Organize projects, the right way
I've been planning and organizing big and small projects for the past 10 years. Since my mind is a pattern maker, I've designed a format you can use as a template to plan and organize any project, no matter the subject, or be it big or small. In this article, I'll explain this format and how you can customize it for your projects.
Understand the terms “plan” and “organize”
It’s important to understand planning and organizing to leverage both in the right situation.
When you plan a project, you make the most important decisions for your project. Decisions such as goals we tend to achieve, the obstacles we’d face on the way, etc.
But when you organize a project, you determine exactly how you’re going to accomplish those goals and figure out what, when, where, and how you can organize and coordinate your resources.
In this article, I‘m going to assume you already know the goals of your project and you’ve planed it. Planning is a very important step so don’t ever skip it. I’ll explain the planning process in another article. But for this article, I’ll discuss the organizing process of projects. I’ve explained each step of the process separately to make a big picture of the whole project organization architecture.
Steps to organizing your project
Of course, the most important assets you’ll have at any project are time and your team. The other resources you should carefully take care of include money, software, and any material tools. To be able to organize your project successfully, you’ll need to have a plan for each and every one of your assets. Then you should organize them to leverage them in the best ways possible.
I’ll explain how you can organize each resource in order as follows. Also, here’s the infographic I created using Canva to explain these steps in a visual way :)
1. Organize your time
You can’t organize your time without knowing what you’re going to do. List all the tasks of your project on a word processor document (I recommend a Notion page).
Don’t put too much time into this step. As you go on your project, many more tasks will be added to your backlog, but for now, focus on the ones you are aware of. Some tasks may be small and some big, it doesn’t matter, don’t let them distract you.
When you’re done writing all the known tasks, organize their order based on the pre-requisites and the Eisenhower Matrix. You may need to add some new tasks as you follow this step. Focus enough on this step and make sure your tasks are in the right order.
OK, now that you have an ordered list of tasks, start estimating how long each of them will take. If working in Notion, you can add a property to give this time to each task. The unit of time depends on your tasks and your project; you might need to measure it in hours or days, or even months. But usually, for medium to big-sized projects, days will work the best.
If you have to measure your time in months, it means the tasks you’ve created are too general and you have to break them down to organize them in a more accurate way.
Bring your tasks on a timeline view (it’s done easily in Notion) and review the order of your tasks. In this stage, you might need to revise the order of your tasks to make sure it makes more sense.
OK, congrats! You have successfully organized your time so far! Now let’s move to the next step, which — I believe — is the most critical part of organizing any project.
2. Organize your money
The budget of every project is limited — even at the biggest enterprises. So you’ll need to make sure you‘re going to have the highest ROI possible.
Start with the money you already have, and the money you need in order to achieve your project goals. It could be tricky to find the correct answer for how much you’ll need. Of course, the more the better! But you should find it using a financial statement (I’ll write more about it in a future article).
The most important part of any financial statement is considering your known expenses in categories. Think about everything, including tax, equipment, HR expenses, bank charges, etc.
Lead this to what you’ll have to do in order to reach your target budget. Do you need partners and sponsors? Do you need to find customers? Do you need investment in return for equity?
As your project continues, you will set new budgeting goals. Looking for money more than your actual valuation can simply kill your project — especially if your project is a startup. So make sure to set the right and realistic budget goals as your project go on.
3. Organize roles and processes
Alright! So far you organized what needs to be done in how long, and where your money is coming from and going to. Now it’s time to determine what roles you need in your project.
To determine these roles it’s critical to pay attention to their frictions. Having modular thinking highly helps you in this case. You can decrease friction between roles by designing them as independently as possible and focusing each role on a single business capability. Write down the responsibilities of each role based on the modular thinking method. This method helps your team to work from anywhere in the world and grow exponentially.
Now that you’ve made sure your project roles are loosely coupled and have designed the responsibilities, it’s time to connect the dots and design the processes between roles.
Again, think modular. Make sure each individual has access to all required resources and can function independently while being able to use the tools and technologies of their choice without interrupting other functions.
Design and document communication processes and tools to ensure your roles can communicate effectively. These processes can include meetings, software tools, communicating guidelines & rules, etc. Although don’t put too much energy into this step. It might change enormously as you go on with the project.
4. Organize your team
This step will directly influence the outcome of your project management and therefore should take your full attention and energy.
Bring your team onboard the project. Let them know about the plan and the goal of the project. Let your team ask questions and make sure they fully understand what’s expected as the final results and outcomes.
Now take your team onto the tasks and priorities. Make sure they understand every single detail. Encourage questions and help your team know what’s needed to be done and why. Also, share the money organization of the project. Make sure the team understands it fully.
Then let everyone know their roles and responsibilities. It’s best to have it written somewhere online, so they can go through it, think more deeply into their roles, and get back to it on the go. This roles book lets your team members clearly know who’s doing what in the team.
Encourage each team member to ask questions about their role and responsibilities. It’s very important they know what’s expected from them and which part of the final result is going to be achieved by their efforts and what final results and outcomes are expected from them.
Now that the project’s plan and each team member’s role are clear, let the team know each other. Organize ice-breaking sessions to let the team(s) get to know each other better. Keep it casual and fun!
5. Iterate
Congrats you’re done organizing the first round of organization, the right way! 🥳 Keep in mind that your job is not done until the project has ended. Iterate through the steps in continuous sprints.
While depending on your project the duration of your sprints can be different, make sure you have enough sprints to review your organization and make it better. Engage the minds of your team to fuel and re-organize better in every sprint.
Conclusion
In this article, I tried to make the steps I take to organize any project as clear as possible. I may have missed some steps or have not explained them enough. In case you’ve found such cases, just let me know. Also, I’d be more than happy to hear about your experiences and how you organize your projects. You can keep in touch with me on LinkedIn or by email.
