Undocumented Features

 As managers and project managers, we often talk about planning.  There is more to planning, of course, than building your project documentation.  Preparation is also an effective way to multiply the capabilities of your team.  A properly prepared team have the following advantages:

• People understand the tasks assigned to them better, thus able to complete more quickly
• People with a better understanding of what their contribution means to the next person in the chain in turn prepares the next person better
• People with a better understanding of the expected outcomes will naturally get there faster and deliver better results
• People build on each other’s work rather than duplicating research and preparation already done
• People better understand the importance of what they’re doing
• People have more similar perspectives on the project and the deliverables

So what kind of preparation should you do to gain these advantages like these for your project?  I recommend a project preparation meeting.  This meeting should be a classroom-style meeting, that is, your goal is to teach your team about the project.  Unlike your project kickoff and status meetings, your goal here is to get into the weeds and educate on the details.

This will not be a quick meeting to prepare for.  The typical educator spends 2-3 hours per presentation hour on preparation, and this meeting should be no exception.  You need to go interview people, do research, and bring information of real value to your team.  The goal here, remember, is to relay information to your team members that each of them will need to do their job in the project so that they do not have to track these things down themselves.

Without this preparation, each of your team members will spend extra time doing research, or worse, not do the research and wing it on what they think needs to be done.  Appropriate preparing of your team can improve both quality and time to completion.