When Meetings Ruled the Day

To decode the secret, let’s start by examining a simple concept that traditionally has been critical to teams: meetings.

Back in the 90’s, most work, status, decisions, and deals happened in meetings.  Meetings were the way things got done. In the days or hours leading up to the meeting, we would prepare bits and pieces of collateral to present or reference in the meeting. We compiled agendas, collected status updates, drafted documents, and printed out static plans. Project managers used their powers to exert control over the process in an effort to move the ball forward.

Then at the appointed time, everyone would gather, spend a couple hours talking about what was prepared, and try to make some decisions. More often, they would end up making provisional decisions, after which they’d disband before coming back together a few weeks later with revised information and the same constituents in the room again. Picture the people as the sun - the collateral orbited around them and their gatherings.

 Virtual Team, Virtual Office

Today that scenario, for many teams, is turned on its head.  Instead of the project collateral orbiting around the people, people orbit around project collateral that is centralized in an online workspace. This configuration supports our modern workspace, which is – for a vast number of teams – virtual. People are distributed across the globe, are in different time zones, and come and go as projects are executed.

That’s not to say that meetings don’t happen – they just take on a different purpose now. Meetings are now focused much more exclusively on making decisions and reviewing a common plan of record, one that is transparent and always available to everyone on the team.

We’ve now moved into an era of continuous project connectivity. One of the key functions of the technology we use is to facilitate connections and help eliminate conversational fragmentation.

Look Who’s Talking

This simple example helps to illustrate the problem of conversational fragmentation. If two people sit in the same office, it takes no effort to span the distance between them for one person to ask a clarifying question.  There are no barriers. As your team grows in its physical workspace, you get farther apart. Walls are introduced; sometimes stairwells and floors are introduced. And research has shown that as physical distance increases, communication drops off and fragments in an exponential decay. Go beyond 100 feet and people are hardly talking to each other at all anymore.

The cure for this problem is to somehow manage to stay in that same office; that’s what today’s virtual project workspaces provide. In this virtual office we can hit the mute button. We can adjust the volume or hit the rewind and fast forward button on all the conversations taking place. This has the potential to simultaneously increase connectedness and efficiency.

Let’s take an example of a typical agency team.  It exists in multiple locations, has multiple client check points for every project, is continuously juggling staff, and is forced to react to constantly shifting priorities, deadlines, and requirements. With a distributed team and that level of chaos, are meetings an effective way of keeping everyone rowing in the same direction? It’s clear that the answer is no.

Benefits of the Online Virtual Workspace

The gestalt of these ideas – the big benefit – is that you develop continuous awareness across multiple concurrent projects. Teams can literally move from managing projects to managing people and priorities. This problem has been enormously hard to solve, in large part because the solutions need to benefit every person and role on the team in order to be adopted at large.

The Final Piece of the Puzzle: Data

Underlying all the activity taking place in the virtual workspace are giant stores of data that are just waiting to be put into managers’ hands. Consider a team of 10 people, each of whom has 40 hours a week of availability. That means a manager has 400 hours of organizational capacity that can either be spent wisely against key strategic objectives or frittered away. Where that time goes, over time, will have a huge impact on the overall effectiveness of the team.

The ability of managers to get real time access to this level of information is a phenomenal advancement compared to the information they had before the advent of virtual workspaces.  Fortunately, almost all of the online project management systems provide some level of data analysis and reporting to help managers visualize what is really happening with their team.

Whether you’re leading a virtual team or not, you should consider the benefits of moving your team into a virtual office. At the very least, you’ll get out of one or two meetings a week.

The Need for Deeper Insight to Meet Deadlines

Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s web content manager, Ryan Newswanger, understands the challenge of managing multiple projects simultaneously across the entire healthcare system. In his role, Newswanger supervises eight content producers, three full-time developers, and dozens of web projects. Ryan’s group began using a content management system and basic project management software to keep track of the various activities in his group. He used this software to manage people’s task lists; however, he quickly realized deeper insights were needed into the entire scope of the projects. 

“I lived in constant fear we would miss deadlines and worried whether we actually had the resources to get the work completed on time,” said Newswanger. “One day I realized we had eight major launches in the pipeline and I knew we risked failure if we didn’t get a better solution in place.”

Newswanger’s team decided to use LiquidPlanner during this critical phase to give them more control over their projects. Within a period of four months, the entire team was using the solution to seamlessly track their time, assign and monitor tasks, and check progress against projects. LiquidPlanner immediately provided Newswanger with the necessary insight to determine which deadlines would be met or missed based on the allocated resources. 

“LiquidPlanner allowed me to oversee a project more than four months out and anticipate problems well ahead of time,” Newswanger said. “The foreboding feeling around my projects was gone because I had so much more insight and control. Now, when a deadline was no longer feasible, I would simply adjust the scope or add more staff as needed.”

Fostering a Whole New Way of Working

LiquidPlanner has been essential for resource allocation on Newswanger’s team. Recently, Newswanger put together a proposal for a significant intranet project. Using LiquidPlanner, he laid out the entire project and assigned the tasks to various team members. When he presented the proposal to his managers, he showed the exact project milestones and visually demonstrated that the project could be completed with four employees, but not with two. Because of this insight, his managers provided all the resources required for the project to meet the proposed deadlines. During the course of the project, team members referenced their prioritized list of tasks to ensure they were focused on the right priorities. Newswanger relied heavily on LiquidPlanner’s project tracking features to monitor progress. Although the intranet project was very complicated, there were no unforeseen problems along the way because each contributor knew exactly what they needed to deliver and when each task was due. 

Previously, a bottleneck existed where project contributors would need to meet with Newswanger to get the information and relevant documents before they could begin their next assignment. Using LiquidPlanner, all the information to help employees move seamlessly from one task to the next is immediately available to them. In many cases, work is happening to drive the project to completion without Newswanger needing to know all the details. This has reduced the number of meetings in the web content group and changed the tone of the meetings Newswanger has with his direct reports. Now, he can focus on managing his staff and their overall professional development, rather than checking on the status of specific tasks. 

The project management process for the web content management team at Dartmouth-Hitchcock has dramatically improved, thanks to LiquidPlanner. Newswanger relies on LiquidPlanner to give him deeper insights into the progress of each project and to make forecasts several months or even years out. Other groups at Dartmouth-Hitchcock have noticed Newswanger’s success, and are exploring using LiquidPlanner to improve the management of other technical projects. 

Benefits of LiquidPlanner at Dartmouth-Hitchcock:

• Provides deeper insight into a team’s ability to meet specific deadlines and allows managers to easily make adjustments in resource allocation.
• Allows team members to be more self-sufficient. Task priority makes it clear what they should be working on, while supporting documentation and communications are always at their fingertips on the task Details page.  
• Creates a rich framework for forecasting major project milestones and necessary resources, making it easier to present project requirements to leadership team.
• Improves ability to manage changes in timing and scope of project, anticipating problems ahead of time.

One of the things we love about you is how generous you are with your feedback. And your thoughts on reporting have come through loud and clear, through forums, email, trainings, and phone calls. When it comes to reporting, you want more, you want better, and you want it as soon as possible. We’ve finally got some good news for you: you’re about to get it.

Last summer we surveyed you about reporting and you gave us some very specific details about what you want:

•    100% said you needed more information about how your resources were allocated
•    96% said you wanted to choose exactly what information to export
•    83% said you wanted to set filter criteria for your reports
•    81% said you wanted to slice and dice your information against specific date ranges
•    51% said you wanted custom fields for your projects and tasks

And that’s exactly what is coming – and much more.

In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be making access to the new LiquidPlanner Analytics tab available to all customers.* The centerpiece of Analytics is the Report Builder, which will allow you to build, access, customize, save, and download reports on hundreds of aspects of your LiquidPlanner data in a matter of seconds (literally).

We’ve been hard at work on LiquidPlanner Analytics for months now, and we can’t wait to share all the details with you. Watch this blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and your LiquidPlanner dashboard for news and more information. For specific questions in advance of the release, contact Sales or Support.

In the meantime, here’s a peek at just one of the reports that will be in your hands soon:

* LiquidPlanner Analytics will be accessible by members with Manager-Level Access and above.

What would you be doing in this position? The broad answer is this: overseeing our inbound marketing programs and projects, as well as working with the internal LP team and outside agencies. Let’s get a little more specific. You will be:

• Managing the migration of the LiquidPlanner corporate website/analytics programs from existing platforms to more robust platforms;
• Researching, segmenting, and profiling high-converting customers and building out marketing programs to better target similar prospects;
• Overseeing the extension of success in website content and messaging to other channels, including email marketing, advertising, media relations, and social media.

We’re all about looking towards the future, but we want to know about your past work, too. Have you accomplished these things in your career? (Think of this as a checklist before you apply):

• Driven lead growth through the use of website optimization, SEO, content marketing, PPC, and advertising/promotions;
• Managed websites from end to end, including design, messaging, information architecture, and user experience;
• Used website and product analytics to assess risk and gain insights into new opportunities;
• Seen the inherent connections between various marketing channels and leveraged them to gain market traction and improved overall brand perception and awareness

Got most of those under your belt? Excellent! So, what’s in it for you if you’re hired?

• A competitive salary
• Full benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and life insurance coverage
• 401(k) plan
• Four weeks paid vacation (trip to Hawaii anyone?)
• A super casual and fun work environment with people like this:

To read more about LiquidPlanner and this job description, click here, or to go ahead and apply, send a cover letter and resume to jobs@liquidplanner.com. Feel free to tweet, email, like, and +1 this post if you’re into that sort of thing.

And just remember, if you take anything away from this blog post, let it be this: free snacks. 

Q) Describe a typical day for you at LiquidPlanner.

A) Since I’m still brand new, my typical day is all about learning, learning, learning.  I’m digging in deep right now with LiquidPlanner functionality, where to find answers for our customers, and puzzling over the chess game that is how to best set up a workspace based upon a zillion different business models. That's what you get when you have a really flexible product!

Q) What makes you passionate about support? 

A) I simply love seeing the lightbulb come on over someone’s head when they figure something out or hearing joy in someone’s voice when they get the answer they needed.  It makes me happy to help make someone else successful at their job. 

Q) What are the most popular questions you get from customers? 

A) I’ve been here for a mere three weeks and I don’t think I’ve seen the same question more than once.  Many questions relate to reporting though, and I’m pretty excited about the new features we have coming up, which will help people get the information they want and need to do their jobs better.

Q) What’s your favorite feature in LiquidPlanner? 

A) I adore the “Done” checkbox for that feeling of satisfaction when a task is complete and poof! It disappears from your task list!

Q) When you’re not at the office, what do you like to do?

A) I’m an avid open-water swimmer and am the race director for the Fat Salmon Open Water Swim.  When I’m not under water, I am a voracious reader.

Q) You know I had to ask this question – what’s the best thing about working at LiquidPlanner, and what are you most looking forward to? 

A) The people, for sure.  It’s fantastic to be part of a team of super smart people who are psyched to come to work each day and do the job that they’re doing.  I’m looking forward to putting all the tasks for “Fat Salmon” into LiquidPlanner and becoming crazy organized for this year’s event!

Q) If you only had one more day on Earth, what would your last meal be? 

A) I’d want to go to a gourmet breakfast buffet.  

Got another question for Liz? Leave a comment or send us a tweet!

25 Things You Don’t Know About LiquidPlanner

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GTD Project Management for Professional Teams

Project Manager Challenge: Influencing in Lieu of Oompa Loompas

The University of Dayton, one of the top Catholic universities in the nation, has had the same motto for the last 150 years: to learn, lead and serve. And serve they do, with over 10,000 students attending every year. With a diverse student population, the university has made it a priority to encourage students to become well-rounded future leaders by providing them with real world skills.

The Enrollment Office is the department responsible for enrolling students from different cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. Robert Winger, Director of Enrollment Technology, understands better than anyone about the pressures faced by all departments (including marketing and admissions) to ensure the university establishes a rich and diverse student body.

Effective communication across all enrollment functions and projects is of the utmost importance, which is why Winger chose LiquidPlanner as the office’s go-to-collaboration tool.

The Enrollment Process: A Communications Challenge

The enrollment process at the university is both complex and time intensive. From the initial step of conducting a search to identify the right list of prospective students, through to the final stages of admissions, there’s a lot to be done. Winger soon realized that his team members were working within information silos, and lacked an understanding of one another’s ongoing work. This led him to LiquidPlanner, and he saw the benefits of improved collaboration right away. 

Soon, the department was facilitating better communications between team members through deeper insights into various enrollment projects. In addition, LiquidPlanner allowed the executive team to quickly and easily check the status on key projects at the institution while prioritizing tasks across multiple projects. 

“The student search process involves many steps and many people. It’s also an 18 month cycle, so things can get very complicated,” said Winger. “With the whole search process in LiquidPlanner, everyone could see who was contributing to their projects at every stage. The streamlined communications immediately saved time for our employees.”

Another reason the university chose LiquidPlanner was because it offered a web-based approach, making project management easier for both IT and department managers.  

LiquidPlanner has proven to be so effective at the institution that Sundar Kumarasamy, Vice President for Enrollment Management, mandated that the solution be rolled out across other departments in the institution—specifically to improve communications. By using LiquidPlanner, each team member will know how project decisions will impact other team members, giving complete visibility across the board. 

Developing Real World Skills Through Project Management

Students at the university benefit from LiquidPlanner even after they’ve been accepted. The University of Dayton uses LiquidPlanner’s portal functionality to provide students with insights into specific projects. For example, the marketing team may include several students in a core project and then allow students to update various tasks.

“Another thing I love about LiquidPlanner is its ability to help individuals plan their day,” said Winger. “The solution actually supports our highest mission to develop real world leadership skills in our students through its ability to clearly prioritize tasks.”

Avatars and emoticons alone won't make your distributed team feel cohesive and connected.

For teams who are spread across the country, across the globe, or even just across metropolitan areas, most collaboration takes place in email, instant messages, or in the online tools used to manage work and projects. The conversations over these channels lack the nuances of face-to-face communication (including facial expressions, stance, and tone), personal knowledge of the communicator, and a rapid real-time feedback loop. The resulting fragmentation can leave team members without a sense of cohesion, struggling to piece together the information they need to do their jobs.

By viewing collaboration software through a different lens, rather than just as a traditional business tool, managers can give their teams an opportunity for self-expression, spontaneous contribution, as well as a way to build credibility and rapport with their colleagues. Think of collaboration software as a multi-player business gaming environment, where the overall user experience makes “getting things done” more productive and more rewarding.

Here are four ways to use collaboration software to make your distributed team happier, more productive, and cohesive.

1. Don’t buy “collaboration,” buy “solutions” with collaboration features

It sounds overly simple, but it’s very important. Look for something that will get the job done in your business environment. Is your group a sales organization? Is the business driven by work tickets? Do you have a project-based organization? Do you have a strict development methodology to follow?

The mission of the business makes a difference, because every tool has it strengths and weaknesses and most are optimized toward different kinds of teams. Beware of tools that claim to work best for every business. For example, if you’re in a large organization that just wants a corporate version of Facebook to stay connected in that “Facebook way,” then you’ll want something like Yammer’s robust social commenting. If you have a sizable development organization you may want to consider a full-featured bug tracker like Jira. Support organizations that live and breathe tickets and email would be well advised to start the search with Zendesk. If the work is project-based, making scheduling and time-tracking essential, then LiquidPlanner is a good place to start. The one thing all of these tools have in common is that communication is in their DNA.

2. Does your collaboration solution create a virtual workspace?

Discussing and documenting the work you do for the group is one of the most important things collaboration tools do. Toolmakers are constantly trying to apply the best ideas in web design and social design to make their as apps easy to use and rewarding as possible. The goal is to replicate the feeling of an awesome meeting where work actually gets done, despite the limitations of time differences and physical proximity for distributed teams.

The need for openness and transparency are more pronounced when your team communicates primarily online. People should be recognized for thoughtful posts, messages, or content that makes it easier for others to move the ball forward. Does everyone know who to contact for the answers when they need to get work done? Managers should facilitate that type of resourcefulness from within the tools, the same way they would in a physical office by walking new employees around and introducing them to key team members.

3. How will team members interact within the workspace (and outside of it)?

In a balanced system, people will consume at least as much as they produce. Hopefully everyone will feel they get more than their fair share of rich content in return for things they put out to the group.

A few finer points to consider when it comes to online conversations: 

• Structured or Ad hoc - Does your work need structure or organization to it? Do you need projects, folders, tags or search or some other organizing principle? Think about what your workspace will look like at various scales of usage and plan accordingly. Nobody likes a messy shared living space.
• Push or Pull- Do you get notified of changes, or do you find yourself spending time going back to look and search for new and relevant stuff? Do you have sufficient control over how the system notifies you?
• Keep vs. Toss - Some social systems are more forgetful than others. In a private collaboration system hosted in the cloud there is really no practical need to toss nuggets of wisdom. They certainly can be valuable to new team members joining the party (tribal knowledge). Some systems focus way more on organizing and preserving content than others.
• Private vs. Public- Who gets to see what? The “friend” model doesn’t always work well in a corporate setting. Solutions take different approaches to sharing, with some offering the ability to extend access to customers and clients who are not part of the core collaboration team.

4. Is the trust and appreciation really there?

If your collaboration tool can’t satisfy the question "What's in it for me?," then it’s going to be a one-way ride to nowhere. It’s important to understand the needs of the different constituencies that use collaboration tools. All the participants — from the executive to the front line contributor — must trust the system and believe in its intrinsic fairness and ability to help them do their jobs better. The best tool designers understand this and are working to evolve their platforms with collaboration balance in mind. If designers do their jobs right, collaboration software will feel natural and fun for every team member who’s using it. This is especially critical when members of your team don’t get the opportunity to make face to face connections every day.

Most managers will find that building and maintaining relationships between members of distributed teams continues to get easier, as online social networking becomes second nature to more and more team members. The challenge, really, is to provide a forum for conversation and information exchange that enhances productivity and accountability at the same time. You can increase your chances of success by consciously hiring people who see the value in these tools and are eager, not reticent, to jump in with both feet.

(This article was originally featured on ProjectsAtWork)

Did you know we’re hiring? LiquidPlanner is looking for a Software Development Engineer, but instead of just posting a job ad online, we thought – what better way to advertise the position than to have one of our current developers tell you why he loves his job? We’ll just let Mark take it from here:

Looking down at the calendar, I've been writing software professionally for 11 years now, the last of which being here at LiquidPlanner. I can honestly say that the past 365 days have been the most fulfilling of my career. Let me warn you now: this blog post is not about LiquidPlanner features, our new Android app, or project management - well, not directly anyway.  Instead, I'm going to share with you four reasons why I love my job. Let’s dive right in!

1. LiquidPlanner has a culture of shipping quality.

Our development team is currently working on its eighth sprint since I've been here.  These sprints have evolved the product in visible ways, including an UI overhaul, a multitude of new features, and updated backend architectures.

As a developer at LiquidPlanner, I’ve hit the ground running from Day One.  Through the magic of Git, I can see that within the past year, I have 1404 commits.  Some of my favorite commits have involved implementing a background job queue with Resque and Redis, used on more than a few LiquidPlanner features.  

The LiquidPlanner development team has a strong culture in test-driven development that helps make "hitting the ground running" effective.  One aspect of this is our post-commit hook that runs the suite of all our automated functional and unit tests, which means running approximately 3500 tests, and 32,000 assertions on a shared server after every commit.  When you break the build, everybody knows it. We're very cognizant of: 

1. Trying to NOT break the build (crazy, right?)
2. Fixing it ASAP when things do go awry 

The results of our tests are attached to our commits, and show up in the homepage of our LiquidPlanner workspace for all to see.

                                                   figure 1. Post commit test hook result

Besides the test automation, we eat our own dogfood, so to speak.  We use LiquidPlanner to manage and collaborate on our own sprints.  This not only helps shape an understanding of the product, but increases our chances of finding bugs before customers do.  Before our releases get deployed, they've been baking on our own internal servers from the first day of the sprint.  Everybody in the company - Development, Marketing, Sales, and Support - works off the internal build of the product, and tests it before it goes live.

2. We develop with great technologies in a pragmatic manner.

An exciting aspect about being a developer at a startup is that we wear many different hats.  For the web app, we have our hands in Ruby, Rails, jQuery, PostgreSQL, Redis, and we run on Linux.  Each dev has their strength as an individual, and we all write code that touches many of these different pieces. We even take turns acting as Operations Support, gaining exposure to tools like Nagios, Puppet, Munin and Monit. LiquidPlanner has an iOS app and a recently released Android app that both hit the LiquidPlanner API. Sidenote: I recently updated our LiquidPlanner rubygem that wraps our API, and you should take a 5 minute break and '$ gem install liquidplanner'. It's awesome!

We always consider the latest, greatest, and newest technologies, but these decisions are made in a pragmatic way. Just because it's a new and 'buzzworthy' technology does not necessarily always mean it's the best decision for us to fully embrace it. It’s rewarding to observe and participate in these decisions.   

3. LiquidPlanner has a great stakeholder culture.

LiquidPlanner has the best stakeholder culture that I've ever experienced.   

Our meetings are few and far between compared to most companies I've worked at, and are tightly focused and concentrated (most of the time!). This is not a company of nodding heads.  We all have disagreements at times, but because individuals are stakeholders, those differing points of view arise with the best interests at heart.  Our discussions are in the context of making the product better, helping to keep many product concerns in check.

The devs here are recording video tutorials at night and on the weekend and committing code at a variety of times during the day and week – all because it's their passion. The focus is on the work, which is a great vibe to be around.

figure 2. Actual number of commits to the LiquidPlanner web app code base for every hour of the week

4. The LiquidPlanner app itself.

It's great working on an app that you care about and enjoy using daily. The product has true value for a lot of different positions in any organization, but as a developer, I love the visibility that LiquidPlanner provides. I can view schedules and my own tasks, and also what's headed my way in upcoming sprints. To be able to measure yourself in the short term and long term is incredibly motivating. Likewise, I can see what my co-workers are hacking on and gain context. I feel like I have a living record of my work that I can point to with useful connected collateral, as opposed to my previous life where I had to dig up e-mails AND refresh someone's memory about what's going on.

Our customers are a passionate user base and care deeply about the app they use daily. Needless to say that we get lots and lots of feedback. It may seem like a simple concept to listen to your users requests so you can deliver what they ask for while still staying true to your high level goals, but it can be challenging. Accomplishing this can be very gratifying.

That's a wrap! I hope I captured what I find rewarding about working as a software engineer at LiquidPlanner. If you’re interested, we have a spot open for you on the development team! If you have any questions about anything, post a comment, email us, or send me a tweet.  

Internally we are jumping up and down about this latest release because it’s been such a long time coming. You’ve been asking us for months to get this in your hands, but we had to take care of a couple other things first (like launching LiquidPlanner 3.0). We were so glad to finally get a chance to work on this because we are truly committed to making LiquidPlanner work for mobile.

If you’re an Android user, you can now get the same functionality in the Android app as users of the LiquidPlanner iPhone app get. That means viewing and updating your tasks, participating in the comment stream, browsing your full project tree, viewing attached documents, creating new tasks, and more. There are still some features you can only get through the web app, but many of those we’ll likely add to both mobile platforms in the future.  Let us know what features are missing and we’ll take your vote into consideration as we prioritize features.

We’ve already gotten some very great reviews (like the one below from our friend Tim Stewart:

A companion application to my daily project planner that even on my phone is perfectly usable. Great UI thoughtful summaries and drill down options. If you already have LP its essential and you know how dedicated the team are at improving their products. If you don't have anything in place and need an intuitive and effective Project Management system then sign up for an account and benefit from both. Stellar effort, bravo

 If you feel the same way, we’d very much appreciate your review. Same goes for the iOS app in the App Store!

Now one last bit of business. If you’re in the market for a new Android phone….say, like the hot new HTC One X™… this could be your chance to score a free one. All you have to do is take our two minute survey on how you use your mobile device for business and you’ll be entered to win.  What do you have to lose!

25 Things You Don’t Know About LiquidPlanner

What’s Your Minimum Viable Project Plan?

GTD Project Management for Professional Teams

Project Manager Challenge: Influencing in Lieu of Oompa Loompas

If I started talking about developing a “strategic competency to obtain competitive advantage” at my kid’s soccer game, the other parents would be befuddled with the verbose verbiage, and I’d be laughed off the field.  The reality is, if you use industry jargon at work, you could confuse your customer and leave your team thinking, “Huh?”

The following is a list of overused and abused terms that should be avoided.  These are actual phrases I’ve heard in business that should be avoided despite the urge to demonstrate your corporate swagger. I could title this list as, ”A Strategic Communication Plan To Help Improve Communication and Drive Business Value with Business Stakeholders,"  but instead I’ll simply call it, “Say This, Not That.”

1. Say This: “It works well.” 

Not That: “No long term sustainable results.”

The product or solution works well or it doesn’t.  If it keeps breaking, it isn’t a working solution.

2. Say This: “We are behind schedule.”

Not That: “Our SPI is less than 1” or “SV is negative.”

I learned this one the hard way.  I thought saying the latter phrase would impress my customer with my project management knowledge, and he would be instantly floored by how well we were managing the project. When I told him that our SPI was .97 and our CV was zero, he nodded in agreement.  Later, he explained to my management that I don’t communicate well.

3. Say This: “People like our products and want to buy more of them.”

Not That: “Maintain the consumer ownership experience across customer lifecycle.”

I recently finished reading the Steve Job’s Biography by Walter Issacson.  This book disects Apple’s focus on creating great products that people want to buy.  Jobs would’ve ridiculed the consultant who presented PowerPoint slides that encouraged Apple to maintain the consumer experience across the customer lifecycle.

4. Say This: “Prioritize within our budget.” 

Not That: “We’re optimizing business value by driving a structural cost mindset.”

I don’t know about you, but my personal finances never demonstrated an optimized business value while driving a structural cost mindset.  I prioritized the stuff I needed and then wanted to buy. There’s no sense in making things more complicated than they actually are!

5. Say This: “Work as a team.”

Not That: “Demonstrate effective business partnerships”

I don’t want to demonstrate effective business partnerships.  I want my co-workers to think we work well as a team so we can do good work and get stuff done.

6. Say This: “Know what is important.”

Not That: “Core Competency”

I keep the “core” talk to when I’m working my abs out at the gym. Knowing what is important is kept in the office.

7. Say This: “Show me what you’re doing”

Not That: “Open the Kimono”

Unless the project team is working in ancestral Japan, just explain how your do work and keep the kimono to yourself. Please.

8. Say This: “Change the way we’re working”

Not That: “Paradigm Shift”

Changing the way a business runs isn’t easy.  People are used to doing work a certain way and don’t like to adjust.  Unless you’re sliding two dimes on a table, avoid the paradigm shift, and cut right to the chase.

9. Say This: “Do This!”

Not That: “Best Practice”

I’m guilty of using this term simply because it sounds cool (just being honest).  I worked in one company that had a Best Practice Replication (BPR) team.  It seemed odd to me that project teams weren’t sharing knowledge and actually had to have a formal organization document to try to enforce the same solution across different teams.

10. Say This: “Get different opinions to the problem.”

Not That: “Think outside the box.”

Did you ever notice that the person telling you to think outside the box rarely ever thinks outside the box?  The creative problems solvers never say “think outside the box.”  They get different opinions and viewpoints to solve a problem and demonstrate by doing.

Are you guilty of using these terms?

I’ll let you off the hook.  We’ve all used some of these terms in our corporate careers.  I don’t remember when I was handed a primer on Corporate Speak.  Perhaps it was acquired through osmosis at the company’s cafeteria?

The key point is to speak plainly so your business partners and team understand you. You'll be perceived as a better communicator and a more effective leader.

About the Author

Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT manager, author, instructor, and lecturer on a range of project management topics including PMO management, ERP implementation, application portfolio management, and infrastructure management.

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