5 Tips for Planning a Successful Asynchronous Project

July 18, 2022 Stan

Let’s say you’re assigned a new project and learn that your team is not only fully remote, but they also work different time zones and alternate days of the week. Sound familiar? For some Project Managers, planning an asynchronous project is new territory. How you set up your team, set expectations, and manage the team over time determines the success of a project.

Here are 5 tips on how to plan a asynchronous project:

One

Identify everyone’s location and working hours (e.g., time zones are the easiest to gather). If there are multiple business units, gather that information as well. You may find that there are team members spread across different working hours. This is also called building a stakeholder matrix (names, roles, responsibilities, etc.)

Once you build a matrix, then it’s time to assess whether there are pockets during the day where everyone is available. For example, the prime pocket for everyone to meet on a call could be on Wednesdays between 8:00-11:00am CT. That allows you to meet with team members in the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa. One useful online tool can be found on timeanddate called, International Meeting Planner: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html.

If you find there are multiple team members per group you choose (business unit, location, etc.), ask for a designated representative for each group. Even if you may not have partnering Project Managers for each group, you can still request a representative for communications, escalations, etc.

Two

Next, determine the process from receiving requests to providing status and issue management through project closure. Having a clear process for the team provides a guide in case team members have questions or need to provide status.

Ask questions, such as:

What are the requirements to submit project requests? Gather the platform instance (if there are multiple), business unit, campaign name, requestor’s name, and target deadline.
Who is going to work on what? This is where building a project plan with clear owners with start/end dates, including dependencies will be helpful in understanding who’s working on what.
How will everyone know the status of a specific task or issue?
- Schedule recurring status calls with each group representative. Remember that 8:00-11:00 am CT pocket on Wednesdays? Use that. Run through what is completed, what’s in progress, and what’s left. Also, identify any new risks/issues, along with decisions needed.
- Utilize a project plan or build a tracker for a specific phase of the project. Do you need to include a project health metric (green = on track, yellow = off track, working on mitigation plan, or red = task is off the rails with no mitigation plan)? Pro tip: keep the status of each task simple, such as In Progress and Completed. If there are multiple stages for each task, implement a separate category like Phase. Then you can indicate where the task is in the process: Build, Internal QA, Ready for Client Review, UAT, Ready to Deploy, Deployed.

Three

Now that you’ve determined, people and process, it’s time to move on to deciding on a collaboration tool. The easiest way to stay connected is utilizing a tool that allows teams to view the same information to overcome location, time zones, and different working days. Other features a collaboration tool can also provide are communication features, such as chat (including historical conversations), calendar sharing, and file sharing. While email is great, important updates or issue tracking could get buried in people’s inboxes and never read. Some common tools across project management include, but not limited to are Basecamp, Microsoft Teams, Workfront, and Asana.

If you find yourself working between internal teams, along with clients and vendors, finding a common collaboration tool may be tricky. Learn ahead of time if there are any security concerns and/or provisioning roadblocks someone may run into, understand what kind of options you have so everyone is on the same tool. Making exceptions for a team member or two can make it difficult to manage and cause the Project Manager to spend more time piecing all the communications, status, and files together.

When working on simple projects, it’s possible you could keep communications via email. If there is a defined body of work that team members need to have visibility, implementing a tracker using shared Google Sheets is a common tool. It can include the same elements mentioned in tip 2.

Four

Understand the escalation paths. This one may seem complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. When something major comes up, determine who to go to. Typically it’s the Project Manager, who will then manage and route the escalation down the appropriate path. If the issue cannot be resolved within the project, leadership can be brought in to help determine next steps.

Five

Find ways to connect with one another. The biggest blocker to projects are people. We can implement and build project plans all day, but if we cannot find a connection with our teams you’ll notice a lack of engagement. Include a quick ice breaker at the top of status calls, allow the first 2 minutes of networking/chatting while others log on to the call, or have a fun board on your collaboration tool where team members can share a fun fact, personal updates (someone returning from a vacation), etc. Building trust and camaraderie over time of a project is priceless. I recall being on a project and being invited to a team member’s wedding celebration. The wedding was located in another country. Knowing that I couldn’t travel at the time, it was a simple gesture that exhibited the trust we built as a team.

Need help planning for a successful asynchronous project? Relationship One is here to help, contact us today!

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