EXECUTIVE SUMMARY INTRODUCTION. Break through any business challenge: Prioritise the right tasks and manage for success

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1 Break through any business challenge: Prioritise the right tasks and manage for success EXECUTIVE SUMMARY All management teams are faced with similar challenges when it comes to building and growing a business. Ensuring the correct balance of effort between long term planning and strategic objectives and daily operational tasks is a vital ingredient for success. As part of a management team that is dominated by engineers, our genetic makeup means we are undoubtedly process driven by nature. As we stand back and look at the way in which we have managed all the businesses we have been involved in, it is clear there is a consistent process behind our success. This white paper has been generated by understanding the practical four step process we have developed and implemented over many years and is integral to the way we run our business. When implemented, the Four Step Solution can help breakdown any challenge your business faces, provides clarity on the tasks required to achieve your ultimate goal and ensures your team are fully engaged in the process. INTRODUCTION When it comes to organising our workload, we face many challenges and prioritisation is essential. We have daily, weekly and monthly tasks associated with our roles and at the same time we are often asked to take on activities related to specific project work or lead a project team. Whether it s finding ways to do more, quicker or better, or how to improve customer experience, retention and value or a drive to increase sales, revenues and profits, no organisation can afford to stand back and let the world pass it by, therefore, organisations typically use projects to bring about change. With deadlines associated to each of these activities, working life is a daily balancing act and it can sometimes become difficult to know which activities should be prioritised over others and to identify the right tasks to focus on and assign resources. It is easier to understand what should be done if the end goal of each activity is fully understood. This can be done by exploring the activity to determine the work required to achieve the ultimate aim. In addition, many of these activities will involve working in teams and often team members can be spread across multiple locations. Where teams are involved, it is important that all team members are engaged and on board with the work involved. Ensuring teams can work collaboratively across locations encourages input from all team members into both the planning and doing phases of the work.

2 EXPLORE The first phase in tackling any challenge is to capture the thoughts of everyone involved and collate these thoughts into a structured priority to do list. Historically we have always found mind-mapping to be the most effective way to quickly break down what you know, and don t know about your challenge. When looking at who should be involved in the process, you can consider the full team being involved from the beginning of the exploration phase and all having input into the answers to the questions outlined. This can be approached with facilitating a session with everyone in the same room and brainstorming all of these questions collectively or if this isn t possible, tools can be utilised which offer the ability for teams to collaborate on the exploration process from any location. The key is to ensure that all information is still captured in one central workspace, providing one version of the truth. This exploration phase of breaking down larger challenges into smaller, manageable tasks provides clarity to any situation with the aim of focusing your efforts on the right activities. It offers a comprehensive process to turn thoughts and ideas into a task list or project plan. However, what do you do with the information once all captured in this way? The next step is to Determine What Should Be Done? Mapping helps define and share what you are trying to achieve and the reason why it needs to be addressed. It helps identify ideal outcomes. It helps identify what currently works and needs to be preserved and what doesn t and is in need of improvement. It helps clarify thinking, using links, associations and relationships to aid understanding. Using this proven technique helps to break down any challenge and provides the ideal platform to determine how best to move forward.

3 DETERMINE The Exploration phase will typically identify many things that could be done to improve a situation. Not everything will be practical and not everything will be achievable, given restrictions and constraints. The information gathered during the exploration phase of the process, will be turned into tasks to be worked on. In reality, there will be more tasks than can be realistically actioned, therefore, you need a way to prioritise and determine what should be focused on. An effective technique to do this is to take the list of tasks generated during your exploration phase and categorise them into an impact and effort scale. This lets you identify what would have most impact in terms of improving the current situation and also assess the degree of effort needed to make it happen The axis of your chart to do this will be Impact and Effort and rated High Low. The focus should be on those tasks which will have the highestmedium impact on what you are trying to achieve but will take low-medium effort to complete. As per the image shown, these will be located in the top left quadrant of the scale and allows you to see what you should be focused on. These activities then become your task list and you can assign resource and timescale to these. Category centric views allow you to view your thoughts from many perspectives, making it easier to home in on what provides the most impact, for least effort. This ability to swivel the axis of how you look at the outcome of your brainstorm of ideas provides tremendous insight, which helps take the right decisions and do the right things You can immediately rule out the high effort low impact activities as these will not help you achieve your end goal and will tie up resource needlessly.

4 ENGAGE To complete your work schedule, you will need to have a team around you who are fully engaged and on board with the overall objective. Productivity and efficiency are dependent upon everyone taking responsibility for the actions assigned to them, ensuring these are completed to the required standard, on time and that everyone takes into account the impact their tasks will have on other team member s tasks. It is easier to engage a full team when they are involved from the outset and particularly, if they are located in different offices or countries. Collaboration is a key part of your process to ensure all thoughts and ideas are shared and everyone can input into information that becomes the team s task list. This way, when resources are being assigned to each task, people feel engaged with the overall aim and have already started working together to identify what is required to meet the goal. With multiple members of a team across different locations, it can become easy to lose contact with some members as communication takes places across different tools. If the main tool across a team for communication is , it is easy for information such as attachments or message threads to become lost amongst multiple communication topics. Utilising a collaborative tool which allows for messaging and storage of the relevant documents and attachments among all team members helps to solve this issue. Through a collaborative tool all communications and documents are stored in a centralised workspace, removing the need for multiple s which can be lost among other communications all comments, notes and progress of a project are located in a file specific to a particular project, visible to everyone involved and only accessible to members of that specific team. There can also be many stakeholders and whilst they bring knowledge, information, experience, insights and perspectives they can also bring their own complexities which can impact on the success or otherwise of your project. Those stakeholders can come and go, as a challenge evolves into a project or a range of activities, making it essential to identify them all as soon as practical, define the role they play and decide how best to keep them on your side. Readily accessible clear statements continually highlight the purpose, reasoning and expected outcomes, ensuring they are never mis-represented. Stakeholder maps identify the individuals, the roles they play, their influence and clout, along with their communication needs. Resource allocation based on workload and real time collaboration without the need for , all help limit obstacles to success.

5 OVERSEE As you progress with your tasks, you will want to keep track of progress and ensure they are on target or delayed and highlight where there are any major issues or red flags. Keeping track of progress ensures that when issues arise you can make the necessary adjustment to the plan. It is essential to be able to oversee all of the tasks of individual team members to ensure no one is overloaded and that goals are achievable based on the team members involved having oversight of the full team ensures you can determine if the goal you are aiming for is achievable within the timescales which have been set. Utilising a Kanban Task Board approach provides a visual overview of status and makes it easier to identify any delays or issues before they impact the overall aims and objectives. With a visual display of progress, action can be taken quickly to solve any issues which may arise. Task Lists and Task Boards provide insight to individuals and management providing the insight required to ensure progress remains on schedule. SUMMARY The concept of explore, determine, engage and oversee provides a framework for a collaborative approach to addressing any challenge you may face and enables you to prioritise the right tasks and manage them for a successful outcome. Breaking through the mountain of tasks involved in working life can be a daunting prospect but it doesn t have to be. The approach outlined here offers a solution which allows you to organise and prioritise your workload into a manageable task list. This four-step process can be applied to any business challenge, project or indeed just daily tasks involved in individual job roles, the key point is that it identifies the priorities which should be focused on to achieve maximum return. Key to this approach is the collaborative nature of working in teams, ensuring the team can be efficient by centralising communication within the team and focusing on doing the right things. Contact us to discuss how our tools can facilitate this approach in your organisation. info@mindgenius.com +44 (0)