If you’re looking for a solution, or you’re looking for something that is going to fit or drastically reduce the manual work or friction that your team is facing, and you’re sure that there’s a solution out there, you don’t have to marry one tool. You can move. Now, you’re not going to move everything at once. I want you to carry out a little test. Just go around that tool. Look at it. Test it out with samples or the type of work you do. See if it’s possible that this tool can help your team members and if they would be able to adapt to it.
Also, you’ll see something that I want to call organized disorder. You look at whatever you’re using, a project management tool, work management tool, task management tool, and in your eyes, it looks quite horrible. No one has been able to properly put things in place for years. But you’ll see your team members are using it. They are responding well to it. They can find where they’ve kept things because they’re used to it. Your problem is that you’re not able to get proper data or proper dashboards from that data, or to see what is going on, who’s working on what, who is responsible for what. You’re not able to see the velocity, how deadlines are being met, and how often those deadlines are met. You’re not able to track all of these things, and that is a problem for you. But it’s not so much a problem for the members of your team.
You want to make this something they are also concerned about. If they are not concerned about it, if they do not see it as a problem, you’re going to keep having missing data because they don’t understand or they don’t know why they should be updating it. There’s a reason these inputs are needed in projects, because at the end of the day, you want to look at performance and metrics. You want to see if you’re meeting the goals that you and the members of the executive team set at the beginning of the year or the beginning of the quarter.
If the data is incomplete or incorrect, if people are rushing through submissions and requests and they’re not able to properly categorize, organize, or put together this information, then you’re not going to be able to provide accurate or reliable data that the business can use to make proper, informed decisions. Look at all of these things. If there’s a tool that you know will make things better for you, you have to decide whether you can get everyone on board. If you’re approaching a new tool, get a few people to look at it and see if it’s a great option for you and your team members. Take a few people, test it out, test some of your projects, test some of your workflows, see how people respond to it, see how well it fits your team, and then you can move on to migrating everything there.