MBA Lessons Learned #4: Time Management and Project Scheduling
I recently completed my MBA at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business and have been looking back at my notes from the effort. While the courses have decidedly improved my knowledge base, perhaps the most important lessons occurred supplementary to the classroom. The next few posts will be a chronicle of the lessons outside of the textbooks that I took from my MBA program. The previous three installments include Team Building, Performance, and Leadership, Project Selection and Definition, and Team Collaboration Tools.
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Create a schedule and stick to it. Really, that is all you need to do.
As for why, after your first semester you will discover that many of your projects come due at the same time and/or your teammates are unavailable at a critical point in the project. This is miserable, at least for me. I desperately hate spending every last moment working on a project when, with a little planning, all of the resulting stress could have been prevented from entering my life.
Task Manager in Google Docs
By defining the project(s) schedules upfront you will be able appropriately divide up the project, assign parts to each team member, track progress, and prevent last minute conflicts (disasters). While there is a wide array of project management software, you can get by with any spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheets). What worked for my teams would be to break down the projects into tasks and assign them to the team members with due dates (eventually I started using conditionals to change the cell color depending on the task status relative to the due date - an easy way for everyone to make sure they are on track with their tasks). Be sure to include time for group reviews and that your due dates tie directly into the deliverables you agreed to in your project definition. The only tricky part, and relative advantage for formal project management software, was tracking prerequisite activities; even then it is not too difficult.
By developing your schedule at the beginning of the semester work overload and last minute scrambling can be avoided by you and your teammates. Again, a few minutes of planning upfront can prevent hours of headaches further in the semester.
MBA Lessons Learned #3: Team Collaboration Tools
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Continuing on the MBA projects theme, today I am going to discuss team collaboration. As a part-time student, how to work with your team given schedule constraints was always a challenge. Very few of the full-time students liked to physically meet every time they were going to work on a project either. Further, emailing files back and forth is confusing (what version are we using?) and troublesome (which sections did you just edit?). During the MBA program my system has evolved to the point where, in the last two semesters, collaboration was near perfect; below are some of the key tools.
Documents - There are very few projects that do not require a written document as a deliverable. It is incredibly frustrating and near impossible to merge multiple MS Word files into one when multiple people are working at the same time. My solution - Google Docs. Google Docs allows the entire group to view and edit the same document at once; for example I can be working on the addressable market size while my teammate is editing the competitive positioning tables. Additionally, when someone accidentally deletes a paragraph you can find it again with the see revision history feature (this can take some searching as the final deliverable for my business plan class had 778 changes). Of course some people have a hard time breaking away from MS Word and others do not want to be constantly connected to the Internet. Thankfully there is a solution to this in OffiSync. A Microsoft Office plugin, OffiSync allows you to use MS Word (along with the rest of the MS Office/Google Apps overlapping applications) to view and edit files stored on Google Docs. Further, using OffiSync you can edit a file while offline (you do have to store a copy locally for this) and it will automatically merge the changes when you next connect.
Spreadsheets - As with documents I tried to use Google Docs as much as possible for spreadsheets. Unfortunately there are a few MS Excel functions that do not exist (or at least I could not find) in Google Doc; some functions I could use OffiSync to pick up whereas others did not seem to translate. I did have much better luck using MS Office Live. While it does have the same functionality as Google Docs for documents (including being able to edit on your local copy of MS Office; I am less certain of the offline editing ability), I only preferred it for MS Excel. You may be different.
Conferencing - If you are in a part-time program, someone on your team will undoubtedly have work travel to Japan, Norway, Brazil, New Jersey, or some other equally exciting destination during the project. Assuming you can get your schedules to match, Skype provides an excellent way to video conference in your lost teammate. While there are other services available (such as dimdim) that lets you share documents during the meeting, using Skype with Google Docs (or Office Live) eliminates the need.
Additional Random Information - Often you have tracking, notes, and other random information that you need to store and share. Just for simplicity I try to use something in Google Docs (or Office Live) as much as possible. Otherwise I use Dabbleboard or Google Sites. Dabbleboard is great if you love whiteboards as you can use shapes, freehand, or text to communicate. Alternatively Google Sites is simple way to organize and store lots of notes and text. Both are useful if you cannot come up with a simple solution in a document.
While this list is far from exhaustive (for example many of my classmates preferred Zoho for documents and spreadsheets) and technology continues to rapidly evolve, it should offer you some excellent tools to assist in team collaboration.