January 21, 2006

New knowledge workers need coaching, mentoring, and oversight to be successful. When I manage younger workers, I make sure they don’t miss deadlines because they didn’t understand the assigned tasks. I sometimes call a meeting under the disguise that I’ve forgotten an action item.

This allows me to show them my personal work plan on how I contribute and track my own progress. Sharing gives them an example on how they can manage their work.

Creating Work Plans

My team’s next big Marketing priority is our corporate Website redesign project. My Marketing Manager is the lead. I’m a contributor along with my new Marketing Specialist who’s transitioning into owning our corporate Website. I asked him to email me a copy of his work plan.

The Marketing Manager did an excellent job of creating a quasi-work plan but didn’t divide the work into work blocks of activity like Website tabs, navigation, Web forms, and pages so it looked disjointed.

This is crucial since we’re borrowing resources from the Development team to build these things including the ROI sales tool. His plan also didn’t assign tasks to the three of us, making harder to track our progress as a department.

Ideally, this plan should be divided into Website tabs, navigation, Web forms, and pages. It should also identify the lead and contributors for each item and assigned deadlines.

Teaching How to Manage Projects

I scheduled the meeting with my team under the disguise that I had forgotten about a key CEO requirement (which I really had forgotten). I wrote an agenda and emailed my work plan for this project.

I started the meeting by saying I needed to touch base with them on our CEO’s key requirement. I told the Marketing Manager, “I created a work plan for myself since I know I’m a contributor for 30% of the tasks. Let me take you through the plan…I apologize for not remembering. Since you’ve worked on this for the tradeshows, can you be the lead on this task?”

My team looked relieved once it became clear that neither of them had through about the project in terms of work plan from this perspective.

Action Items for each Task in the Work Plan

I pulled up the Website shell. This allowed us to check off what work was done, what content or work was being revised, and what work still needed to be done.

I explained that I had just learned our CEO’s travel schedule so we needed to update the deadlines and also back in to some dates because we needed to change to the Go Live date of January 27 to the last day of the month.

They followed my lead. The Marketing Specialist’s confidence started to soar after we had identified or validated her next steps. My Marketing Manager became his animated, happy self again.

By the end of the meeting, all of us had confidence in what we needed to do individually and as a team. I also managed to demonstrate how the two of them are leads on different tasks due to geography or job.

Am I Nervous?

Not in my team. I’m nervous about our ability to hit the deadline because of our dependency on others because we’re doing just-in-time delivery on some of the tasks. My team learned how to identify the tasks and resources across the company.

I’m providing the right amount of oversight to help my team be as successful as possible on this project. The website is the last major deliverable in this 90-day plan. My CEO’s watching us like a laser beam so it’s important that we nail it even if we slip by a day or two, it will be okay.

Fortunately, I sensed my team wasn’t confident on managing this project so I’m glad that step in. I’m pleased with the fact that my newbie knowledge workers are so earnest, willing, and able to learn from me.

The Smart Lemming Diary is a series that chronicles a journey of laid-off worker, who becomes a Vice President of Sales Operations & Marketing for a small entrepreneurial healthcare technology company. For previous entries in this series, click here. For the first diary entry, click here. For the highlighted Smart Lemming Diary entries, click here.

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