Tag: Project Management

Work reflection from my time at Conestoga

Originally published on LinkedIn.

“Most of the time, we work in the system, not on it. […] If there’s a hole in the boat, it’s easy to spend all day bailing water with a bucket. Or we can take a moment to pull the boat onto the dock and fix the leak. When we work in the system, all we can do is bail. When we work on the system, we have a chance to make things better.”

“161. To Get to New York,” This Is Strategy, by Seth Godin.

I was not let go from my job at Conestoga due to issues of performance or competence. But even though the organizational restructure was not my fault, I am reflecting on the lessons learned from issues that I was responsible for.

Accreditation is hard work. I saw 5 successful program accreditations in four years. By that metric alone, I delivered value.

Seth’s words spoke to the side of me that struggled. In retrospect, I wasn’t quite ready for the role when I started. I did not have a lot of experience in project management, and that showed in the ways I became the bottleneck to the work of the Chairs, Faculty, and the Degree Consultants (who bailed me out many times). In the end, we delivered (sometimes a little after the deadline), but in my inexperience I failed to see that in project management, problems trickle in slowly then happen all at once.

When I let things pile up, or when my attention was flitting across many projects, tasks, and areas of concern, I was just doing my best to keep my head above water and keep the system going.

I now know what it means to periodically pause to step back and look at things from a higher perspective, or as Seth says put the boat into dock and fix the leaks.

The leaks? Those were the things that made the system less efficient, lowered quality, and required a lot of manual inspection and rework. I’d plug a hole by locking down cells in Excel instead of helping faculty see the meaning of what was in it. I’d discuss the value of creating a culture of quality, but I’m sure most faculty still saw it as yet more work on the overhead of teaching. And perhaps the greatest sin is to generate a list of actionable tasks that only dealt with operations instead of seeking to move the needle on important metrics like measuring against graduate attribute attainment or improving retention.

All of these things would have been fixed in time, I’m sure. For now, I’ll just ensure I carry that lesson forward.

Productivity From Home

Note – not my workspace.
Photo by Anna Auza on Unsplash

It’s taken me six weeks, but I think I’ve finally found a good system for working from home. Like many people who are fortunate to work from home during the pandemic, I’ve been struggling with keeping my normal routines while working from my computer at home. I won’t pretend that I had a perfectly productive system when I used to commute to the office everyday, but where I had the illusion of being productive simply by being at work and conversing with my colleagues, at home I am totally cut off from those signifiers of “work.” In the last few weeks, I’ve had spurts of productive time, but those were relatively few in number.

Late last week, however, I found a good combination that allowed me to really focus on moving my tasks along. I’ll share some of the tools that have been working for me.

First, using headphones to play noise while I work helps me make the mental shift in context from “home” to “work”. I have two sets of headphones at home, and both work well – a wired set of Sony headphones with noise canceling function, as well as a set of Philips Bluetooth headphones that also cancel noise actively.

I don’t just listen to music, however. I find most music to be distracting to my workflow – even lyric-less songs. My mind tends to pick up on the melody, and I’ll focus on that instead of the task at hand. I have two sources of noise I currently use – a pomodoro Chrome extension that plays fuzzy white noise (and conveniently tracks my pomodoro sessions), as well as a pomodoro video on YouTube that includes a visual timer and ticking clock. The white noise blocks out ambient noises that otherwise gets through my headphone’s noise canceling feature, and the ticking noise helps me focus.

Speaking of pomodoros, I use the pomodoro method to break down the tasks into manageable chunks. It also has the benefit of bypassing my motivation drive. Rather than committing to working an 8-hour work day, I commit to the next 25-minute block of work.

I have a lot of projects and tasks to keep track of, so I use two systems to prioritize and track my work. For long term, multi-step tasks, I have set up a dedicated board on Trello to manage where each project is in the pipeline. I have created buckets that I can move tasks through, from the general pool of tasks, to the planning phase, into an active phase, and if the project is put on hold, I can take notes on what I need to do to push things along while the task is in limbo.

For day to day task planning, I went simple and set up a text file that I number tasks as I think of them for the day, then I keep track of what I accomplish each day in a growing list. I usually would do this in my notebook, but I liked being able to cleanly re-order tasks. On paper, you can only order tasks in the initial stack you wrote them in, but if something changes during the day (e.g. a meeting gets scheduled on short notice), it’s harder to move things around.

Aside from the Microsoft Office tools provided by my employer (Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, and OneNote), that covers my current workflow. Depending on how long the stay-home order is in place, I might update how this system evolves. It’ll also be interesting to see what of this system I port back with me to the office (I have a feeling I might bring the headphones to help me focus).

If you have any systems or tools you like, I’m curious to hear about it in the comment section.

Stay Safe and Awesome,

Ryan