Project Management Tips for Marketing Teams - Whiteboard Friday

Key Takeaways

howdy SEO Mo's welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday this is Jamie this is Tom and today we're going to talk a little bit about the SEO mods project management system I've come over from distilled and I've implanted some of the ways that we do things at distilled and between us we've come up with this kind of way of managing projects managing tasks across the marketing team and we thought we'd share with you a little bit about how it works so Jamie what are we looking at here yeah so what we've done is we've taken every team member and created a column for them on the whiteboard now just for the purposes of this whiteboard Friday we've got just the two of us and the idea is that we have these post-it notes that represent projects or outcomes of things that we're all working on and the idea here is that we have this line so if a project is both above the line that is a project I'm going to be focusing on today that particular day and things below the line are things that are what we would consider to be sort of a holding pattern so maybe you're waiting for somebody to get started on this maybe it's the next thing that you're going to work on so you can really quickly and easily see everything that's on my to-do list now broken down by what I'm directly working on now either like today tomorrow but also stuff but I'm waiting on other people this is like end of the week next week further out these are just kind of like you know they don't have a specified date but this stuff is the stuff that I'm working on like right here and now so I will say though I think one thing that we've tried to do here is keep this simple and not necessarily have these be the most atomic or the smallest task yeah but instead be some sort of measurable outcomes so for example shoot whiteboard Friday when I'm done shooting whiteboard Friday I'll be done with this and I'll take it from here and I'll put it into a different column which is accomplishments or achievements and the idea is that by the end of the week this should be filled up with between 10 and 30 different post-it notes of the progress that you've made that week but I think what the clear distinction that we've made is that everyone has their own sort of project management system that they use I use a software for my Mac you use everybody's room of the milk yeah I want some people use notepads next to their desk but this for example may have ten different tasks that I go through but the team really only needs to see this and so that's what we've tried to do here by making these sort of these size projects so what what is the right amount size of a project to go up on this board would you say so I think basically any project that goes up on the board here should be like a sizable chunk of work that has like you're saying a defined outcome so anything really that's like maybe less than an hour's work or isn't going to be that measurable or impactful like you know I'm not going to put on here like a meeting with somebody necessarily yeah that's not something that is particularly important for the team to know that I'm working on but it's useful for the current defined output so rewriting copy for a new page on the website that's like a task that's going to take me some time everyone else were might wants to know when that's done when I'm working on it you know and and that leads into I think one of the powerful things of this system is really the the simple the ease with which you can see what everyone else is working on you know it's like everyone on the team can see what everyone else has on a plate see what they're not working on and see what they're working on and just a you know a just their schedules accordingly so for example let's say that you have this task here for for wire framing category pages moved it up here let's say this is top of your list and I can be like oh so I see this is important so I should probably move up the copy for the category pages onto my to do this and I can just move stuff around like this like really quickly and easily and that's the parent is not too restrictive there aren't too many rules going on here but it gives us a really quick and easy way of seeing what's going on but we also like the the whiteboard is only one part of the project manual system we also have these daily stand-ups or we have the whole marketing team we come together for like maybe no more than 10 15 minutes a Georgia talked us through that Jake yeah sure so every morning at 10:00 a.m. that's the time that we chose and it may be different for your organization but when we're lazy as you want so today I'm feels like a I would say it's a nice gentle it's between 3 and 10 minutes it really depends but really what we do is each person just does a quick once-over of what's on their their roadmap or their radar so to speak so if this was the stand up right now I would say well today I'm going to work on the wireframe for the category pages I think I'm going to need as soon as I'm done with that then it'll go off to you so you can work on the copy yeah and that's why Tom would probably move that they are consider doing that and then I'm gonna say you know I'm going to work on the presentation for SMX Advanced and that'll probably take me a day or two and so that'll be the the kind of the two things on my roadmap and then I might say something I have on deck is to shave and if if you're going to do a Y port Friday it's actually probably not a bad idea to shave before yet so that's why I have that next on deck but then Tom you would kind of go through your projects in the same manner yeah absolutely and by doing this like it's really important the whole team then gets a sense of what we're all working on you know it's like it's really quick doesn't take anyone's time too much but we all get that top level visibility which i think is really important for a team you know the particular for the marketing team where you know we might work at a whole range of disjoint tasks you know some of it is kind of you know something to do with the website some of it is to do with the email some is the affiliate program like we don't all need to know the the the nitty-gritty of all those different projects but it's useful for so on just understand broadly what we're working on and when those things are achieved and what those outcomes are exact thanks some other things that we get in that daily standard process are help so if I throw this up and I talked about it and stand up Tom might say oh let me help you with that I've got some time today and so it really helps you to help each other it also helps you to provide feedback yeah so if Tom puts this up I or someone else on the team might say I don't know if that's the most important thing we don't I don't know if we need that this yunk and so he might swap these yeah it's something that we do throughout the day in fact not only do we move things and stand-ups but we you'll notice people walk up during the day and they move things around they take things that are completed and they move them over yeah yeah talk to me a little bit about the line where you think it should be because it's something that we've played with a little bit yeah I notice we have this perfectly working at our system at the moment but I think that this line really it's kind of a line in the sand to try and differentiate between what tasks are you know I'm actively working on right now versus tasks that are just like yeah someday when I get round yeah or maybe I'm really important but I'm waiting on somebody else for something up and I think that you know we tried to play around with with keeping these tasks just stuff I'm working on today but I think it works a bit more broadly like today stroke the next few days you know kind of the like I said at the top of mind the things that I'm actively thinking about I'm working on now because because there are loads of subtasks you know involved with these you might end up working on a whole bunch of one things at once right you know just single focus and go you know a whole day I'm just doing this task like you can work on bits and pieces here you maybe send something off to somebody wait for feedback you know so there has to be a room for a few different projects or if you didn't tasks going on at once but I think that the idea being that having this line like we tried it without the line to start what I didn't work so well but having the having on the line really separates mentally primarily like what's what's really active narrow and what's not I did I see this sort of in focus and out of focus yeah and I think we did we did play with a line I think different organizations are going to have a different point where the line makes sense yeah but we've sort of gotten to a point where it where the line is if the number of projects you have above the line is crowded like they don't fit that's probably not going to be a successful day like you're not going to be successful touching all of those things so I think ours can fit about for yeah and most days most of us have two or three above the line I don't know if we mentioned this idea that whatever's closest to your name is sort of the closest the highest focus if that makes sense yeah and that below the line we sort of similarly use the same sort of prioritization but it's very simple it's it's very easy to move things around by to say oh you know this is good this has been delayed so I'm going to do that yeah and so that folks can kind of see what maybe up next on your plate yeah so this has been working pretty well for us last couple of weeks I think it's the team really appreciates having the the stand-ups especially you know getting that that high-level view across everyone else's projects I think is really valuable but also I think it's really important for the whole company you know we have this white board and behind the marketing team and it has everyone's tasks on it it's very colorful and you know anyone who walks by like ran can walk by anyone from the exec team can walk by you know and they can just instantly see oh one of the marking team working on right now like it's right in the queue right as we're ahead if they recently accomplished yeah yeah and I think this like achievement section is really that kind of positive reinforcement for like oh we're achieving loads of stuff at the moment this is good like keep that momentum going you know that's one of the big differences I found coming from agency to kind of an in-house where all is is you know you guys don't really have that kind of external motivator so much like it's not like there's a client on your back hounding you all the time for like get it done get it done or I need a report or you're your own bosses we need to choose what we work on exactly and this helps us do that because as a team we're able to say I'm working on this this week and someone else and say oh what this is a supporting project let me help you out with that yeah and there have been a few times in the stand-up where will everyone go through all their tasks and then somebody will put the hand up be like wait what who's owning X like you know some and what do they do this you know we'll we'll put the project on a thing and you know I will yeah yeah and that's great like everyone feels like someone's got ownership of it we don't forget the task and there isn't that situation where everyone goes oh I thought that you were working on it I thought you were yeah and then it forces the cracks so it feels quite simple but it's actually like it's actually a surprisingly powerful way of managing projects and tasks and that visibility I think that communication between the team is really key to making it work yeah I think two other things that we've done that have been sort of interesting is that we take the achievements from a given week so every first thing Monday morning we take all of the achievements from last week and we put them somewhere else and that what we do have we've been drawing a box around it and the writing the week and so we can actually see these boxes that have 20 or 30 of these in them and not only does it help us say what did we do two weeks ago but it helps us see that progress and what we've actually notice is that there have been more post-its yeah each week yeah we've been doing more each and every week and I think it's not just because we've been doing smaller things I think that we've become more efficient as a team yeah absolutely absolutely and then we also have these little magnets that we've been using a little bit these are sort of an optional thing but what we meant to do is that we have some projects that involve our development team and some projects that involve our engineering team so we have a few different colors of these magnets and it allows someone from our engineering team or from our design team to walk up to the board and say oh that's a project that's going to require some help from my team it gives them a visibility on what projects are going to need their help yeah and so it's a way that we signal to other teams in the company that those are projects that need their help and again internally in the team if we have a whole bunch of tasks here that all required development we can decide to deeper out some of those because we know that I'm gonna get all of them done straightaway yeah we look and say oh jeez we have way too many development projects this one's important it's going below the fall absolutely yeah yeah cool awesome yeah thanks guys I hope you that was helpful I will post post some photos in the blog post down below as well of the real whiteboard this is just a dummy one for the whiteboard Friday and yeah I'd love to know like how do you guys manage your projects I love to hear in the comments yeah and what how do you think we could improve this because it's just something we sort of came up with over the last few months absolutely oh great thanks a lot Thanks you