How to Tackle Poor Project Communication

Every day, we communicate in person, on the phone, by email, text or online. The human brain actually evolved to favor our social nature, meaning that we are hard-wired to communicate with others. Despite our natural predisposition to social interaction, many people are poor communicators. The professional consequences of ineffectual communication are manifold: conflict with colleagues; missed business opportunities; stalled career development; stress; low morale and so on.

Poor communication is particularly damaging in the context of project management. Research conducted by the Project Management Institute (PMI) found that ineffective communication was the main contributor to project failure one-third of the time, and had a negative impact on project success more than half the time. More worrying is the finding that 56% of budgets allocated to projects are at risk due to poor communication.

Communication can make or break your project. Understanding the roots of poor communication and the impact of this risk is critical to developing a communication plan that works.

Reasons for Poor Communication

1. We take it for granted: Communication often fails because we take it for granted. Project managers assume that communication takes place as project teams attend in-person and virtual meetings, use emails and IM, update documents and so on. In reality, fragmented communication happens in several different places. Lacking real visibility and direction, team members scramble to understand the big picture.
2. Lack of a formal plan: PMI also notes that high-performance organizations who finished 80% of projects are twice as likely to have communication plans in place than low-performing counterparts. Without a communication plan, project contributors will not understand the objectives of the project and their role in achieving these goals. Additionally, various contributors and stakeholders will have different expectations, which can lead to conflicts and delays.
3. Stakeholder engagement: It is estimated that 1 in 3 projects fail due to poor stakeholder engagement. Stakeholders are critical to project success; failure to communicate with stakeholders can undermine internal support for your project.

 

Consequences of Poor Communication

Poor communication can have a domino effect that results in project failure. There are several consequences of ineffective communication; here are two issues to consider.

1. Requirements management: 47% of failed projects are linked to requirements management. Within these failed projects, 75% reported that poor communication led to misplanned requirements. This makes sense as many of tools for gathering requirements such as focus groups, meetings, and interviews rely on clear communication from both the project manager and various contributors. The knock-on effect of inadequate requirements management can include scope creep; resource shortages; solutions that do not meet the original objectives; damaged relationships with stakeholders and lost revenue.
2. Collaboration: Collaborative project management is impossible without communication between the team! Poor communication can quickly isolate team members, who become disconnected from the purpose of the project, their roles and the value of their contributions. Work is executed in silos and conflicts quickly arise as individuals lose track of completed and upcoming tasks.

It should be pretty clear that poor communication can undermine your project in several areas. If you want to take some steps to address poor project communication, read on.

Tackle Poor Communication 

1. Have a plan: As noted above, communication plans increase project success. A communication plan will make it easier to say the right thing in the right way to the right people using the best tools. Your plan should include what needs to be communicated, how often, channels (email, meetings etc) and individual responsibilities. Review and update your plan periodically to reflect organizational and team needs.
2. Team Culture: A 2012 study published in the Harvard Business Review discovered that communication is the key indicator of a team’s success. Researchers found that face-to-face conversations and social interactions boosted engagement, employee satisfaction and productivity. Email and texting were the least valuable forms of communication. In one instance, scheduling the team’s coffee breaks at the same time increased employee satisfaction by 10% with an associated growth in revenue. Take a look at how your team currently engages with each other. Is email the primary communication tool? Do you have break-out areas to encourage quick conversations? Are meetings enjoyable and energizing? Cultivate a team culture that facilitates communication.
3. Involve Stakeholders: If your organization uses particular tools and strategies to engage stakeholders, take some time to review and update these resources for maximum benefit. Lacking a formal stakeholder plan? Check out our four-step process to get started.
4. Use software: Implementing a ‘single source of truth’ such as a SharePoint project site for the team and stakeholders will aid your communication plan. A project site makes it easy for the team to understand their responsibilities, follow agreed processes track tasks and access project updates. Live dashboards provide stakeholders with high-level data for enhanced project visibility.

Of course, having a plan and software in place will only go so far. Communication must be valued and encouraged throughout the organization and within every team. The above suggestions are a good starting point. Do you have any additional suggestions or tips?

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Manage Your Energy – 5 Physical Factors

Have you noticed the shift in lifestyle? It's cool to be health-conscious and active! If you aren't on the health and fitness buzz, it's time to take the leap. It has a huge impact on all aspects of  your life, both personal and professional...but that is a story for another day :) 

Let's get to the point today...

What if you have a huge amount of time but low energy? Then it’s very likely that you’re not going to get much done!

With that in mind, here are five physical factors you should keep an eye on in order to keep your energy levels high and your days productive.

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1 Sleep

Are you getting enough sleep? If not, you may need to assess your bedtime routine. Avoid large meals, sugary foods, coffee and alcohol late at night. These will disrupt your sleep cycle.

2 Diet

How is your diet? Make sure to avoid unhealthy foods and drinks. Focus on eating healthily throughout the day – working in a reasonable amount of vegetables, fruit and water.

3 Exercise

Are you getting enough exercise? You should be exercising three to five times a week and each bout should be a bit harder than the last.

4 Breaks

Do you take enough breaks daily, weekly, monthly and annually? Getting away from your work and recharging physically and mentally will give you more energy that will help you be more productive.

5 Hobbies

And finally, do you have hobbies away from work? Activities that allow you to go to a different place physically and mentally can help boost your energy levels.

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If you would like to learn more about many, many different areas of project management, not just improving project quality, why not check out the rest of our project management tips.

The videos are packed with useful information that we are sure you’ll both enjoy and find applicable to any projects you may be working on!

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

[Video Blog] 3 Ways to Deliver Project Team Success Using SharePoint

Sometimes, it can be difficult for team members to deliver exactly what is expected of them. Too often, they find it hard to contribute to project team success. Common problems they encounter include:

• Finding it hard to understand what the point of the project is and what is expected of them
• Struggling to contribute to projects and feel under pressure to provide updates
• Not knowing where to go for training to deliver on their end of the project

Luckily, SharePoint is a robust collaborative tool that has the answer to all of the above problems. Check out the video below to learn more.

1 Launch each project with a team-focused site

Using a team-focused project site gives team members visibility into a project. This makes it easy for everyone involved in the project to find the work that is assigned to them, the current status of other pieces of work and more. Centralizing the work simplifies your project management process.

2 Use SharePoint as a work management system

SharePoint makes it easy to look at projects across a portfolio. Not only will you be able to view details about a project, but you can look across the whole portfolio of projects and see what work is being done and where. This will allow you to make adjustments as necessary.

3 Use SharePoint’s improved communications tools for easier collaboration

Finally, SharePoint boasts fantastic communications tools that allow for easier collaboration such as knowledge bases, user profiles and advanced search. These tools can be extended even further with the right tools.

This video is a snippet from our webinar series! If you would like to check out more webinars, you can gain access to them here!

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Which Collaboration Option is Best in Office 365?

We’ve been using Yammer here at BrightWork for a while now.  It has been a great tool for having open conversations and discussions.

But as we use Office 365 more and more (you can connect Office 365 and BrightWork by the way!), we are getting access to even more collaborative options.  We still use Yammer, but now there are Office 365 groups, SharePoint team sites of course, and Delve still to come, and probably some I’m missing.

But which collaboration tool should we be using?  How do you pick?

I don’t think you should or really even need to pick one winner.  What you have to keep in mind is that with these collaborative tools, each one has slightly different use cases.  In this blog I’m going to cover three that we utilize here at BrightWork, and how we use them to suit our different collaboration needs.

Yammer for conversations

We use Yammer for open conversations.  Sometimes this is about product updates, customer feedback, Microsoft news, maybe a summary of a new campaign that we’re launching in marketing. It’s great to have an open forum like that, where people can flesh out ideas, debate back and forth with input from everyone – and get those conversations out of email and into a place where everyone can participate and contribute.  So for us, Yammer is about ideas and conversations.

Office Groups for small group collaboration

Then we use Groups for small, basic team collaboration.  Maybe it’s a group for a department, or a team, or even a sub-set of people working on a particular project.  What’s great about groups is that they enable conversations, they have their own OneDrive for files storage and collaboration, a shared OneNote dedicated to that group.  It also includes a relatively new app called Planner, which is a simple card-based task list where you can bucket work into different categories like “To-Do,” “In-progress” and “Done”.  So Groups are great for small team who need to collaborate, but on the lighter side of a full blown SharePoint team site.

SharePoint Sites for more process and structure

Of course, some projects require more process and structure, so that’s where SharePoint sites come in.  You’ll need to plan and manage a project schedule, use a Work Breakdown Structure, manage goals, risks and issues, provide project status updates, and so on.  In this case, you might like to use a SharePoint team site where you can have that more structured approach to project management.  If you’re looking for a handy way to get started managing projects on SharePoint, BrightWork offerstwo free SharePoint project management templates to get you started.

Summary

So for us, there is no one tool that we rely on.  For different collaborative scenarios, we use the app that provides the team with the right amount of process for the task at hand.  We also use Skype for Business for instant messaging and screen sharing, OneDrive for Business to share files, etc.  So there is immense potential for collaboration and productivity gains among the many apps in Office 365.

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

5 Top SharePoint Tips For Improving Your Experience

I’m one of those people your Support Team dread. Those that come full of curiosity, press all the buttons and then log the ticket later! Since my time using an AS400 system, I would always want some quick and easy ways to speed up what I’m doing. I’ve since learned some keywords like “Sandbox” and “Dev”!

From my button pushing with SharePoint and managing projects there over the years, I’ve picked out 5 of my top SharePoint tips that could help you - plus we know a lot of our BrightWork community struggle with these areas too. Some buttons that you may be wondering, “What does this do”? (Or if you’re like me, you’ll just go ahead and push it!!).

1. Add a Calendar to Outlook

• In SharePoint, open up your calendar view.

• Click “Connect to Outlook”
• Note: It may prompt for a username and password

• I can now see the calendar in Outlook

Headache Alert – If your SharePoint Calendar is on another domain, Outlook will prompt you for the username and password each time you logon!

2. Set Up Alerts

Do you need to know if someone is changing items in your lists? Set up an alert and you can be notified via email or SMS when a change has been made.

• On the Ribbon of your list, click “Alert Me” and the “Set alert on this list”
• You can set up the “if” and “when” for the alerts:

• But just be careful! Sometimes if you create too many alerts it can be confusing. People might set up a rule instead and throw them into a folder in Outlook, never to be looked at again!

3. Set Versioning and Approvals on a List

This ties into No. 2 above. It might make more sense to put some sort of versioning on your list and that way you can check to see if and when edits were made.

• On the list you want to track, click on “List” and “List Settings”

• Under “General Settings”, click on “Versioning Setting”

• If you want to set an approval on the list, click “Yes” on “Require content approval for submitted items”

• And if you want to select “Yes” on “Create a version each time you edit an item in this list?”, this will let you see when edits were made, and by whom.

4. Copy Documents to Another SharePoint Library

Do you sometimes want to copy a document from an old site into a new site that you are now working on? Rather than having to download and re-upload.

• In your documents library, click on the document you want to copy. (You can only do one at a time).
• Go to “File” on the Ribbon and select “Send To” \ “Other Location”
• You can then pick the new site that you want to send the document to. Make sure you enter in the right URL! It needs to be the folder and not the form i.e.
  • http://ift.tt/1QWgViV

• Click “Okay” on the wizard, and in a few moments, the document will be copied over to the new library

5. Open a Library in Windows Explorer

Maybe you want to do a bulk copy and paste or move file. You can open up a library within Explorer.

• In the Documents Library, click on the “Library” ribbon and select “Open with Explorer”
• After a few moments, you’ll be able to see the files in Windows Explorer. The same permissions carry over from what you had in the SharePoint site.

These are just some of the little tricks that can help you beef up your SharePoint knowledge and hopefully save you some time when doing some project work. If there are any top SharePoint tips that you find really helpful when using SharePoint, I’d love if you’d add them to the comments below!

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

[Top Tips] Add Videos to SharePoint 2013

From a project management point of view, ensuring that your team has easy access to training is often key to project success. In this post I’m going to describe how to add multiple videos to SharePoint and to make them all accessible from one page by adding navigation that means the users don’t have to leave the page.

This post assumes that you have multiple videos that you want to make available in SharePoint; however, if you only have one video to start with, you should still find value to the post.

Get iframe Embed Codes

The easiest way to get the iframe embed codes is to add the movies to  a video hosting platform like Wistia or YouTube.

If this is not possible, you can use a SharePoint Assets library to get the iframe embed codes.

1. Click Site Contents | add an app | Assets Library.Note: The Assets Library can sometimes be found on the second page of available apps.
2. Upload the movies to the library.
3. Click on a movie thumbnail to go to the page for that movie.
4.  Click < > on the movie to open the code window.
   
5. Copy and paste the code into a text editor and save this file – you will be using it shortly.
   

Add Videos to Web Part Page

Next, you will add two script editor web parts, one for the movies and one for the navigation that will enable you to switch between movies. If you only have one movie, you will only need to add the one script editor web part.

1. Add the script editor web parts – I’m adding them to the row that has the tow columns.
   
2. Click EDIT SNIPPET on the web part where you want the movies to play.
   
3. Paste in the embed code for the movie you want to be available when the page loads.
4. Add code that names the iframe (e.g. name=”training-movies”) as shown below.
5. Click Insert.
   
6. Save

Create Movie Navigation

Next, you need to add your movie navigation. The below code should get you started –

1. Copy the below code to your clipboard and paste it into the file where you pasted the iframe URLs.
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m1″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 1
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m2″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 2</a></p>
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m3″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 3
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m4″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 4
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m5″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 5
2. Update the URL (the bit between the brackts) after href and the movie title (e.g. Move 1) in the code for every movie you want to make available.
3. Copy the code.
   
4. Click edit snippet on the other script editor web part, paste in the copied code and click Insert.
   
5. Click Stop Editing!

Voila! You now have a video library for your team to take their training! If you know what you are doing, you could probably improve the navigation panel on the left so that it indicates which movie is select; however, that is another day’s work!

Want to access more tips? Lots more on our blog you can access here!

Thanks for reading, Ciara!

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

[Video] Time Management Traps and Tips: Goals

In our 5 step approach to time management, we have a strong bias in the approach for being very clear about your personal and professional goals.  In fact, Step 1 in our suggested approach is: “Set Goals and Action Plans.”  Once you have your goals outlined and have identified the actions that need to take place to make those goals a reality, you will have a much better idea of how you should allocate your precious time for the achievement of those goals.

But what we have found is that people who become disappointed or overwhelmed are typically not achieving their goals, stated or unstated – personal or professional.  This may not come to fore.  It may not be what people are thinking consciously, but deeper down do you ever think: “I am not achieving my goals (personal or professional) and I am frustrated and disappointed?”

This segment of our time management training series Manage Your Time – Traps and Tricks walks through 5 traps and tips to make sure you are on track to achieve your goals, because here at BrightWork we believe that this will really set you up for success and happiness!

The short segment will cover five very common goals traps, and make some suggestions on how to avoid them!

1. Not achieving your goals?
2. Unclear path to success?
3. Not getting to your goals?
4. Feeling overwhelmed?
5. Stressed?

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Restore Navigate Up on SharePoint 2013

As one of the most popular blog posts ever on our Manage Projects on SharePoint blog, this post, written by my colleague Jonathan Weisglass, will hopefully help the SharePoint community too, or anyone who struggles on the topic! Would love to hear any feedback of comments too. Enjoy! 

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With every new version of SharePoint, one of the things that we have to do is work out the implication of various features being pulled or deprecated. You can find a TechNet article on the subject here.

With SharePoint 2013, the removal of the Design view from SharePoint Designer is probably one of the biggest. One that really surprised me was the removal of the Navigate Up menu that replaced the site breadcrumbs in SharePoint 2010. This article will tell you how to bring it back.

This is the Navigate Up menu in a 2010 site.

At BrightWork, we have always seen SharePoint as something that should be structured hierarchically, with parent sites and child sites. It seems that our friends at Microsoft see sites as islands. It may be the ability BrightWork has to report across multiple sites and lists that has made us see SharePoint this way!

Anyway – back to how to bring back the Navigate Up menu to a SharePoint 2013 site. You will needSharePoint Designer 2013 for this. To appreciate it, you should create a hierarchy of a few sites and apply the change to the site at the bottom of the hierarchy.

1. Open the SharePoint 2013 site in SharePoint Designer.
2. Create a copy of the seattle.master.
   Note: It is important that you make a copy for reasons that I explain at the bottom of the post.
   
   
3. Open the seattle_copy(1).master for editing and search for class=”ms-breadcrumb-dropdownBox” – it should be on line 368.
4. Delete the style=”display:none;” at the end of the line.
5. Delete the Visible=”false” immediately underneath.
   Essentially you:
   
6. Click Save.
7. Make the seattle_copy(1).master the default master page.
   
8. Return to your site and refresh. You should now have a Navigate Up menu in the Top-Link bar!

Note: One side effect of making a change like this is that the new Change the Look Feature seems to stop working. As far as I can make out, this will happen if you make a change to the default master page. This is why I got you to make a copy of the master and use that too make your changes.

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

How to Save a SharePoint List as a List Template

If you are using SharePoint to manage projects, you’ll build out your site with lists to manage the various project management processes, such as tasks, issues, risks, lessons learned and so on. 

So let’s say you added a Project Risks list to your SharePoint project management site (Check out this blog for some best practices for managing project risks and adding a custom column to your SharePoint site). Now you might have several SharePoint project management sites that need to start using this new risks list, but you don’t want to have to create a new one in every single site.

The easiest way to reuse a list like this would be to save the list as a list template that can be easily deployed to other SharePoint sites.

Here’s the step-by-step to save a list as a list template:

1. Navigate and enter the list you want to save as a template.
2. Click on List on the ribbon and then List Settings.
3. Under Permissions and Management in the centre column of settings, find and click Save list as Template.
   Note: that not all lists types are exportable.
4. Give the template a File and Template name that will easily identify it.
5. Choose include content if appropriate and finally click ok.
6. You will see an Operation Successful screen, now click on the List Template Gallery link.
   Note: The list template gallery lives on the root of your site collection within site settings.
7. If your objective is to export the list to a different machine or share it with someone else, you can easily download the list from the gallery by clicking on the list title. A download popup will appear, save to an appropriate location on your local machine.
   Note: the import process is the opposite operation. Once you upload your template to the list library it will be available as an APP / List in any site in the site collection.

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community