Project Management Tip of the Week - 8th November

Hello, Jasmine here from LVL Up Consulting with this week's project management tip of the week. And usually you're stuck with just me, but today I've got the wonderful Kara Deveney joining me because Kara's going to share some of her experiences on this particular tip, which is all about how to deal with moments of intensity in a project.

So if you've been working on projects for a long time or even any sort of schedule based work such as event planning or anything really, you will know that there are moments of intensity when it comes to delivering work. There, of course are ebbs and flows. So there are times when things aren't so intense and you're sort of delivering but there are times where you need to buckle down, work hard, and get stuff done.

And that's what happened to us last week. So Kara.

K: Yes.

J: In these periods, which hopefully are rare, they're not the norm, what are your strategies for dealing with periods of intensity with project work?

K: So I always look to go back to the data. That's one of the first things that I, or we will do. And we often go back to what, what's the priority and write everything down that, that we need to do. I'm a stickler for pen and paper and having it on Trello and all, all sorts of things. But it's always just going to the 1, 2, 3, what's, what's most important, what can we tackle? And I think it's really important to stop, have a break, and make sure that you have some fun, have a laugh, and break that up because otherwise you'll just go down.

J: Absolutely. And we like to, if you have this luxury, tackle it as a team. And we are very fortunate that we do get to work as a team on a project. But we'll have periods where we, we diverge, we go and do tasks separately. We converge, we share notes, make sure we're all aligned you know, give each other feedback and off we go again. And in those periods of coming together, yeah, we definitely have a break, play some music, get a bit silly, do some dances in the office, just to bring our energy back and our focus back to make sure that we do in fact hit that deadline.

So it's, it shouldn't be the norm shouldn't be running intensely every single week. But when you gotta do it, you gotta do it. And it, you know, it'll help you catch up on your schedule, hit those deadlines and do really important things like make sure that you make your go live date or you're deploying an integration into production.

There are all moments of intensity, even testing. So take it easy. Recognize that you're in an intense period. Get it done but also stop, reflect, relax. Absolutely. So that you can come back the next week, which is where we are today after our intense week, last week. But that is our project management tip of the week.

We'll see you next time.