Tag: Project Management

Definition

Teamwork.com is a SaaS (Software as a Solution) which is a Project Management System applied in Diamond Digital Marketing (DDM) to manage the execution of all project.

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How teamwork.com looks like

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What Problem the Teamwork.com Solves

Before we dived into the problems we encoutered , allow me to setup the environment that is close to the reality.

Imagine you are working in a company which has 20 projects come from 15 companies at the same time on the fly. You are a newbie with a title Marketing Executive in this company who just reported to due for only 1 week. Your company have 50 staff. Although you direct report to your superior which is a Senior Digital Marketing Manager, both the Marketing Director and the Senior Digital Marketing Manager, as well as the clients you are serving , can and will assign you task directly.

Searching Inefficiency

Multi Project Environment

One day your superior is asking you to find out the “Logo PNG File” from one of the loyal clients which your company had already worked on 3 projects with. While you start searching for the “Logo PNG File”, you should make the following decisions before you can find the file.

• In which Google Drive you should search for as the Logo PNG File should have been saved in somebody’s Google Drive that you don’t have access rights to. Imagine each time when you are searching for 1 file, you may need to search for 5 Google Drives, which means 80% (4/5) of the time on searching is wasted for each File you searched. Imagine if you need to search for 1000 files in a year, how much time you have spent on the searching activities which didn’t bring any productivity.
• What Keyword to search for. While you are searching for an appropriate Google Drive in your company, what Keyword should you search in the Google Drive? While there are 4 components which locate a correct file:

1. Client’s Name (e.g. DDM_Logo)
2. File Title (e.g Logo)
3. File Version (e.g. v1 , v2, v20240815)
4. Approval Status (e.g. Approved , Rejected By Client)
5. File Variant (e.g. 1000×1000 pixels, Editable , Transparent Background)

Imagine if the Logo File you searched for simply came out with the result “Logo.png” , how can you decide the 5 points above? And unfortunately, most of the time you don’t even know (before you read this article) there are 5 components you should be considered during searching a file.

The Project Management System (Teamwork.com) is going to eliminate the searching cost.

Multi Task Environment

On another day, your superior complained that she is not happy with the speed of your delivering the output. She wanted to help you to speed up your work and she asked you the following questions:

1. How much tasks you are on hand right now
2. What are the priorities of all these tasks and what is the logic behind prioritising these tasks. 
3. What tasks are waiting for the client’s reply before we can move forward.

Before you can answer these questions, do you have a mechanism to record all these tasks? Even if you have this mechanism , how much time do you need to spend each day to maintain the hygiene of the record?

How much time do you need to spend on searching for all the tasks and consolidate them into 1 spreadsheet and report to your superior?

Even worse , while you are “searching: for all the tasks , do you know what keyword to “search” for a particular task? How can you guarantee that you didn’t miss any task when each person will use a different title to mention the same task in the email?

In turn, probably you may need 4 hours to produce this report to your superior, and that is exactly the reason why you cannot deliver the output on time (because your superior asked for a report which consumed you 4 hours). 

While your superior , the Senior Marketing Manager , having spent 1 mins to read your report, now she understand how challenge you are to handle all the 50 tasks at the same time, don’t forget that there are still the Marketing Director and your 20 Clients who didn’t (and will not) read your report , and therefore keep complaining they are waiting for so long for your output. 

One of the functions of Teamwork.com is helping you to enumerate and prioritise all the tasks in one click.

Multi Communication Channel Environment

Imagine this scenario : While you have been added into Digital Marketing Project Whatsapp Group with 6 people involved which you just joined 1 week ago. One day your client in the Whatsapp group is asking for you to find out a Last Year Budget Plan Cap Screen .jpeg File which was sent to your company 1 year before. Lucky the Digital Marketing Project Whatsapp Group is created by the company owned Whatsapp Number, so that you go for this mobile phone handset and start searching for the cap screen. As it is a cap screen that the client for sure didn’t rename the cap screen file for search-friendly purposes, you started to scroll back to top from the very bottom of the Whatsapp Group to search for that cap screen, which took you 15 mins but in vain.

You start wondering if the client had really sent via the Digital Marketing Project Whatsapp Group. You send a message to all the teammates in the same Whatsapp Group and ask for them to search for the cap screen .jpeg file inside their personal whatsapp conversation box with that client. After less than 1 mins all your colleagues told you that they found nothing. You wonder if they really take it seriously. But unfortunately you cannot prove anything.

You know it is unlikely that it can be found in the email box, but you still take a chance to search in the email box of the ex-staff who acted as your position. As the cap screen will not be assigned a very search-friendly name , you can only filter all the email with an attachment , and read the email title one by one. Found nothing, for sure.

And finally you compromised and you told your client that your side lost the Last Year Budget Plan Cap Screen. Lucky your kind client told you that he remembered he sent the cap screen file to you via a Google Drive Link. So that in the Whatsapp Group and search for the Google Drive received around 1 year before. Bingo ! You finally got the Last Year Budget Plan (and in the very inner you , you muttered why the client didn’t find it by himself) , although you have already spent 1 hour to do so.

Do not underestimate the time you spent within a year to seeking for a password, as well as resetting password of all the applications you have used in the company.

As you are the Digital Marketing Executive who just onboard for 1 week, you should have the login credentials of the digital assets from both of the 20 clients that are under your manage, including 50+ digital assets including :

Multi Authority Environment

While one of your job duties are to do the regular Facebook Page Post copywriting, you need to get the approval from your superior by emailing the copywriting to her, before you can send the ready-to-publish version to your client for approval. Once your superior approved the copywriting and replied your email with a little bit comment and adjustment which is not supposed to be seen by your client, you cannot directly forward the email from your superior to your client without deleting the email content that is not approrpiate for the client. And therefore you need to create a brand new Email every time you have a new version of copywriting, but all these emails are actually referring to the same article. Imagine if you have 60 articles per month , which each article is modified 3 times on average, you are additionaly created 120 emails. How do you search for the latest version or approved version after 3 months will be definitely a challenge.

By using the feature in Teamwork.com as the Project Management System, this kind of searching cost can be eliminated.

Multi Talent Environment

Imagine when you are building an e-shop for your client, your client is requesting you to create a “Banner” at the top of the “Front of the Website“to show the hot item of the eshop. When you , as a Salesperson , reply to reconfirm to your client that you will ask the web designer to design a “Hero Banner” in the “Landing Page” . So you pass this requirement to your Web Designer, which she asks you how many numbers of Product Photos are going to install into the “Hero Banner Slider”. Once she confirmed the number of photos in the slider, she passed her design with the HTML and CSS Code to the programmer to build the “Slider” , which the Slider now has an unique programming ID of “slider_home_one“. He had created a CSS Class “#slider_home_style” so that in the future any Slider can apply the same CSS style to make the design align. 

Can you realise that even though in the same organisation ,both of you (Salesperson), Client, Web Design and the Programmer are referring to the same object (“Banner”), they are in fact using totally different wording / jargon to describe the world, not to mention if there people in different company with different academic background are using different wording to refer to the same thing. In linguistic this problem pattern is called Polymorphism.  

By using the Project Management System – Teamwork.com, in order to avoid the misunderstanding , we are trying our best to standardize the wording that all different people are going to use to describe the same thing.

Communication Inefficiency

Communication Mesh

Imagine when you are working for a project with 10 people, it is quite common that you will create a Whatsapp Group and invite everyone who is involved into this project to join. 

Everytime when you want to update the progress of one of your web design tasks, even though you initially just want to notify the Web Designer in the Whatsapp Group, you eventually type a “@Designer” handle in the Whatsapp Group and everyone in the Whatsapp Group will receive that message. Although you only want to communicate with 1 person (the Web Designer),in turn 8 remaining people have wasted the time to check the message and find out that the message is not relevant to them, and therefore 8 communications are wasted.

If you want to split the Main Whatsapp Group into subgroups, you will find that finally you have no idea which Whatsapp Group you should go to for checking the previous important message that you have notified your teammate.

Now if you are working for 20 projects with 20 Whatsapp Groups with 20 Tasks on the fly per project, you can do the maths and find out how much time of communication is wasted.

We call this communication pattern “Mesh Topology” and in order to stream the communication , we have to turn the communication pattern from “Mesh” to “Star” Topology.

The Project Management System Teamwork.com is here to solve this problem.

Lack of Quality Assurance

Input Quality Control

While most people are alert on controlling the quality of the output of a Task, seldom people will pay attention to controlling the quality of the input of a Task. One of the prerequisites of the input of the Task is the Task Instruction.  

Let’s illustrate the concept with 2 instructions in below:

Instruction One : Write an article that can convert the traffic to sales

Instruction Two: Based on the product specification found in the Product Collection – Children Footwear in our website , write an English human article (which the output will be used as a Facebook Post) within 300 words in casual tone and manner, using “love” as the sales angle,  to convert the traffic in Facebook Post to Sales Transaction , with an expected CTR of 2%.

Which one (Instruction One and Two) do you think is more executable and the less risk of being rejected by the client after delivered?

Obviously Instruction Two is the answer. 

However, in reality , The instructors may think that it is not worth spending 30 minutes to write an instruction which leads the executor to write an article which can be completed within 1 hour. And therefore they will apply a “trial-and-error” approach to let the executor write a draft and modify the draft afterwards, which this method make the instructor invest least time on it.

This method is only in favour of the instructor which in expense of the time of revising articles by the executor, which in turn brings a “loss” to the company as a whole.

Meanwhile, due to the fact that most of the time the instructor is also the superior of the executor, the executor does not dare to challenge the quality of the instruction provided by the instructors, leading the quality of the input (i..e the instructions) with no quality control.

To consider the interest of both instructor and executor, by creating the Templated Instructions for the repeating tasks, everytime the instructor simply calls the Templated Instruction again, so as to save the time of the instructor of repeatedly writing the same instructions details again and again.

Moreover, we can keep fine-tuning the instructions to make it perfectly. As the Templated Instruction will be used many times, the time we invested in fine-tuning the instructions will become an “asset” (i.e. instead of expenses). 

Here comes the feature called “Templated Task List” which exactly fits the need of Templated Instructions

Output Quality Control

Unlike Physical Product (i.e. SKU) which has a predefined and standardised deliverable, it is quite hard for a business to standardise the service in each deliverable.

Imagine how you can measure the quality of the Marketing advice provided by a consultant to a restaurant and a brand of a fashion chain store?

If we cannot quantify or measure the quality of the deliverable, that means the business is at risk, which will bring the business to failure in the long-run. 

While staff training is another big topic regarding how to control the quality of their output, before that we can build a Task Library which stores all the delivered Tasks, no matter success or failure, into one place. Whenever the newbie wants to carry out a Task by himself, he can refer to the Task Library to gain some insights and learn the error from others , in order to save the wasted time derived from error.

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Conclusion

Teamwork.com is a the major project management system used within the entire DDM Group. Details usage of each feature will be mentioned in another articles.