If you struggle with project management, getting things done, moving your team forward to outcomes, I'm going to share with you the three very different unique perspectives I have that I've learned from being coached and trained from some of the best project managers in the world to building and managing not only companies but projects and OKRs and strategies. I mean, you name the management strategy out there to try to get more done with your team, I've read it, I've consumed it. But what I'm going to share with you today is a completely different perspective. To simplify it, to look for the minimum effective dose, not try to boil the ocean, but what are the three moves that I feel? If you guys add, that’s probably missing from your execution today will have the biggest impact on your projects and getting things done. Let's get into it. The one thing you will quickly learn from me if I'm managing a project and you're part of that team, is that I like to grab everything and put it into what I call a project file. And it is not complicated. Some of you guys want to talk about Asana and Trello and the toolings, which is great. But what I want to encourage you to do is consider just dumping everything into a project file to be able to start playing with it, to work with it. So what's unique is the way I structure that project file. There's three specific elements that make it different. The way I look at projects that you may be missing right now in your process. Number one is the success criteria. I'm a big fan of asking people when this is successful, let's list out the 4 to 6 different areas that we’ll know have improved measurable impact in the business or in your life. That's going to decide if this project has been successful, what are the success criterias that we're going to list out so that we all know that as especially if you have multiple team members? Yeah, three people on a project, you've got 20 people on a project, you need to make sure everybody's rowing the boat in the same direction. They're pulling on the rope in the same direction. And the only way to ensure that is to get on the same page for the specific success criterias of the project. That's number one. Number two is that you define the measurement, what are the leading indicators? What are the activities? What are we going to agree upon daily, weekly, monthly that we're going to measure as a team and review to let us know we're making progress towards the outcome, the success criterias. Because oftentimes what I've discovered and I was just on a project meeting, people get really excited about like moving things forward and creating and like pushing the boulder up the mountain. You know, this like starts as a little snowball and they keep building it and build and it becomes harder. But the closer they get to the top, the more they get excited. And they got this boulder. But what I want to do is slow things down and say, hey, how are we going to know we're making the right progress in the right direction? What data, what activities? And can we all agree what ours are going to be? Somebody, it might be, you know, sending 25 emails per day every day for the next two months. Right. And that's their contribution to the project. Somebody else, it might be like meeting with the team every morning for 15 minutes to do a stand up and say, what did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? And are you stuck? Right? So like and then just measuring that, it sounds crazy, but I literally create a spreadsheet and I link it in the project file. Right now our teams are so big, they're using like fancy data, data tools and analytics and, you know, airtables and all these tools. But I like to keep it simple. I like to break it down and say, let’s just define what we're going to measure as a team. Every person on this, on this team that we are going to review once a week. Ideally, it's an activity, it's an initiative, and these are leading indicators to the final outcome that we all get on the same page on. And if we do that and we measure it, it becomes inevitable that you will succeed if you're willing to measure and report back. So that is a huge area that most people miss and it’s part of the project file. The third aspect of the project file that I think is unique is I like to collect everything that might exist - resources, strategies, images. I literally just got off a call with my sales team and they've got this process that they call sell by chat. So essentially our sales team is chatting through our sales inbox and other different platforms with potential buyers all the time. And a new person took over and they started creating an SOP, the standard operating procedure, and I stopped them and I said, have you collected all of this stuff? Have you collected all of the different resources that exist to define this process that you're going to go create this project that you're initiating? And they were like, no, and I go, hey, why don't we start with this? And I’m telling you, even like, I have a lot of clients that outsource, you know, to marketing agencies, to sales agencies, to productivity agencies, operation agencies. And the thing that they miss is literally just looking inside of their company and collecting not only stuff they've created, but even external resources that they like. You know, I was on another call with my COO and we were talking about building a calendar because our team is huge now of everybody's time off because what's happening now is that there's projects that need to execute and there's certain people that are not in the loop and there’s dependencies depending on timelines and events that people need to be aware of. Just like one page where the executive leadership team, and the senior leadership team, can see everybody's time off so that we can see opportunities to improve. And all I did is I went online to Google Images and I searched for examples of calendars, one page team calendars, duh duh duh duh duh, and I went through it until I found one template that I liked. And I said this, this is what it's supposed to look like. I share that because if you take the internal resources and you take literally 15 minutes to research, external resources and you link them all up in the project file so that every new person that might be added to the project or you have this open when you're doing your project meetings, reviews it and is aware and they know where it is and it's easily accessible, it will change the game for how you manage projects. The one thing stopping project teams from being successful is they don't create a cadence for success, and I like to use a framework that I've created called the Weekly Sync. It doesn't matter what project you're working on today, if you want to achieve an outcome, you have to ask yourself what is the rhythm of success? How often are we going to look at our activities and our numbers and our progress? And what is the right frequency for doing that? Is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it monthly? But at minimum, if you are working on a project that is meaningful for me, my book launch, I was dedicated to making sure this thing was a bestseller. And I and I sat down and I said to the team, what’s the rhythm we need to adhere to? Now, you know, I'm technically the talent, and I had a book launch team and a book CEO and everything. I really wanted to show up and support. I'm also running another company, SaaS Academy, and the book itself is almost like birthing a new business, a new startup. And we set on the Weekly Sync structure and the key is, is like defining upfront what is the agenda. So at minimum, these are the three things that always show up on a weekly sync. The first one is a link to the project file and an update and review of everybody's progress. So in the project file, you should have broken down kind of the key projects and sequencing and timelines, having that open to just get everybody to report back on... Hey Bob, you're working on this project. How are you doing? Jane? You're working on this project. How are you doing? Like getting them to give a red, green, yellow status report. Here's the timeline. Make sure there's dates there. Are you on track? That is the first thing that we start with. Number two is the metrics, the measurement, and I always call it the leading metrics to the outcome. What are the numbers that we're going to measure that's going to get us this specific outcome? And how are we doing? Are we red, green or yellow? These are quantitative measurements so that we know if somebody is on track. The third thing is a list of discussions. Now here's where most people fail on the discussions is I expect throughout the week between our meetings that my team is adding stuff to the discussions. So I know if that's not been the case, if I show up to the meeting and in the discussion, it's just a public Google doc, that if they do not have any new items listed under discussions, because what I'm looking for is people that are executing projects, seeing friction, seeing challenges, not getting responses and saying, hey, we've got to solve that problem. I'm going to add it to the list, because what happens in most project teams is you get on there and you say, does anybody have any discussions and they're like, nope. Everything is good. I have nothing to review. And then you're like, well, why didn't you get this done? Oh, you know what? Last week I was waiting on Jane, but she was on vacation, huh? Should we talk about vacation schedules? Because that would be a great discussion to have. So to me, if I don't see before the meeting in the agenda of the weekly sync, under discussions, new items added by the team that is part of that project, then I know they're not using the document the way they need to be and it has to be solved. One of the biggest pet peeves that I have is when I can't find the thing that I know exists. So what I've done when it comes to project management is I created this rule. All people that work on a team with me know this rule. It's called linkability. And the rule is very simple. If you have the document, the project file, the HubSpot form, whatever you're working on, if you have it open and then you email anybody for advice or feedback or you post a slack message, you have to include the link. It might sound small, but I will tell you from experience, if any time you talk about an asset, you include the link to your Dropbox location to another Slack thread even, you will increase the project team's velocity by just making things linkable. Again, some of you might be like this sounds so basic. I will tell you when I was building companies in the early days and we didn't have all these online kind of cloud tools like having a process for when we document or we talk about things in email to link to the final place or at least mention where it's located because literally people be like, yeah, I just reviewed the project file and I didn't find this, this and this. And then there's an email that’s sent out to the whole team and you're wondering, well, where is that project file? Like you had it open, you didn't attach it, you didn't link it, and everybody else is like, well, I want to look at it. Maybe I can help you. Maybe I can see within there, you know, where it could be in that section. And it's so interesting to have especially new team members that are kind of new to communication processes and like team collaboration, that linkability, linking up the thing is not part of it. So for me, it's part of our communication guidelines, it's part of our project management rhythms and it's a non-negotiable. And I usually just reply to somebody that's forgotten to do it and I go linkability? Question mark. And they're like, oh, yes, I need to make this likable because sometimes they'll have something on their computer and they haven't put it up in a shared folder to make it linkable. And that's step one. And then they can link it to the email, to the slack post, to the project management software, or wherever they're talking about it, to make it really easy for everybody else to be aware and collaborate. So if you want to level up your project management skills and be able to tackle not only $10,000 projects but $100,000 projects, and maybe someday million to $10 million projects, then you need to perfect these three areas. You need to focus on the project file. So you collect everything and you put it into one place. Then you got to get really clear about the weekly sync and what is the agenda that we're going to go through to prompt the review to know that everybody is on track? What's that cadence look like? And then finally get everybody to agree to linkability so that all the communication around the project is moving forward as fast as humanly possible to get to that outcome and make it impossible that you don't hit your goal. To help you guys take your project management skills to another level, I've actually pulled out our internal template for a project file and it includes a bunch of different sections you may have never seen as it pertains to project management to help you execute even better. So click the link below to download your copy. I hope this finds you awesome. I’ll see you in the next video.