01 Mar The Ultimate Guide to Days of the Week
Days of the Week is a set of regular communications and actions that ensures all parties accomplish their project tasks.
Did you ever notice how sales and marketing projects can create stressful environments? After a decade of managing, we at Sales Beacon most definitely have! After all, once a project is scoped, estimated, planned, and scheduled, project managers have to wrangle overworked and cross-functional teams. Easier said than done, right?
Sales Beacon developed the ABC project framework to succeed in these challenging environments. In this framework, we combine elements of Agile, SCRUM, change management, traditional project management and a ton of common sense. ABC lets us deliver end-to-end projects in fast-changing business environments.
Our Days of the Week (DOTW) methodology works as a subset of ABC. It is a set of regular communications and actions that ensures all parties accomplish their tasks to complete any project on time and on budget.
Days of the Week is the reason Sales Beacon has completed more than 800 successful assignments for companies like Cisco, Telus and Dell. Here’s how it works:
Expect the Unexpected
By recognizing the reality of modern project management, DOTW prepares each team for the unexpected.
DOTW is based on a set of operating assumptions that keep everyone accountable. These assumptions come from understanding the fast-changing and competitive nature of most sales and marketing teams.
In a typical project, most members of a team don’t report to the project sponsor. Many of them don’t even work in the same department as one another! They can be on different sides of the globe and working on many different projects.
Given this far-flung team structure, the first thing DOTW assumes is frequent change. Whether it is budget, scope, time or people, you can bet that in a constantly-changing organization things aren’t going to stay static.
Other givens:
- Everyone is distracted and doing other things during meetings.
- Team members are often overworked and engaged in numerous other projects.
- Even with the best of intentions, deliverables will often be delayed because people are coping with all their other to-do lists.
By recognizing the reality of modern project management, DOTW prepares each team for the unexpected.
Communication is Key
DOTW methodology addresses the management and communication of two key areas of project management: accountability and risk.
Daily Accountability
Unlike other project methodologies, DOTW and ABC recognize the need to firmly track action items and we carefully track team members’ activities. What could be more important than knowing who is doing what and when are they doing it? A typical week for a Sales Beacon PM could look like this:
- On Monday, send action items to stakeholders individually, and update project plans and statuses. If there’s any risk, escalate it to a manager.
- On Tuesday and Wednesday, hold status meetings. Based on each meeting, revise the schedule and the plan, as well as update any cloud-collaboration files and meeting notes. Continue to assess any risk.
- On Thursday, send the most current project status to the team and program sponsor. Update the project dashboard and continue to assess risk.
- On Friday, send action items to stakeholders as a group, and update the project plan and all relevant files.
DOTW works because it makes everyone accountable from start to finish. There’s nothing that works as well for keeping a project on track, on time and on budget.
DOTW focuses on consistent risk escalation in case corrective measures are needed.
Risk Escalation
Are you one of those people who are afraid of their own shadow? Well that shadow could cause your project to fail! You cannot avoid project risk just like you can’t avoid your shadow.
Project risk is a normal occurrence that must be communicated and escalated. A risk is anything that may impact a project. It could be a technological failure, people leaving the project, changing market conditions or even an act of God.
Each project needs a tailored risk-management plan to address potential changes to project scope. Through DOTW methodology, risk is communicated to the appropriate personnel to assess and, if necessary, redeploy resources.
DOTW focuses on consistent risk escalation to make sure everyone is on the same page in case corrective measures are needed.
Implement DOTW Yourself
With our Days of the Week and ABC project management methodologies, Sales Beacon has made mincemeat out of tough projects. Share in our success. Try out DOTW in your projects to see how it works. Need some help putting it into action? Reach out to our experts. We’re here to help.