Project Management Ideas

Robert Redman:

I have been using The Raiser's Edge for almost a year and a half. I have come a long way from when I first started. I work for a university foundation as the Database Coordinator. I have never worked in an office seeting prior to this job. When things are slow, my job seems to go smoothly. It's only when things pick up that my projects seem to get out of order. I am responsible for internal and university data request; daily updates: deceased, returned mail, NetCommunity updates, etc.; all anual FinderServices and results updates/clean-ups; Blackbaud NetCommunity eblasts, page and part updates, etc. My question is what are some ways or ideas to stay focused and stay on top of all of my data request projects and completing them in timely manner and still be able to take care of my daily and annual projects/tasks?  I currently use Outlook Task/Calendar and a white board, and a note book for tasks I need to take note of on the fly from my coworkers. Using all of these, I am still getting behind. What makes it worse, is I haven't even mentioned the emails, phone calls, tasks I need to add to my list from my boss. I am also tasked with writing procedures and documentations, assigning projects to two interns, and I am now working with the MBA program students on a projects with us. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. 

 

Clearly you're not alone in feeling like the tasks are getting out of hand! I like many of the suggestions, but I would put something else out there. 


At my former job, the Director of Institutional Research tried to encourage us in the Advancement Office to use project management software (Basecamp, I think it was called) because of the size and complexity of our tasks, especially large appeal projects and the annual gala. I set up the gala project and asked people to participate, but it was just one more thing to open and figure out. Our daily work was so full of jumping from one project to the next, answering phone calls, putting out fires, doing routine things...stopping to type in a bunch of notes related to a face to face meeting we'd just had would have been a colossal waste of time. Beware of the system that takes more time to maintain than the job it manages!


I think it depends a great deal on the size of your organization/office. There were really only 3 or 4 of us working on projects together, and we were all in the same suite. When we had outside folks involved (consultant, event planner, committee) we would simply use email (Outlook, in our office) and put larger files in a Dropbox folder set up for the purpose. It would have been silly to ask all these other people to download yet another piece of software and pay attention to it. If they set it up to receive email notifications when something happened, why not just use email? Very few documents were being edited by multiple people, so there was no need for the multi-user input provided by project management software.


I, too, use Outlook Calendar and Tasks for most things. Long before Outlook had been invented, I had a very cyclical job in student services, and I had a text document that showed a page for each month, broken out into the tasks to be done in the first, second, third, and fourth week, since the dates could easily change but the basic timing of registrations was the same year to year. 


My poor, long-suffering work/study students had the dullest jobs most of the time. We had them "attach the media" for each completed batch - they opened the batch, opened each record in tury, and had to find the scan in the month folder and attach it to the Media tab. They also got to change lots of minor things by hand - fixing the Comments section of a bunch of Attributes so they would sort properly, or add a date to something. I never seemed to have time to do a Global Change, or to export/fix/import things like that. I'd look for something routine and easily understood (and easy to check) and train them in that. If you've got a really good intern, of course, you can start initiating them into the mysteries of RE!