Alright, so perhaps you're trying to choose a project management system you're looking and you're like, you know what, I can see some benefits here, but you're not sure which one to choose, should you go with Asana should you go with Trello should go with click ups or go with Monday?
Well, the interesting thing is, to me, they're competing with something that's relatively simple.
And that is Excel, or Google sheets that these are essentially fancy spreadsheets.
And they're very nice.
They're very powerful, you can drag and drop, and they've got colors.
And there's a lot of time savings, they also have a capacity to have multiple team members, and let them see their particular version of the overall work that's going on in your business.
But one of the downsides is that they are incredibly powerful, that these tools can do so much.
They can be set up in so many different ways, so many different views, so many different columns, items, groupings, it's like, Oh, my goodness, what is going on.
And the challenge that you are going to face is that if you don't put some effort into thinking about how you structure, your project management system, and you just allow your team to do as they please, then you're going to face a very interesting problem.
And that is that there's going to be multiple different ways of getting things done.
You see, there are multiple ways of structuring a project management system.
And you may need to lay down some constraints on these programs.
If you don't, then you're going to lose something that's quite important.
And that is team redundancy.
What I mean by that, well, I mean that if someone is sick that day, then you can take a member from another business area or another business where they typically don't do that job and move them across, and they can work in that area for the day.
Now, if there is a completely different way of doing the work in marketing compared to sales compared to filming, compared to accounting or HR, then you're not going to have this.
But if there's actually a consistent setup across all of these business areas, then you got to be able to take one of your team members and get them to cover for the day short, they might not be as good as the person who's doing that job day in and day out.
But you will have the capacity to say, hey, cover this job for today.
Or let's say someone leaves someone quits, then you can on a more permanent basis, bring members across and have them covered that redundancy is only there.
If you set up your boards the same way.
If they're all different, and this is a problem like literally go look at the templates that these companies set up.
It's like, whoa, you guys are setting up a lot of different ways of doing work here.
And that is powerful.
But it also comes with a downside.
And that is your team redundancy just will not be there.
From this perspective, it's almost beneficial to go to excel at the beginning, Why yes, it is slower, but it forces you to look at what you're actually trying to get done with your project management system.
And when you get that dialed in, then go to one of the project management systems from there having your structure already defined.
This actually happened to me on Monday, like I use Monday as my project management system.
I've been pretty happy with it.
But they took away a key feature.
And this is the message that I want you to get across How do you judge a project management system? If they all just fancy Excel? Well, how do I choose between them? Sure.
Price is one thing.
But let's say that you do manage to set up your boards consistently.
And you're like, okay, great, we've got this setup, there is one more very important thing that I would be judging a project management system on.
And that is the capacity for it to show you two very important optics.
One is from a business perspective, Hey, what are you seeing happen in marketing, what's getting done in sales, what's getting done in fulfillment, what's getting done in HR.
And so being able to have a look from that business perspective and see what work is being done, but also being able to flip across and see what a particular team member is working on.
And this is the problem that arose with Monday.
For some unknown reason.
They had this awesome feature called my work.
Yes, it was in beta and they're like, Yeah, we're going to take Take it away to work on it.
And like Guys, why can't you just leave it there while you fix up the next generation? Because the one that they went back to is sucked? No longer could I easily see what my assigned work was what my team members assigned work was, like, this sucks.
I have written to them, when are they showing up? I don't know.
But this is the judgment that you should make, in my personal opinion, Hey, can I see what's going on in the business you should be able to, but how easily can you switch across and see all of the team members, this will mean if someone's away, you can drop into their profile and see the work that needs to be done, see the deadlines, see what's due, and reassign it.
And this is the judgment that you should put on, you can go to their sales teams or go to their support teams and say, Hey, show me the overview of a sample business from a work perspective.
And show me the overview of like, I just want to see what my work would be, or my sales manager’s work would show me that view, how quickly can it switch between those because this is the optics that Excel just does not have.
But if the project management system doesn't have an in that capacity, that capability, then you know, you may as well stick with Excel.
So hopefully that gives you an idea about how to judge a project management system, whether it's Monday, whether it's Asana, whether it's ClickUp, whether it's Trello, whether it's KISSFLOW, whether it's any of the many, many project management systems, that you now have a judge, show me the overall business.
So you can see everything that's going on in the business.
And you can drill down into a particular area, I just want to see what's happening in sales and just want to see what's happening in operations.
And that second view, they want to see what's going on for that one particular person in your team, each team member should be able to bring up their work.
And if they're getting multiple assignments, multiple scheduled things that have to be done, they can work through them, see the due dates, make a judgment, even flag and say, Hey, I'm going to get behind, we're not going to get this done.
Can I have small resources, that's only possible if you can see the amount of work that they've got to get through.
I hope you found that useful if you want some help around this stuff, systems, and processes and the benefits that it can have for businesses looking to scale looking to grow.
Then head over to systemio.dev and go through the training there.
And there's an opportunity for us to meet up and look at your particular situation the challenges that you face.
So what I want you to do, go over systemio.dev, pop in your name, pop in your email address, and I look forward to seeing you on tomorrow's episode as we continue this journey into the power of systems and processes in business.
I'll see you then.
