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Every organization has processes, does not matter which lifecycle stage or age it is. Even if there is no document where process is described, that does not mean process does not exist. Very often, when organization is in a growth mode, first and foremost it focuses on the results, without thinking, how they will try to achieve the results. If building right processes around the practices that company applies is not one of the highest priorities, ask yourself how long will it take for every person to figure out who is doing what or how long does it take to onboard new people, if there is no structure around services or products that company provides? Process management is foreseen as an activity that is needed for big companies only. Process management is one of the important things when organization seeks to be more effective and efficient. But sometimes you may hear an opinion that process management is required for corporative organizations, and it is seen as an evil in small companies that kills the vibe. In addition, actual value of the process is forgotten and seen as something that slows down the company or make it more bureaucratic - could be, if organization goes too far with governance and implements too many steps, where they are not needed, but eventually processes help people to be more efficient. Process management is a way to setup a structure for the organizational routines and practices. Process management is important in various organizational stages, because this is what helps people to understand what their role is, what is the responsibility that person needs to fulfill and what person should expect from others. One of the most important goals of the process is to make things happen faster, because you do not waste your time by figuring out who can help you in certain steps and who is in charge of different things. In addition, having processes in place it will help you to solve ownership problems in the organization, there will be less sheet dragging to different conners moments and hopefully more commitment. And finally, when you need things move faster, without process being in place, there is no way you will be able to determine which steps need improvement without having proper process painted. Final thoughts. Describing and implementing processes take time and may look like additional overhead for the organization, without any added value. But if somebody would calculate how much time is spent to figure out who needs to do what, will understand that having process setup, would make things work faster and would help organization to succeed.

Ask any company owner or Chief Operating Officer (CEO), if they would like to have managers and specialist who would be acting as true leaders and you will hear the answer loud and clear, that yes, this is what they are looking for. There are certain personal skills that every leader should have or gain in order to be a good leader, but if person have skills, there is a question still: is every company ready for certain level of leadership? Leader is an individual who acts as an owner and does not demand for instructions. Person with leadership skills normally are the ones who set their own rules, know and understand what their long term goal is and like to have certain amount of freedom to implement improvements in the organization. Leaders are the ones who can stand behind their opinion and look for potential solutions in the areas where things are not working. He / she will always question the state of mind and will not use first no as an ultimate answer, but instead will try at least 3-5 various ways to change status quo in the organization. As nice organization full of leaders would look like, it is important to understand is your organization ready for such people to pitch in. One of the most important things for person who wants to improve status quo in the organization has a mandate of implementing things: if culture in the organization is that every single tiny thing needs to be aligned and discussed, it will be a buzz killer for any leader to do what is right, because person is just stuck in endless conversations. It does not mean that there should not be anything aligned, but there should be clear border line, where you give leader a mandate to move ahead. Without it may look that you do not trust the person, therefore you expect person not to move any direction without informing or aligning things with others. if company style of working is to have numerous catch up's, reports, check in's during the week, that will create feeling of mistrust as well. Such environment encourages to question whether you are seen as a task doer or the one who can work in self- organized manner and deliver the result at the end of it. if company higher leadership do not show signs of encouraging people to act as owners of their area, that will keep people in the state of asking for directions. How higher management can show that they want people to act as leaders? Simple - by getting their hands dirty and coming up with improvements and implementing them. if company is asking and making instructions on every step, it actually limits opportunities for the people to be more independent and approach things in their own manner. This one is very hard to overcome, because organizations have instructions mostly because people would know what to do and save time, but down side of it, is that no new thing, will work without somebody holding hand, will not encourage people to look for optimal ways of how to do it and eventually you will find yourself in a situation that no new assignments can be delivered without clear step by step instruction. Such environment often kills any opportunities for leadership skills growth within existing company community. Final thoughts. If your aspiration is company being driven by leaders, there are certain things that you need to fix, before even asking to act as a leader: give freedom to act, stop checking on every step of the way, stop giving instructions, instead ask to come up with their own path, how things need to work. All of these may become a buzz kill for any person with leadership skills package.

There are different definitions what project manager means in different organizations. And sometimes Project manager name seems to be used in a wrong setting, that creates various misunderstandings in expectations towards people who are wearing the title of project manager. Project Manager is the one that feels in charge of the project ultimate delivery. Being in charge of the project may mean various different things, but mainly it means that project manager is a manager when he / she: does not run from the responsibility when issues appear. looks for the most efficient ways how project result should be achieved. understand project key risks and deep dive into them. trusts, but verifies what project team is delivering. presents project delivery to the stakeholders as it would be his / her personal responsibility. analyzes and understands project stakeholders and works out communication plan that fits each and everyone's needs. is not afraid to look for solutions when unknown risks realize. understands that there is no project that goes according to plan. knows how to work when there are no instructions in place. respects company ways of working and shows cases to others. The list can go on and on. The whole idea is that project managers are the ones who run the show and are capable to navigate unknown waters. Being a project manager does not mean that you are alone, you have the project team that you need to know how to work with in order to achieve the results. Most of the time project team members are not direct subordinates to the project manager, which makes it even harder to make group of people work for the common goal. This part is important because project manager need to have not only team management skills, but as well be able to read the team to catch various different reasons why some of them are not meeting agreed timelines for tasks from project plan and obviously motivate to work the tasks out. Final thoughts. When describing the role of project manager, it is important to understand that project manager has managerial element for a reason: person needs to run the team and motivate it to reach the necessary results, needs to feel an owner of project delivery and be able to work with various different stakeholders in unknown waters - where there are no instructions available.

Comfort zone by definition means familiar psychological state where people are at ease and (perceive they are) in control of their environment, experiencing low levels of anxiety and stress. There is nothing wrong about people being in comfort zone, but what this means for company, if it wants to grow, find more efficient ways of working etc. Does it mean, if there is bigger proportion of people who are happy with the current state at work and are not looking for any improvements, will lock the organization out from new opportunities? People that have found their comfort zone in the company will keep the current operations running and stay loyal until existing state remain stable. There is an opinion, that people who are just happy with how things are moving and are not looking for any change in the organization, may be a cause for various struggles for the organization to initiate changes. It is most possibly very true, but there is a good side of having people in the team that feel in comfort zone: will stay loyal until the environment remains intact, will keep operations running the way it supposed to run. But as anywhere else, you need to keep the balance in the team, so it would not become stagnant because of the fact that people are not willing to change ways of working or look for better tools to use, as they are too comfortable with way it is. Make sure that you have well balanced team to make team operations going, but at the same time willing to look for new exiting things to implement. People who are in comfort zone can be grounding element for those who are crazy about trying new things on daily basis, just make sure that people with an apatite for change does not loose motivation because of the pushback they can get from the others. To have the right balance in the team, first and foremost try to understand what the reason is, why people do not want to try new ways: maybe it is because of lack of knowledge or maybe they feel not safe to experiment, because of previous experiences. To encourage people to scratch the surface on the settled ways of working, implement steps: Create an environment where people have a scene for experimenting - encourage on weekly basis and greet the ones that tried something during team meetings and personal chats. Encourage to learn something new - setup weekly gathering when whole team can listen in training remotely. The key here is that different team member should bring the online training that he or she is interested in on weekly basis, and everybody listens into it. Maintain improvement backlog so the ones that are willing to get their hands dirty, but do not know what to do, would be able to pick the topic and work on it. Show the difference between the improved way of working and the old way, so people would understand why it was beneficial to do it. Setup motivational fund for the people who will implement improvements to make things work better. Just do not forget to have clear definition of done and evaluation rules. Final thoughts. People who are in comfort zone can be a good asset in the cases where there are no major changes or market moves which may impact organization operations. These people, if there is no turbulence, tend to be loyal and act as grounding element for the ones who may go crazy about the new features. But team build only from people who are happy the way it is, will not succeed and it should be balanced out with the ones who are more willing and ready to implement changes.

Many companies are working on the culture, that encourage people to experiment, try out new things, think out of the box, by not punishing them for the things that go wrong. This culture brings lots of freedom to people, creates a scene for finding new opportunities, that maybe people would be scared to try out due to potential consequences. With this setup you open your business for potential new horizons. But is there anything that you should think about before diving fully into this? To make culture of failure celebration work, organization should do certain preparation. If you are a company that wants to empower people to think out of the box and look for new exiting products, services and approaches, it is not enough just to state that from now on organization will allow people to experiment and try new things. It is important that you, as a company, are transparent with various potentials risks and prepare a playground for experimenting. This way you not only minimize the exposure of your company, but as well raise awareness among the company community. There are certain steps to think about while setting up "lets celebrate failures" culture: Help to avoid key organisation risks. Setup organization risk appetite and explain to people - not once, not twice - it needs to be continuous exercise. And no risk management framework is not enough either, give people exact examples what would harm company a lot, so they would know which impact to avoid. Always remember, people do not try things out of fair of not knowing. Create safe space for going wild. Prepare sandbox environments where people could play around with various potential developments. Give a chance for creativity. Allocate time for people to try out new ways of working - if everybody is busy with daily stuff, people will not have enough brain capacity to be creative. Encourage personal accountability - mistakes are not collective. Establish a forum where people come in and share their failures or mistakes with overview what they have learned. This is super important that people understand what mistakes they did, because the best way to learn, is by analyzing "what I could do better next time". Mistakes are not collective, everybody should deep dive where they went wrong. In addition, it is important, that forum is a safe space to be honest and open. Final thoughts. If you are an organization that wants to have culture that celebrates failures, which works, spend some time to get ready and help people to be ready for that as well. It is important, that people have time, feel free and understand the boundaries when trying to be creative and implementing new things.

Every process in the company should have a tool that enables the process work efficiently, to have visibility, reports. As there are many various different possible solutions to use for different things, how to select the best one? Do not select the tool before the process is being defined. One of the most common mistakes, while choosing the toolkit for various processes is actually not having any process defined, but tool being in place already. This most of the time drives to the situations that selected tools lots of customizations, that cost money and time. Therefore, even if process in super simple and pretty straight forward, there should be at least: process steps described. view of what information should be visible. reports that may be required in the very get go. Of course, it does not mean that you need to have a super sophisticated process from the very beginning, but direction what you want to achieve, what is important as an output and where the input will come from - is a must. Be very clear what is important while selecting the tool. As everybody can imagine there are many sexy tools in the market that can be bought for any price. Most of the time people forget to analyze of what exists in the company that maybe can be re - used. If this adoption of existing tools is not a choice, while choosing the tool do not use price as key element. There are other elements to think about while making a decision which one to pick: Are there any people in the company that know how tool works or this something that will be very new for the whole organization? How many people will have to learn to use the tool? How user friendly tool is comparing with the ones that people are used to? Who are the people who will have to learn the tool (are they fast learners, are they used to the various new solutions, how they normally learn new things: on their own or maybe you need somebody available 24/7 and super extensive training)? How fast the tool can be implemented (if timeline is important for you)? How flexible the tool is for future process amendments? What are other tools in the organization and can they be adapted to your needs? Adapt to what you have approach. Final thoughts First of all, if you feel that you need a tool for functions that your team or you are performing, make sure, that you have process steps defined prior to making the choice. Secondly analyze what already exists in the organization and whether adapt to what you have approach would work. Finally analyze company environment and stakeholders that will have to use the tool kit, as price should not be the only determinator.

There is no workplace where you will not find people who tend to act with a negative attitude towards most of the situations. Though does it mean that every person who acts in a way that impact people negatively can be called toxic? Toxic behavior may occur in various ways. Everybody understand what toxicity is from their own experience, values and expectations how person should act or react to certain things. Toxic behavior is defined as an act that cause negativity to your or others' lives. The behavior can be physical or mental and may be expressed by lying, blaming, manipulating, gossiping or being passive - aggressive. Not all negative behavior can be called toxic. Nowadays it is very popular to use term of toxic behavior or toxic person on almost every step of the way where people may feel negativity around. The term of toxicity is very powerful and can be harmful to the person whom this label has been tagged to. Therefore, before using the term, it is very important to understand why person is acting the way that causes negative feelings for others: maybe it is from the place of not knowing or the place of being too curious or feeling not evaluated enough. For example, if person asks many questions without malicious intentions, this cannot be called as toxicity, but rather curiosity or rudeness, if it is something that oversteps boundaries of recipient's values. There are simple steps, to determine whether person is toxic, or it is just a misunderstanding: be open - tell the person who cause negative feelings, that the behavior that he is showing towards you is something that you do not like, explain why and ask not to repeat it again. listen - give an opportunity for a person to explain why he or she behaved like that and try to understand the reasons, maybe there is something that caused this behavior where you are responsible for. keep your end of the bargain - normally during these conversations you may find middle ground that should make both of you more comfortable in future encounters. In this step it is important that both parties keep their promises. If the behavior stops, this is something that for sure would not be fair to treat as toxicity, but if it repeats, this is something that enters the land of toxicity, because from that point, you can eliminate the not knowing or not understanding element from the situation and potentially it is conscious act. Facing toxic people - what to do? In the cases when simple talk did not work and behavior is continuing to be present, it is obvious that stronger actions need to be taken, because there is no way that this behavior will disappear, if it is not addressed properly. There can be various ways how to address the situation, but before even coming up with the action plan it is necessary to understand deeper reasons why person is acting like that: maybe person is tired and needs time off. maybe person feels underestimated in work place. maybe person needs a change in function that he is performing. maybe it is time for a person to change a company. maybe person have personal issues. maybe ... Depending on the reasoning, ask the person to prepare an action plan, how he or she will address the situation. It is important that the plan draft comes from the exact person whose behavior is under question, so he or she would feel ownership and motivation to act on it. Managers / team leads role is to advice on certain things and watch the progress. If the plan does not work, there is always a hard decision possible, if that would save the wellbeing of the rest of the team. Final thoughts Before you jump into conclusions that person is acting toxic, try very simple 3 step approach and see whether person hear you and you both can find the common ground. If after this the behavior does not change most probably there are deeper reasons to it and more actions should take place to fix it.

During fast-paced world, multitasking becomes new normal, when many people are in charge and hustling with multiple different topics at the same time. Most of the time multitasking hides behind the words like productivity and efficiency. However, even if those words are something that employers like to hear and some people are better, than others with it, is there something that should be considered before going crazy about those trends? Many companies look for employees with fast-paced mind. Due to the current reality, many companies look for the people that are capable to work on more than one topic at the same time and being able to adapt to the situations when the same topic is changing on the go, which makes delivery even more challenging. Often multitasking hides behind such type of skills like productivity and effectiveness. Though there are many situations when being in a place where people attention is peanut butter spread across different questions at the same time, may cause various risks. There is a price to pay when people are spread across multiple topics at the same time. However, all those trendy words would sound good, there are lots of consequences that may pop up, if necessary, amount of focus is not allocated. agreements lost between the chairs - there are many situations when due to huge amount of information or wide spectrum of responsibilities, there are many things that have been agreed are forgotten, this way additional discussions may be needed - which is time and money for every organization. high stress level - people who are in charge of multiple topics at the same time, most of the time need to be very sharp and be capable to turn their brain from one to another - this leads to people being on the edge and experiencing high level of tension. topics delivered not with right quality - when focus is spread across multiple questions at the same time, there is no chance that all questions will be delivered with best possible quality, therefore organization should answer the question - how many and what mistakes they can allow to happen and where it is better to have specialized person for certain things. not all risks understood while making decisions - yes, there is no time for long discussions sometimes, but, if chosen way is - quick decisions -, it may bring many unknown risks that may hit extremely painfully, therefore every organization should have set mandates for every level clearly. Different measures could be used to keep up with the reality and stay productive. timebox your day for every question in the calendar and stick to it - it is important, if you planned to spend specific amount of time on certain topic, do not open your outlook, do not read chat messages, do not pick the phone call - just work on what you planned. prioritize all the questions from the point of urgency and complexity - work on the ones that are most burning and most time requiring first - you will feel more relaxed when you will know that less complex topics are waiting rather than wise versa. plan at least for week ahead - every Friday, before going to weekend review the calendar and plan it accordingly. block focus time in everyday calendar, which supposed to be used to read email or company news, to think about potential improvements in your area of responsibility, to attend trainings or in worst-case scenario to put out unforeseen fires. Final thoughts. In this world when so many topics are changing at the same time people must handle and cope with lots of different information at the same time. These situations do not go without any consequences to the organization or employee, therefore it is important to measure what is the potential price to pay, if there will be one specific person running multiple things in the organization. And additionally for employee to adopt necessary measures that it would help to cope with fast - passed environment.

Many companies have various meetings that are setup to have some kind of reviews, catch ups amongst the team, monthly performance reviews, resolve unplanned roadblocks, discuss something new etc. But what is the normal number of reoccurring meetings? And what exactly you can understand from the number of meetings in the organization? Every meeting needs to bring value. When it comes to meeting management often it is forgotten that every meeting should make sure that there is a result or consensus agreed at the end of it. Therefore, there are some key things to think about while planning any meeting: What is the key reason and key objective that you want to achieve from the meeting? Who are the participants of the meeting? What are key roles of each participant? What is the best way to run the meeting to achieve the result? How you going to tell the story and drive to the alignment or agreement topic that you want to achieve? What are the potential follow up steps after the meeting? Yes, you need to think about it in advance, going through various scenarios and be ready for them. Review, follow up, update meetings often may mean that there are shortcomings in different processes of the organization. There is no company where you will not find various meetings which has a purpose to keep up to date other parts in the organization. To have those meetings is healthy especially when you are dealing with sensitive topics, strategic questions or trying to make sure that people have a scene where to express the way they feel during tough times. Even that being said, it is important that these meetings do not become the only way of resolving open questions. If you have your agenda packed with update or review meetings on weekly basis, it may mean that company is not super collaborative, but rather that it is struggling with the maturity of the processes, and they are not working as supposed to. If you find yourself in a situation described above, the best first step to understand how to handle heavy meeting agenda and where to invest time by fixing processes, tools, communications are to start by preparing a meeting registry where you indicate: purpose of the meeting objective that you want to achieve with the meeting amount of attendees roles of attendees that need to participate meeting cadence With the registry you will spot easily: where there is potential duplication, where you should look for a solution rather to send an email instead of gathering all people, which meetings make sense to merge, where process tool is not enabled enough therefore you need a meeting for that, where people need to be trained to understand where this information could be found, etc. Final thoughts Having many meetings during the week does not mean that people will collaborate better, it rather means that you will start hearing that there is not enough time to do actual work. To be sure that only meetings with actual value are organized, make sure that every meeting has clear objective to achieve, if it is hard to define the objective, drop the meeting - it means will be waste of time. If you already feel that there are too many meetings running - make a meeting registry - there is nothing worse than pointless, no actual result generating meetings - they not only eat time, but affect people motivation.

Project management consists of many elements and have many linkages with various other processes, starting from: requirements engineering, budget and benefit planning, delivery planning, communication, stakeholder management, development and implementation, testing, risk and dependency management, etc. And most of the time communication is left out as a last one with the very little amount of time blocked through the project implementation period. Proper project communication is possible, if project manager has build the skillset for it. Communication as an area of expertise is very wide and used in every step of the way in project management. One of important skills for every project manager is actually being able to build a proper communication strategies with action plan used to communicate with the team, stakeholders, project owners, vendors, organization leadership, etc. Time planned to be spend on project communication is underestimated often. If you would deep dive into the project documentation, you would find very little information about communication with except of the plan itself and the training plan that kind of anyway refers to the communication as well. But these areas are not always thorougly covering everything that actually should be covered. Communication is used across many project management functions. When we talk about project management, good communication is a tool to deal with all different situations and action plan should be prepared accordingly: Stakeholder management - here key is understanding stakeholder needs and planning the time for all the possible conversations like: discussing of the project status, issues, progress, negotiations about the scope, etc. Project team management where the difficult part is that project manager needs to find the way how to make the team, which is made from group of people that are not direct subordinates, work and reach the common goal. If project manager has not prepared and planned a good communication strategy, how he can communicate what is important to the team and likewise hear what is important to every team member. Escalation management fails if the message and the ask for help is not communicated clearly and not to the right people. Therefore it is important that there is a clear list of people ready while planning communication strategies, who needs to be informed if project struggles. Change management is important when project includes people needing to transform their behaviors. If project impacts any group of people (which is 99% of a time), it is super important that project manager has well though through action plan, how he will encourage people to change their patterns of their behavior, how he will deal with dissatisfaction, when and how he will collect the feedback etc. If this is not performed properly, project will be considered as not successful, even though solution is implemented on time. All these things are directly linked to communication, but when you look to the project plan you will normally see a very tiny entry for this specific activity and not much of time planned for that. Final thoughts If project manager wants to succeed with the project delivery, he must plan proper actions for the communication with stakeholders, decision makers, team members, people being impacted, otherwise project may fail without it.

Decisions which projects to proceed with normally are based on the value project will bring. Benefit tracking or in other words value realisation, this part of the process turns on usually once something is implemented and is tracked for the period when benefits will materialise fully. Benefit tracking not necessarily need to be complicated There is common belief, that to track benefits you need to create gigantic excels which allow to guess all the possible shifts in the market and make sure that the growth in income (if it is the benefit) comes from the exact project. To have this implemented is possible, but it will be a Sisyphus work, as it will create many situations when something that is out of your control will cause changes in your company results. That does not mean, that you should not implement the process at all, it rather means that you should use benefit tracking process to achieve necessary accountability and awareness of people who are asking for investments and promising gold. If you want to have benefit tracking process which does not eat all the time of your finance team, make it in a way, that you setup regular reviews with benefit owners on every quarter basis and store all project benefits in benefit tracker. Your aim of the review should be only to understand from the benefit owner of what is going on with the project value that he has promised. Even though you do not do any strict checks or control steps, this way you make people accountable for what they promised. P.S. benefit tracking is often forgotten for Agile deliveries – do not let anybody fool yourself, Agile is a delivery method, whatever you are planning to deliver via Agile method, should bring value to the organisation. Use your projects benefits data in company annual targets planning Proposed process looks super light, but it will give you an understanding how you are doing company wise in regards to costs going down, revenue or income going up from the perspective of where you have invested and what you tried to achieve. Benefit tracking registry is a good tool for conversations and negations with division heads when it comes to annual targets - many of you know, how every year company leadership wants increased income targets and decreased costs, but expectation is vice versa in other levels. So when you have 3 – 5 years outlook what has been promised, you can drive thought talks more easily. Final thoughts There is no need to be afraid of introducing benefit tracking in an organisation as there are ways how to make it lighter, but still make it useful for accountability, awareness and target planning purposes.

The whole idea of having priorities set in the company is to say clearly what exactly you are deciding not to do, not to focus on and everybody follows. Does it always work 100%? Nope. When you ask various organisations you will notice that there is huge disconnect of what leadership and people think: leadership says that there are very clear priorities set, meanwhile people are lost and express the feeling that everything is a priority. How to make priorities reality? Work on your behaviour However strange it may sound, the fact whether priorities are fulfilling its goal depends very much on the behaviour in the organisation: ​Leadership – the ones that make decisions on the strategic level are the ones that should show that their decision making is supported by company priorities: I mean, if organisation gonna focus on specific goals and will ask whole organisation employees make them happen, but at the same time continues making decisions that are not entirely in line with what is agreed, will be very harmful and people may be lost, what exactly is important and which leader to trust. All the other layers of the organisation – sometimes it is important that people are not afraid continuously remind the leadership what is the direction they have set and challenge the new asks, that differ from set priorities. In fact this way people will encourage leadership to be accountable of their own decisions. Whole problem of the situation, is that most of the time there are leadership representatives that are not willing to give up things or put something on pause, even though there are no capabilities in the organisation or those things are not concidered as must do for the organization. Therefore it is crucial that leadership agreements are respected by themsleves. Otherwise it will create a situation, that everything is important and leadership will not look like as a united front or trustworthy. Keep it simple and communicate As any task, priorities should be described in a very simple language, if you want them to be understood and followed by the whole organisation. It must be communicated via various channels and most importantly: no priority will work or will be ever achieved, if it is communicated in the begging of the year and results calculated at the end of the year. There should be a constant review of the progress and results achieved, which will be a reminder at the same time. Reflect your priorities in yearly employee targets Another important detail, that makes sure people’s awareness what are the priorities for the organisation - are set clear yearly targets (in different companies it is called KPIs (key performance indicators) or OKRs (objectives and key results). This is how you will not only measure the results, but as well will keep people focused. Just do not forget, that yearly goals for every employee should be: understandable easily measurable influenceable - every employee should have a good understanding which functions will help him to achieve set targets amount of targets to single person can be up to max. 5, through the year with different weights and delivery timelines. Final thoughts There are many organisations where priorities are just a mirage: senior leadership talks about it, but rest of the organisation has very little clue about it. This often happens, because of lack of leadership support with their decision making, lack of examplory behaviour, lack of clarity of what exactly should be achieved via set targets and lack of communication.