The Importance Of Organization

[xxtoni]

I've gotten some good info out of this community and since I have a bit of time I thought I'd contribute a bit.

One of the biggest problems in our company was organization. As far as organization was concerned we basically worked on whatever we could remember on top of our head. Of course this led to numerous problems, more urgent work was delayed while stupid tasks like someone coming by the shop for a decal or the opening hours for their shop was done immediately, personally I frown upon this kind of work but I just can't get it into our guy's heads to stop doing these sorts of things.

This was especially annoying for me cause I'm an organization nut.

To get this whole thing resolved I looked around for a project management software. This is more of an issue than you would think cause most of them require that you register a user for each assignee and requires at least some level of interaction from that account to work properly, probably cause they're designed for office or online work.

In the end I settled with Zoho Projects for one main reason, it has built in gantt charts. These are useful because they should all your projects over a period of time and you can immediately see which ones are overlapping and what will be done when. There are 3 of us who will be handing care of the software. So when someone of us adds a new project, for example when making a deal, ideally we'd first look at the current projects listed on the gantt charts to see what projects are on there, how much time they'll take and then arrange the new deal accordingly. Anything that takes more than 15 minutes to make ends up on the project management software. So whenever something that you estimate to be over 15 minutes of work is required of you, you immediately throw it into the project management software and set the due date.

Later on when you're on a computer and when you have more time to the project description you add the required materials needed, how the product is to be made and so on. If there is an installation the location needs to be added as well so we can batch jobs at the same location at once since we do jobs nationwide, this is also useful is something has to be picked up from that location, instead of just going there to pick something up it can be picked up along the way. This is also done to save fuel, before the change we used around 300 gallons per month, that's $2k just for fuel!

Another terrible area was materials for signs. Our guys would go to the store multiple times per day. It's not far, maybe 10 minutes with the car but it adds and it's an unproductive waste of time and fuel. We just made a stockpile of the most common things we use like paints, screws, bits and so on.

This rampant lack of organization led to huge delays in finishing jobs and staying late for almost every day for a month or two.

Now we have a casual meeting every morning, I print out the work that needs to be done for that day, we discuss what needs to be done, talk about possible problems, if something hasn't been added to the projects or details we discuss that as well.

If we have a product that we've never done before we will usually sit down for an hour or two long casual brainstorming session just to see for whom we're doing the work, to work out the possible problems, compare it to work we've done before, check possible problems we had with similar products, discuss the creation of a sample for approval and then off to work.


Hope this helps someone out. Bad organization or rather lack of it can lead to a lot of trouble, in our cases it indirectly created a lot of stress, lots of tensions, unhappiness both from our side and the clients.

If anyone wants to know anything...I'd be glad to help.

 

[kanini]

Good to hear you're on the right track and thanks for a good reading! I feel we are in the same situation you was in before e.g. lacking organization and priorities, and being late with a lot of projects. I would like to ask how the staff has taken on this change, do they work with the project management system or is it just you and a couple other guys? How about the morning meetings, do you feel it is valuable or could you have it just once a week (Monday mornings?) instead of every day? Thanks again for an interesting post!

 

[xxtoni]

Good to hear you're on the right track and thanks for a good reading! I feel we are in the same situation you was in before e.g. lacking organization and priorities, and being late with a lot of projects. I would like to ask how the staff has taken on this change, do they work with the project management system or is it just you and a couple other guys? How about the morning meetings, do you feel it is valuable or could you have it just once a week (Monday mornings?) instead of every day? Thanks again for an interesting post!

One thing I want to add that I forgot in my OP before I start answering your questions.

This isn't really related to organization but it was another huuge problem for us. Quality Control. We had quite a few embarrassing scenarios with products that went out faulty. This was due to a lack of rigorous quality control. It should be standard practice to test the product in it's natural environment before it goes out, in our case we had big problems with shadows on face-lit LED signs. Because most of our signs are one-off custom made there is no exact science here where you can say "ah, I'll put this module here and the next ones with spaces of 5cm" or something like that.


As far as use of the system goes currently it's me and 2 other guys because only we deal with the project, the rest of the team does the manufacturing and installation. As far as the change is concerned...you know, I've discovered something. Most people are creatures of habit and therefore don't like change, that's why people who are overweight say they want to lose weight but still eat 2 pounds of potato chips every night, it's comfortable and easy. Implementing the change was and is a thing of patience and perseverance. Every once in a while they revert to their old ways and you have to remind them to use the system. If they call me and tell me about some project or mail me something about it I just reply and say use the system and I basically don't want to deal with anything that isn't in the project management system. I'm sure it's gonna take a while for them actually start using it properly because I don't think they've seen the full benefit just yet. How much time and energy is saved with having everything in front of your eyes and knowing what has and hasn't been done instead of asking "oh did you do that thing" and constantly calling someone and mailing back and forth...Not to mention the reduced mental stress and mental energy drain of having a clear head without having to remember all of this stuff and deadlines and so on and forth. Smartphones have allowed us, or at least me, to clear our head from remembering all these mundane things that keep taking up menta processing power. Since I started jotting down every aspect of my life in Evernote, Wunderlist and as of late Zoho Projects I'm a lot more relaxed and calm.

Moving right along. As far as the morning meetings are concerned. I strictly insist that they be half an hour long. If we don't have anything to talk about we'll sit and look at each other. The reason for this is that it provides a sense of structure. Another reason is often times you will find yourself remembering something like 2 minutes after a meeting ends and you would have loved to have brought it up but you won't remember it for the next one and it might not be relevant then. A bit longer meeting once a week could certainly work but since we had so little organization to begin with I want this to go on for a while longer to see if it will work well or if further changes need to be made to improve the organization and workflow. Once some of these principles are burned into everyones mind the meetings will probably be reduced gradually to something like the once per week you mentioned.

Another thing I am curious to see is how this system will perform under tight deadlines and heavy workloads. Currently we're in somewhat of a slowdown so we don't have to be 100% efficient to cope with the work but we'll see how it all works under heavy workload. We have also had problems with estimating how long it will take us to finish a certain project so that's another thing that we'll be looking to improve in the near future.