In this Edition

Note From the Editor: Happy Holidays from Everyone at AtTask to You!
Feature Article: It’s Not More With Less, It's Less With Less
Blog Posts: Project Leadership and Motivating Teams
Projects, Work, and Prioritization
Rushing: Resisting the Urge
Death by a Thousand Deliverables

Note From the Editor

It’s that time of year again – the Holiday Season. The Holidays always seem to bring with them an increased feeling of generosity and good will, but they also mark the quickly approaching end-of-the-year deadlines and, unfortunately for some, an increased feeling of stress and anxiety in the work place.

As this is our last newsletter of the year, we thought it appropriate to focus on how we can all get our work done as efficiently as possible now that most of us are down-to-the-wire and working hard to complete our projects in time. Our features this week include advice about doing more with less, effective resource planning, and the dangers in rushing and “box-checking”.

We hope that you find it useful and we wish you the Happiest of Holidays!

Feature Article

It's Not More With Less, It's Less With Less

Doing more with less really isn’t the answer to a diminishing resource pool and the need for profitability. The real answer is doing less with less, but doing more of the right things. Robert Half, author and pioneer in the employment field said, "The combination of hard work and smart work is efficient work."…

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Blog Posts

Project Leadership and Motivating Teams

The burden of doing more with less includes doing it with the right people, or projects are doomed from the start. As a general rule, I believe that people are really driven by a desire to contribute to something bigger than themselves. Let's face it, most of us don't spend our time changing the world, curing cancer or fostering world peace, but there is value to what all of us do. Team members who are allowed to share in the vision and understand how their role contributes to the success of a worthwhile endeavor tend to be engaged and motivated…

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Projects, Work, and Prioritization

In the real world, formalized projects are only a part of what gets done by the workforce. If we ever want to get a handle on accurate resource planning, I think we need to look at all the work done by individuals on our project teams. Much of the work that isn't really project related has the potential to be just as important and should probably be evaluated with the same level of scrutiny as project-based work. Otherwise, project managers, team leads, and other project leaders will never gain an accurate understanding of their people's priorities, difficulties, and status…

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Rushing: Resisting the Urge

A healthy amount of motivation and working hard to be as time efficient as possible are important parts of getting work done well. However, often times we make the mistake of rushing to complete tasks in an attempt to be time efficient. My experience has been that rushing does not always equal efficient. In fact, I have identified four major reasons why we should resist the urge to rush…

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Death by a Thousand Deliverables

It's easy for some people to look at deliverables as boxes to be checked. "Box checkers" don't actually provide any value to what they do, they are just going through the motions checking off the appropriate tasks so they can say they are done. At first, it might be easy to think, "As long as the project gets done, what does it matter?" Unfortunately, it does matter. When project teams are more concerned with meeting time-lines, it's easy to make short-term decisions that have long-term consequences…

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