Now that you've started to work towards getting all your projects aligned to the organizational direction or vision, and its priorities, let's see what we can do to coordinate all of the projects in a way that seems to be well choreographed as opposed to trying to herd cat. I doubt that pinker was thinking about project management when they came up with this quote, but when I found it, I thought, this makes good sense to me. I've been in many organizations where project teams are either subtly or directly in each other's face, trying to sabotage other projects. For resources, whether it is based on ego of the project leader, or rewards that they're going to get from a successful project or whatever it might be coordinating projects, goes a long way to increasing the success Have all of the projects across the board. But it takes something beyond just the project teams and the project leaders to do this.

Now, let me offer you a simple tool or a simple framework that will help to get at this challenge. One of the first things that can be extremely helpful is simply getting all of the project leaders and possibly even all of the project teams, although that might be a bit of a daunting task. So let's just start with the project leaders together into a room occasionally. If there's lots going on in the organization, this may need to happen once a month. Now that task just by itself can be difficult. getting busy project leaders together with all of the other busy project leaders, isn't going to happen unless we've got the first essential in place.

And if you remember that was about senior leaders, acting as owners. When a senior leader calls all the project team leaders together, they're likely to show up now. This tool that's in front of you is simply a way to help the project teams identify and then communicate what's going on. So imagine a room imagine you've got 15 project leaders in there and an executive, maybe a facilitator to help guide this. And we've got three big sheets of paper on the wall. Each one of the respective project leaders gets a different colored stack of sticky notes.

And what we want them to do is to look at this month, what's going on for each of the projects. And they will simply list the project and it's identified by the color, so it makes it easy, what activity Do they have going on, and then what groups in the organization does that impact? We'll do that for this month. We'll do that for the next month. And then we will also do it for two months out. We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.

This is really real time work. Just identifying this by itself can go a long way to helping people understand why folks get confused, that are not on project teams. The project teams themselves know what's going on in their respective projects. The rest of the employees in the organization don't know that. But they're being bombarded by some form of communication about all of this stuff. And none of its making any sense.

So what this affords is an opportunity for simply to start with the executives and the project leaders to see what's going on each respective month. So on the first month, you can see we've got a blue, green, pink, gray and orange project. So what's that 12345 different projects, you can see the second month, next one out, we've got a yellow project coming on whatever that is. So a new project starts to show up. And the next month out, nothing's dropping off. We're just continuing with that same level of activity.

Now that by itself can be helpful. You can dig into this fairly quickly and start to see where we've got some real opportunities for gains and efficiency. If we looked at just the groups that were being impacted each month, we can see we've got directors involved with three different projects this month next month, we've got supervisors involved with 12345 different projects. In the next month out, we can see that sales are involved with four different projects. Now, is there not a way that we can somehow make it easier on the directors and the supervisors and the sales by coordinating some of these activities. Don't ever underestimate how much the directors or the supervisors or the sales guys would appreciate that kind of coordination.

We can dig into this even more deeply. Let's look at the activities that are going on. So for example, in this first month, we've got 1234 activity number ones. And what this is telling us is that we've got the same activity going on four different times with four different groups is there not a way to economize that and do the one activity at one time and pull the four different groups involved together, we can look at the next month and we've got activity number three, there's five times that that's going on, involving different groups. Two months out, we've got three different activity fives. So here is just simply a visual representation of what's going on.

And what will be going on next month in two months out. As I said, Don't expect your project team leaders to resolve this on their own because usually this just gets into a debate. We need to have the senior leader or senior leaders, whoever is quarterbacking these particular projects, whoever is owning each of these different projects in the room because they're the ones who are providing the resources and they're the ones who are looking looking for ways to economize and maximize efficiencies. So this is a great tool to think about coordinating projects. Now it's your turn find this worksheet. You can do this on your own, if you like, it will take a little bit of time to flesh this out, you may need to get more information from other people.

But once you start to build this out, it becomes an incredibly helpful tool. This is an opportunity for you to take this idea of coordinated projects using this tool and bring it into your organization. Do this with a group if you like, do it on your own doesn't matter. But it's a helpful tool and it has been tried many times and it works every time. There's the question What can you do to increase the likelihood that all of your projects in the organization are coordinated and avoid the ongoing competition or confusion that happens when you're Projects aren't coordinated. Find this worksheet, this action plan and make a note to yourself.

That's the question coordinating your projects, eliminating confusion and competition. What are you going to do?