We are slammed with projects and our team are not completing the items considered priority. Our project managers cant come up with any more excuses as to delays. Each day we are putting out fires and shifting our priorities based on which client is upset.
Where we are:
We are currently in a stage where each week we find ourselves with more than 5 projects in sensitive stages every week.
Where we want to go:
The goal is to minimize the amount of projects that are in the “sensitive stage” each week with client’s projects. I would like to move in a transition of finding ourselves focused working on time or ahead of time each week rather than catching up on projects every week.
Question: What steps can we take to get there? If you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment below.
Filed under: Team Management | Tagged: business, management, operations
Its a management issue, your managers are not successfully hitting their goals and commitments, fire them all or train them to accept their own commitments and perform as they said the would…the buck stops at the top….
Sounds to me like you need a carrot and stick approach, the carrot being an incentive based reward system that pays them to succeed and beat projections…it works great, and if they fail then replace one of them and the rest will fall in line…uts a matter of standards…must come from the top. don@todrinandassociates.com
It seems that your team is having problems prioritizing their time and managing these projects. Before you go firing your whole team as Donald suggests, I would recommend you have them take a course on focusing their time, such as the ones provided by Franklin Covey (I recommend the Focus seminar). Perhaps your team has never had an effective way to prioritize their time effectively and need some coaching on that.
Another issue may be regarding their motivation to work. Are you aligning their goals to your companies goals? Is it really in their best interest to work in the way you want them to? Maybe you need to restructure how you reward them. Also in regards to pay for performance, you may want to first consider if that is a true motivator for them. Perhaps you may need to tweak your approach, and make it a more team goal, where the team receives a reward as opposed to the individual. This way you have people willing to work together as opposed to on their own to achieve their goals.
So maybe try some training or restructuring of your reward system and if it doesnt work, then beat them with the stick
-Brandon
ps
How are you determining the root causes of this issue currently? do you have a system or person in place to analyze the bottlenecks in your process?