivity is due to a systems failure, not an individual’s inefficiency. Use a process audit to pull the team together by explaining that the goal is to make their work easier and improve productivity by making the tasks and roles they take on less frustrating. This is no time to be punitive; this is the time to pull everyone in to work together!
Once you have a comprehensive outline of all the processes and tasks required for all your projects, organize them by groups and/or systems. This will give you a clear picture of where things are falling apart.
Some examples:
- Onboarding team members (training takes forever)
- Team (mis)communications (things getting lost in email chains, etc.)
- Data tracking (where is the thing and what stage is it at?)?
- Production delays (deadlines are missed, materials not ordered on time)
- Overburdened leadership (inability or unwillingness to delegate)
And everyone’s least favorite reason:
- You.
It might be depressing to discover that you are, in fact, the weak link in the system, but that is not uncommon. Even if you are a solopreneur, you are still working within a network of people who are supporting you (especially if you hire freelancers to do work for you), and after all you are the person tasked with making something out of the chaos.
It might just simply be that you are trying to do too much, and it is time to offload some of your tasks to your employees or by outsourcing them. This is particularly true in situations where businesses are trying to scale up. Do not consider this a failure on your part, but simply the result of being successful: you have reached the point where you cannot do it all, and every growth cycle is always a little bit painful too.
At this point, and ONLY this point, is it time to look for solutions. Don’t look for the perfect solution, though, instead what you need is the best imperfect solution: the one that solves your most pressing problem first. This is a great time to apply the “big rocks first” principle, where you look at the biggest issues and solve those before you start looking at smaller, less critical pain points.
If there are a lot of hand-off of tasks getting dropped (someone starts it, another person needs to finishes it) then a team-oriented app like Asana, Monday, Airtable is what you need. If the issue is more about knowing where things are and what stage they are at, consider database apps like Notion (which can be used by teams as well). Sometimes the solution is as simple as a large quarterly wall calendar!
BONUS:
A fantastic bonus to doing a process audit that is often overlooked is that the resulting task outlines can be collected into a Standard Operating Procedures manual/FAQ that serves as a living knowledge base for your organization. Keep it in a shared location so that it can be updated by the people doing the work, and review it regularly so you know what is being done.
Creating a knowledge base is a topic for another blog post, but even if you are the only person in your business you need to have one. Feedback I get when people first start using my Personal Projects Management method is that they did not know how much information they were cluttering up their brain with, and what a relief it was to just have reference sheets to go to when they needed to remember how to do certain tasks. A process audit is a great way to jumpstart the creation of a knowledge base.