Collaborative working

Whilst I'm no expert on organisation, I like to think we have identified some universally available tools that allow us to organise our various projects and fulfil our various roles.

I usually have on average 10 Email Campaigns to plan and deploy on a weekly basis. These are either led by marketing, one of our vendors or an internal sales team/person. This involves a lot of emails flying around from various stakeholders, thought-leaders, myself and our graphic designer/branding goddess Amanda.

Step 1) Organise Microsoft Outlook  into folders and store only the emails which you will need to refer to/action
Be ruthless - keep the most recent email in a trail and delete the rest, use meaningful and consistent subject lines so that you can automatically populate the related emails into that folder using a rule (and so your colleagues know what you're talking about).
Detail the actions that people need to take, then follow these up with calendar appointments for phone calls, deadlines or allocation of work.

Step 2) Organise Microsoft Outlook Calendar into action appointments to structure your time.
If your internal customers and contacts know that you have allocated a designated time slot for their project then it's easier for you to set them deadlines. It also means when requests come flying in that you can be objective about what you need to prioritise. I shift my calendar around on a daily basis, bumping projects back or bringing them forward depending on when the various contributions are released or when conflicting appointments come up, and because it's all set down I never lose track of the things I have yet to complete.

We share our calendars internally so that we know what resources we have available when quoting lead times - see below for my calendar this week set against our marketing calendar (showing my time only). By categorising the types of task, it also gives management full visibility over how our time is being spent - very valuable when you work 300 miles away from your manager!

When it comes to annual appraisal time it's good to know how often I've worked evenings or weekends, or how few lunch breaks I've taken (I found time for two this week of 30 minutes each!) so that I can reassess my work-life balance. By extending or reducing the time allocated to a task retroactively depending on how long it's taken, it also helps me when quoting lead-times on similar projects.

 

Step 3) Have regular conference calls
We get together for a webex session at least once a week to go through our various marketing projects so that everyone in the team is aware of what everyone else is working on and why. Using Webex we can each share our desktops wherre necessary to demonstrate artwork or documents or present reports. The sessions can be recorded to refer back to (so people don't have to faff about taking minutes and if anyone has any arguments because something hasn't been done they can reply "but I TOLD you about it!"... also within Webex you can see whether people are paying attention or have drifted off to read their email... a handy tool that!)

Step 4) Keep a project log
I have an excel spreadsheet which lists every single campaign (over 500!) I have created during the (almost) 4 years I've been part of QA following their acquisition of Remarc. Each campaign has a project number, a title, a description, the person who recquisitioned it and the stautus of the project (completed, in progress, invalidated). The title of the campaign relates to the title of the campaign in my email client CommuniGator and I use this same title in Microsoft Outlook to label my tasks so that I know when I requested the campaign data, when I started and finished creating it and when I'm due to send it)

I find these methods work well for me and my team, and they were developed through a mixture of:

I may not be an organisational expert... but the company I work for is!

I highly recommend the following courses:

Managing People In Projects
Leading Virtual Teams
Microsoft Outlook Specialist
Organising Work And Time
Communicate Effectively
Business Writing

This list would not be complete without sharing our expetise in Project Management and specifically recommending our new PRINCE2 course which is available from w/c 2nd July.

Lianne Marie Mease
QA Learning Expert: Social Media
Email: socialmedia@qa.com

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