Professional Team Management Tips For Creative Folks - as featured on Smashing Magazine

It has been some time now since I was commissioned to write an article on Team Management by Smashing Magazine and I thought I would post it up here also for anyone who may stumble upon it. Feel free to get in touch with any comments, feedback or advice on this subject and I will be looking to write a follow up to this on SM over the next few months inluding research on several project management methodologies such as Prince 2 (and it's recent refresh) and Agile Project Management with SCRUM.

Enjoy.

Introduction

Management is a vast subject, with several sub-categories, such as product, team management and project management. While all are interesting topics, this article focuses mainly on team management and offers some useful tips and ideas to promote discussion and help improve the performance and happiness of your teams.

There seems to be in creative sectors a fear of management and a great divide between creative and “business” people. This is often because the people doing the managing are not business-minded or business school graduates but are rather designers or developers. Managers in creative industries tend to be staff who have moved up within the company; for example, a junior designer who reaches mid-level, then senior, and eventually ends up running their own team; or a developer who works for himself but gets a series of major contracts, and before they know it they are the Managing Director of a small company. This type of team has many benefits but also some downsides.

Some of these ideas are not new or indeed particularly innovative, but they are often overlooked or even ignored. Below is a selection of key items for discussion within your team. The snippets cover a variety of topics to help managers in creative industries who may not have a managerial background. You may agree with some suggestions and not others, but the aim is to gain a basic understanding of key issues so that you can look at how to improve your team. After all, if you spend all your time producing great work and no time creating a great team, the first will be harder to achieve.

1. Why It Is Important

Good management is vital if we expect our work to be effective. A job goes through several activities and cycles between when it comes through the door and leaves as a nice shiny finished package; and effective management needs to be in place at each stage for the product to be completed on time, to a high standard and within the budget. Time and project management are not the only things to consider, though. Just as important are bringing a team in line with the company’s objectives and motivating the team so that it truly wants the outcome of its creativity to be successful.

As mentioned, managers in creative industries tend to have the background skills associated with their particular field, so they often are familiar with the kinds of problems their teams face day to day, as well as the solutions. Issues often arise, though, when they have to do something “managerial” about it. These designers and developers eventually find that management tasks occupy most of their time, and so making the shift gracefully is important.

Looking over everyone’s shoulders and chipping in an opinion and trying to be involved in every decision can be counter-productive. Let your team shine, and offer guidance and support when needed.

2. Tips And Suggestions

Know Yourself

What kind of manager are you?

Knowing yourself first is important before you start managing others. What kind of manager are you? Helping and managing others is hard without understanding what kind of person you are and what areas you can improve in.

There are several approaches to managing:

• Tell
  Top-down, you tell them what to do, with no involvement from them. In this style of leadership, information is funneled up, and decisions are funneled down very authoritatively. This style leads to members disagreeing with what they have been told or simply doing what is asked and nothing more.
• Tell/Sell
  You tell them what to do but try to “sell” them the idea as well. You attempt to sell to your team the benefits of a particular course of action but are essentially telling them to get it done. This style often creates compliant collaborators, people who simply do what has been asked more because of the benefits than because of personal motivation to achieve the objectives.
• Involve
  The team feels more a part of it. They are more involved in the direction of their work while still leaving the responsibility of decisions with the manager. Seeking input from the team creates a more enthusiastic team, and sharing ideas often helps generate new ideas.
• Co-create
  This has potential to harness the talent of your team members best. The manager sets the objectives, but the method of achieving them is largely decided upon by the team. The manager actively involves the team and take their suggestions, often changing her or his mind in favor of a team member’s suggestion.
  

A skilled manager needs to be able to balance these styles according to the situation and maturity of the team. Obviously, if a team has served a “Tell” manager for several years, transitioning to a “Co-create” style will take time.

As John Smythe points out in his book “CEO: Chief Engagement Officer” (see reference section below), while the “Involve” and “Co-create” managers are much better at harnessing team skills, they are not necessarily the most suitable for all occasions. For serious business emergencies, a directive “Tell” approach is more effective.

Know Your Team

This is the whole point, after all. If you do not know what drives your team, you cannot possibly begin to get the best out of them. Don’t assume that your team members are motivated by the same factors that drive you.

The team approach has several benefits: distributed workload, balance of strengths, creative problem-solving, full involvement, good motivation, etc. But running an unhappy team can damage your company. Your team should know the reasons behind the work they are creating and should buy into the vision of the company. If your workers come in, do their work, go home and don’t care, then you are unlikely to draw their full potential.

You can use several tools and techniques to get to know your team better. These are detailed later in the article.

Invest in Your Team and Push Its Boundaries

A team needs to be — and feel — invested in the work it does. Being able to judge when to develop certain skills in team members and learning what they themselves want to develop is important. Kenneth Blanchard states in his book “One Minute Manager” that 50 to 70% of a company’s money is spent on wages, yet only approximately 1% is spent on training.

More is spent on maintaining the office that on maintaining and developing the staff. So many managers and businesses spend so much time completing tasks that they rarely stand back and ask, “Is this the most effective way to work on this task?” It is the age-old problem of spending too much time working in the business and forgetting to work on the business.

Forcing a team member to learn a certain skill or fill a certain role because it is lacking in the company is usually not the best solution. For example, give a brand designer a book on how to improve their typography skills, and they will likely read it in their every waking moment. If they have no interest in programming, and you give them a book on ASP.NET in C# just because the company needs to fill that gap, they will struggle with it, and then their commitment (along with their happiness) will drop. Learning what makes your team tick then is vital.

All Teams Need to be Stretched and Challenged, Not Pushed

Stretching and challenging your team members helps them develop and maintain their interests. But monitor how much your team members are being challenged, because stretching them too hard will have negative consequences. “Pushing” isn’t the right word. Pushing a team implies that someone is behind it pushing. Remove that force and the team will likely fall back into its previous routine. A team needs to be stretched and should also want to be stretched.

So stretching within our comfort zones is important. Each person has a comfort zone, a set of tasks that they are comfortable doing and that they do well. Beyond is the panic zone, where they are anxious that they will not be able to perform a task to a sufficient standard. Between those two is the stretch zone.

This is where a manager wants their team to be most of the time. When team members get tasks that challenge them, their comfort zone is stretched and their panic zone shrinks. They learn new skills and develop the confidence to complete tasks they previously could not.

Goals and Targets: What Drives Your Team?

Setting goals — personal, team and company goals — is useful. This exchange from Alice in Wonderland illustrates the point well:

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

If you don’t know which direction to go in, then how will you know when you have reached your destination? You need some sign that you have achieved your goal. Most people have some idea of where they want to be in five years. By writing down what you hope to achieve, you formulate a checklist. Without that checklist, you have nothing to work towards or anything to measure your success.

Milestones help you track success. Learning each team member’s goals is useful in assessing what motivates them. By sharing the company and team’s goals with each member, you show trust and gain theirs. You also get a sense of the path each member wants to pursue and are able to guide them in that direction if appropriate.

For example, if a junior developer states that in five years, they would like to be fluent in ASP.NET and running their own team, you automatically gain insight into how you can help them train and build the foundation for that future.

Motivation

One point that bears repeating is that your team members may not be motivated by the same things that drive you. Inspiring a team member to do something they do not want to do is very hard. A more productive solution would be to learn what motivates them and allow them to act on it in a way that benefits the team.

Several books on management assert that creating an atmosphere in which team members feel personally motivated is better than trying to directly motivate them yourself. Create an environment in which team members actively seek to solve problems without being asked, in which they want to expend energy and solve problems to make the product or service they are working on the best it can be, thus benefiting themselves, the team and the company as a whole.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument, or by emotional appeal. Marilyn Ferguson, author.

Forcing someone to change their behavior or motivations is often demoralizing and even leads them to argue with or resent you, depending on their personality. Take a staff member who is constantly late. Rather than discipline them and focus on their tardiness, focus on why they would want to be there. If they have a purpose and motivation to be there, they will more likely make the effort to arrive on time.

Change and Trust

A lack of trust can be the biggest barrier for any team. Building trust and shared values on a team is critical. The members need to feel reassured that you are looking out for their best interests. An owner whose team members know would sell the company for profit with no regard for them will not gain their trust. Likewise, a company whose top-level managers give the appearance of stability, only to make 80% of the team redundant, won’t be able to hold the trust of the remaining members without careful discussion and explanation.

Therefore, managing major changes carefully is important. Consider the happiness of the team, because an unhappy, distrusting team makes for a work force that is paranoid about its job security and thus less productive.

Three major barriers to a team’s happiness and success are change, loss of control and lack of trust. How you manage these issues when they arise is critical. Much research has been done into change control and trust on teams. See the book on building trust by Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores in the reference section below for more information.

The diagram below shows the balance a manager needs to strike to gain the trust of their team. You can show you care about a team, but if you are incompetent as a manager, you will not be trusted. You can be competent as a manager, but if you do not show that you care, you will not be trusted. To truly gain the trust of your team, you need to show that you are competent at what you do and that you care about your team and have their best interests at heart.

Interaction with Your Team: Communication

Good communication is vital in any organization and is the difference between success and failure. Maintaining strong communication channels with your team is essential, or you may find yourself playing the telephone game, in which information is miscommunicated as it is passed along. A team has to know exactly what is required of it and by when.

Things can and will go wrong along the way, but communicating and regrouping in time when something is going off-track is a sign of a strong team. You cannot train someone to predict all problems, but they can learn to flag problems when they occur in time to work around or resolve them.

As a test, try an internal email-free day. Emails are a useful tool for passing around data, instructions and feedback, but how often have you emailed someone on the same floor, in the same office or even beside you. Email is a one-way channel insofar as the recipient gets your message but cannot interact with you or ask about your message at that very moment, nor do they have the benefit of gauging your facial gestures and body language.

While difficult, try working a whole day free from internal email. Not only will this force the staff to actually speak to one another, but it will allow them to debate questions with each other face to face. It will also improve their memory and note-taking skills because they will now have to remember things that they are used to receiving in hard copy. See the book by Dan Heath on making information stick in the reference section below.

“Sorry, I Just Don’t Have Time”

If you as a manager or team member are asked for help, do not simply reply, “Sorry, I don’t have time.” That says that you consider your tasks to be more important than theirs. Everyone has the same number of hours in the day. Prioritizing and giving help when needed is important. You may actually feel as though you have absolutely no time to spare, but if the task would hold your team up for an hour but take only five minutes of your time, you may want to reconsider.

Stephen Covey recommends a time-management matrix, shown above, which splits tasks into “urgent” and “not urgent,” and “important” and “not important.” He says, for example, that some people “spend a great deal of time in ‘urgent, but not important’ Quadrant III, thinking they’re in Quadrant I. They spend most of their time reacting to things that are urgent, assuming they are also important. But the reality is that the urgency of these matters is often based on the priorities and expectations of others.” Use this matrix to filter your day-to-day tasks and determine what really needs to get done and what may not be as important as it first appeared.

What Do You Want Your Team to Get Out of Meetings?

Hold team meetings as often as needed, but keep them concise. While obvious, this advice is often not followed. Holding a Monday meeting, for example, to let the team know what is required of it that week can be useful. Meetings should cover three key areas:

• Sharing information: what’s happening, events, deadlines.
• Focusing resources: who is doing what?
• Energy: the team should emerge from the meeting with more enthusiasm and understanding of what is expected of it than when it entered.
  

Store this information somewhere accessible, so that all team members can refer to it. This also allows the team to review earlier periods, to see what targets it hit, what remains outstanding and so on. And if the team misses a target, they can discuss the reasons for it and learn lessons from it. It doesn’t matter “who messed up” or “who is to blame”; think more of “what can we learn from this so that it doesn’t happen again this week.”

That Blasted Facebook!

One issue that many managers struggle with, related to motivation, is staff who appear to be surfing the Web instead of doing work. With the rise of social networks, we have so much at our fingertips to distract ourselves with. This can easily frustrate a manager, until they alter their perception slightly. An effective manager focuses on achievement, not activity. A person could occupy themselves with work non-stop for eight hours a day and appear to be productive but still not perform to their potential. People need recovery time, and everyone’s recovery time is different.

For example, Joe finds he is at his peak when he works for an hour, then makes coffee and checks Facebook updates for 10 minutes, and then returns to work. Janet, on the other hand, prefers to work under pressure, going non-stop from 9:00 to 12:00, then taking a full hour for lunch, instead of half an hour, to get some fresh air and recharge.

Whatever works for the individual. Understand what your team members like to do for downtime and what they have to do on an average day to improve their performance. By working non-stop, they are not working to their maximum potential.

Ground rules are important. Your team has to know what is expected of it. You may even want to collaborate with members on setting ground rules for how they work. After all, they know what is best for them, not you. If they agree to a deadline and miss it, then you are justified in looking at how much downtime they take, discussing what went wrong and taking measures. But don’t discipline a team member for appearing not to be working. If they are hitting their targets and producing work of an acceptable standard, while occasionally surfing the Web, then fine. Achievement, not activity.

3. Team Management Tools And Techniques

Several tools are on the market to help with management, most for time and project management than for team and personnel management. However, a few may prove useful to you.

DISC Behavioral Profile

The DISC behavioral profile is a popular and effective tool for team management. The profiling tool identifies the inherent strengths and challenges of individual working styles and guides you on building effective relationships with people who have styles different from yours. After all, your team’s effectiveness largely depends on your relationship with the members and the relationships between members.

No one result of this test is better than another, but some styles may be more appropriate for certain situations, and an effective manager will adjust their style without confusing the team. For example, a team would probably be confused by a manager who is usually a very high D (highly focused on the bottom line and authoritative, even argumentative) and suddenly switches to high S + C (unable to make a decision without going off to weigh the options). The important thing is how you use these results to get the best out of your team. (See the notes below and reference section for in-depth explanations of each style’s characteristics.)

As you can see in the chart below, someone with a high D assertively challenges decisions and problems if need be, whereas someone with a low D generally seeks consensus and avoids conflict. Identifying the makeup of team members’ behavioral profiles can yield valuable insights that help improve performance. For example, a developer with a high D style challenges ideas and methods of working and tends to work better at the beginning of a project and then trail off at the end as they seek a new challenge.

Someone with a high S + C style is more likely to do things correctly the first time and stick to methods they have tried and know work. So, pairing these two personality types toward the end of a project can bring two advantages: the high D can have their worked checked by the high S + C to ensure high quality, and if the high D has tried a new technique, they can put it to the test with the high S + C, who may not have tried it before.

Note the focus of each style of working — D: problems; I: people; S: pace; C: procedures; — and some of the characteristics of the highs and lows of each style.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule) helps to focus effort on the most effective, essential and often profitable tasks. This principle posits that 80% of the rewards or results or profit or outcome come from only 20% of the effort or time or contributions. For example, a manager may recognize that the beginning and conclusion of a project are the most important stages and that focusing effort on them benefits the project enormously.

Reviews

Reviews are a critical tool in managing. While most managers conduct them, simply having an annual appraisal in which you say, “You are doing X well. You may want to improve X, Y and Z? How do you feel about that?” is not enough. Use these occasions as an opportunity to really delve into the performance of the team member and assess their happiness. Once these have been ascertained, then you can look at what skills they would like to develop next.

Find out what makes them tick. Find out how they think the team would perform better. This goes back to the “Co-create” method of managing. But if you conduct only a single annual review, that is not the time to raise concerns about a team member’s performance. Waiting all that time to discuss the problem is, in fact, quite disrespectful. Discuss it earlier on, before it gets out of hand, so that the member has time to come up with a plan to improve, which you can then assess at the annual review.

One-Minute Manager Techniques

The One-Minute Manager is a series of books by Kenneth H. Blanchard (reference below). Rather than lay out theories, the books tell the story of a young man in search of the perfect manager. The title is not meant to suggest that you can learn how to become a manager in one minute. Rather, it refers to a manager who gets results quickly (i.e. in one minute). The book covers some key techniques that you can develop and apply to certain situations, such as the following.

One-Minute Goal Setting

Once a project begins, set out the goals that the team member has to work towards, as well as the standard of performance you expect them to meet. This can be kept to a single sheet of paper, no more than 250 words per goal. The idea is that you should be able to read each goal in under a minute.

Both the manager and team member should keep a copy for reference. This goes back to the Pareto Principle: setting goals for every single bit of work and milestone will not likely be beneficial. Blanchard states that “80% of your really important results will come from 20% of your goals.” This requires not only that the goals be clearly understood by everyone involved but that the standard of performance be clearly set out, too.

Blanchard gives the example of a staff member going to their manager and saying that they have a problem with how something is done. The One-Minute Manager asks him what the solution to the problem is, to which he replies that he is unsure. The manager then says:

“‘If you can’t tell me what you’d like to be happening,’ he said, ‘you don’t have a problem. You’re just complaining. A problem only exists if there is a difference between what is actually happening and what you desire to be happening.’”

By getting team members to solve their own problems, not only do you give them responsibility and a sense of accomplishment, but you ensure that minor issues are not constantly passed up the chain to be fixed. If asked the right question, each member of staff would be able to solve their problem themselves. They just need to internalize the process of working through the problem and coming to a solution that achieves the desired outcome.

Blanchard uses bowling as a good analogy. People like bowling because they can see the pins in front of them, and when they knock them down, they see the results and praise themselves. If you hid the pins or removed them, where would be the fun in that? As managers, we need to clearly set out where the pins are and how many need to be knocked down, and we need to give feedback on the person’s performance afterward.

One-Minute Praising

This technique is about acknowledging when a team member does something right, instead of pointing out when they’ve done something wrong. If you tell your team that you will praise them when it does something right and reprimand it when it does something wrong, there will be no surprises. Everyone knows what to expect.

If you praise people immediately when they do something right, being specific about what exactly they did well, you demonstrate that you know what is going on and are on top of everyone’s performance. Expressing how you feel about them doing well and how it helps the organization and letting that feeling sink in for a moment can significantly help team relationships, morale and productivity.

Do more of these one-minute praising sessions when an employee starts at your company or on your team, begins a project or gains new responsibility, because those are the times when you are more likely to have different ways of measuring praiseworthy performance. If the member restructures code to optimize how particular chunks are searched, they may feel this deserves praise but you may not see it as being so important. This way, the member learns when to praise himself and will be motivated to earn their manager’s praise for other tasks.

During training, praise new employees when they do something more or less right. Most managers wait until team members do something spot on before praising them, which could keep some of them from becoming high performers, because the manager’s focus is on what is still wrong rather than on what is going well.

Blanchard gives the example of a child learning to walk. You do not stand them up for the first time and say “Walk,” and then punish them when they fall. You praise them for standing on their own. And when they take one step apprehensively, you praise them again, and the child continues to makes progress until they are capable of walking unaided. That is when you move on to the next (smaller) goal and praise.

One-Minute Reprimands

While One-Minute Praising is about pointing out when someone does something right, the One-Minute Reprimand has its place, too. It is the third secret in the One-Minute Manager’s formula for success. If a person has been at a job for a long time and makes a big mistake, they should expect the One-Minute Manager to respond, and respond quickly. Every established team member should know their job well. Simple mistakes are fine; after all, mistakes happen.

But when one does happen, and the One-Minute Manager has gathered the facts about it, they will discuss it with the team member face to face. They will make eye contact and tell the team member precisely what they did wrong. They will then share how they feel about the mistake: are they frustrated, angry, disappointed? The conversation usually takes less than a minute.

Once the mistake has sunk in, the One-Minute Manager lets the team member know how competent they consider them to be and that the only reason they are disappointed, angry or frustrated by the mistake is because a team member with so much knowledge and competence should have avoided it. The manager then explains that he looks forward to speaking with the person soon under different circumstances (i.e. not for the same mistake). This will hit home for the team member that they should be aware of that particular mistake and avoid it in future.

Five things to remember with One-Minute Reprimands are:

1. A reprimand should be made as soon as the mistake happens. Even if your business is doing well otherwise and you are feeling good about a project’s success, do not overlook mistakes. Do not keep a shopping list of mistakes made by an employee over a week, month or year and then explode on them all at once. If you do, the recipient won’t really absorb what you’re saying and may get defensive and even de-energized.
   
2. Specify exactly what the mistake was. Clarify what the problem is to show you are on top of things and that sloppiness will not be overlooked. Do not reprimand on hearsay. Get your facts straight, and show you care enough to be tough.
   
3. Criticize the behavior, not the person. Overt personal attacks make people defensive and make them want to pass the blame. By focusing on their behavior or performance, you appear fair as a manager.
4. Be consistent. Do not reprimand one team member for making a mistake and then not reprimand someone else who does the same thing. By being consistent with both reprimands and praise, you gain the trust of your team.
   
5. Be willing to laugh it off. Team members need to be able to laugh about both praise and reprimands. For example, a manager reprimands a team member face to face, and then the member calls the manager shortly after, saying, “I just realized that you forgot to add some praise after your reprimand and say what you think I do well.” This example is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it illustrates that the member does not take the reprimand personally and can joke about it with the manager if appropriate.
   
   

4. Conclusion

We have covered several topics here in brief. Hopefully, you will be better able to spot problem areas in your team’s dynamic and take appropriate steps. Not all of these points are relevant to every situation, so please comment below with your own points, examples or reasons why any of these points are not relevant to your particular situation.

Ultimately, the point is to take stock of how you do things. If what you’re doing works, and you are 100% confident that you are getting the best from your team, then carry on. Keep track of your and their performance, and watch out for any areas for improvement. If anything comes up, then investigate it further and see how you can get optimum results while keeping everyone happy.

Further Resources

Below are some resources that you can use to further apply the ideas we’ve discussed here. If you know of any others, please comment below.

Websites

• David Parrish
  Author of “T-Shirts and Suits.”
• Paradigm Partnership (DISC profiling information)
  Paradigm Partnership believes that peak performance comes when the needs and desires of individuals and organizations are truly aligned.
• Pareto Principle
  Wikipedia entry.
• Kirkbright
  Kirkbright focuses on “management development for creative business.”
• Marshall Goldsmith Library
  Some interesting reads on management in general.

Books

• “The 7 Habits of highly Effective People,” by Stephen R. Covey
  Published by Simon & Schuster, 1989
• “The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer,” by John Smythe
  Published by Gower, 2007
• “The One Minute Manager,” by Kenneth H. Blanchard
  Published by HarperCollins Business; Rev. Ed. edition, 2000
• “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less,” by Richard Koch
  Published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd; 2nd Revised, 2007
• “The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich,” by Timothy Ferriss
  Published by Vermilion, 2008
• “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck,” by Dan Heath
  Published by Arrow Books Ltd, 2008
• “Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life,” by Robert C. Solomon and Fernando Flores
  Published by by Oxford University Press, 2003

On the Job hunt

As many people within Manchester have already heard Idaho Technology Ltd will cease to trade by the end of this week. It has been 6 years in total I have worked for the company and have worked through the ranks from a Graphic & Interactive Designer to project coordinator to General Manager over this time.

Everyone will be sadly missed and I am hoping to find somewhere equally as rewarding to work where I am able to have a great impact and work on some interesting projects.

An article about the closing of the company can be found here.

I will keep you posted. As some of you may have noticed the layout of this blog has changed today and I am hoping my new site design and content will be live shortly. A final thank you to everyone at Idaho for the commitment and dedication to delivering great quality projects as well as how the whole process has been handled.

A sneak peak of a design makes it onto the BBC

I just did a quick freebie for a friend. Not a whole site just a header image. Apart from the fact it took 5 minutes it was simply to jazz up the site in case they wanted to show it on the telly.

Today BBC tomorrow the world :)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8470596.stm

The site is a goal tracking site called GoalHappy and is run by an ex colleague Paul Bibby. Visit http://www.goalhappy.com for more information.

I have successfully completed the Accidental Managers course

The course is now over. Having finished the 6 month course on Accidental Managers I now feel I am more of a Manager than an accidental one. The final day and presentations went well and it was interesting to see what everyone else had taken from the course as well as report back about ways in which I have used it to improve the team.

As with many people in creative industries designers/developers find themselves slowly moving into management as an additional role as roles progress and people become more involved in the running of a business - as the title states... Accidental Managers.

I have learnt a whole wealth of information and now believe combined with the knowledge from the PRINCE2 course I am now equipped with several skills and techniques that aid me in the day to day running of a team - I now have a sound foundation to manage a team, the people, the important part of the managers tool kit as well as being able to manage projects and time within the team.

I feel I am now a more approachable, efficient and productive manager and I have helped improve myself as well as the team and believe that by spending time focussing on the Process - the how and why a team works a certain way and if that can be improved - rather than simply working on the WHAT - the day to day getting jobs done - it is possible to improve performance, happiness and overall quality of work. It is the age old saying "SPEND TIME ON THE BUSINESS NOT IN IT".

Basically most teams get a job and aim for an end result. The way they do that is by simply tackling the problem at hand, often using techniques and processes they have used before simply because the last time it came out OK so we know that method works. This is restrictive as by spending time on how you achieve that end result and forcing some time out to evaluate and get the teams input on how the team functions and how that can be improved it is possible to improve several areas and achieve better results and often faster.

I may be posting some useful tips from time to time here on experiences I have had and the results of putting some of these techniques into practice so sign up to the RSS feed if you want to be the first in the know :) For more information on some of the techniques I learnt see my Smashing Magazine article here: Professional-Team-Management-Tips-For-Creative-Folks

For those of you interested in the course please visit: http://www.kirkbright.com/

Wigan AWP is Live!

Another one of our very successful 14-19 (AWP) Area Wide Prospectus sites has gone live. For more information on the product in general see the previous post about the Tameside AWP launch. This one is for Wigan and you will notice that the new crisp, clean style of the Tameside one resonates through this one with the addition of some nice banner graphics using the new Wigan Life logo. The clean, easy to use search functionality takes pride of place and all the fancy ajax and javascript fanciness is here on this one as well along with the Careerstube content relevant video case studies and the advanced search and refining slider techniques.

Take a look and see what you think - all comments welcome.

Wigan AWP
http://www.wiganprospectus.net/

Careerstube
www.careerstube.com

Smashing Magazine article is now live!

I am proud to announce that my first article for Smashing Magazine has now been published and can be found here:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/

Seems to have gone down well so far which is promising and I am already looking into what to write about next. Would appreciate it if people can comment - good or bad - below the article and feel free to Digg it etc if you feel it is worthy.

Hope people find it useful and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Soon to appear on Smashing Magazine

I am proud to announce that Smashing Magazine will soon be publishing my first article. I contacted them regarding becoming an author for their design/development blog that currently has 142,000 thousand RSS followers and is often the first place to go on a Monday morning to see what new posts they have up there. After they vetted me - a process involving seeing who I was, what previous writing experience and examples I had and also finding out what it was I actually wanted to write about - I got asked to write a trial article that will be published within the next two weeks.

The article is entitled 'Team Management Tips for Creative Folk' and I look forward to the feedback. I hope people find it useful and it sparks debate within teams. Let me know what you think by commenting below it when it is published. I will post again here with a link once it is live.

www.smashingmagazine.com

Rochdale AWP is live!

Our second 14-19 (AWP) Area Wide Prospectus has now gone live. For more information on the product in general see the previous post about the Tameside AWP launch. This one is for Rochdale and you will notice that the new crisp, clean style of the Tameside one resonates through this one. The clean, easy to use search functionality takes pride of place and all the fancy ajax and javascript fanciness is here on this one as well along with the Careerstube content relevant video case studies and the advanced search and refining slider techniques.

Take a look and see what you think - all comments welcome.

Rochdale AWP
www.rochdalebp.org.uk

Careerstube
www.careerstube.com

Tameside AWP is live!

Our first prospectus site is now live. It is, in my opinion, the nicest looking, has the best functionality and is the easiest to use on the market for this type of product. Each area across the UK is required by the government to provide a searchable online database of learning provision available in an area. This site is, essentially, a user friendly, fully searchable directory of education and training available in Tameside. Additional extras like ability to expand the search and look for courses within so many miles of your postcode, at certain providers, levels, age ranges etc, Boolean searching so you can look for a provider that supplies “art AND English AND Spanish”, embedding of relevant videos from our vast Careerstube video library for individual courses, searches and providers and integration with Ofsted to show school/college reports and a number of other fancy visual bits and bobs make this a great package all round that is at the forefront in this sector and one I really enjoyed working on. The design is simple and not cluttered yet visually interesting enough to appeal to the fairly broad 14-19 age range.

We have a load of other areas going live shortly with all sorts of fancy functionality and also some ILP (Individual Learning Plan) sites that allow users to record their educational experiences, arrange content on their dashboard, create CVs and the ability to create CV’s and information tailored toward a specific college/employer and send a token based invite to them to view their ILP as well as integration with our prospectus sites meaning when a user adds that a careers aspiration is to become an English teacher they are supplied with a series of links that are relevant to this career from the prospectus site and also a series of links to the pathways tool that shows them what they need to do to become and English Teacher and also what they can do after that.

Have a click around, see what you think. All comments are welcome and I am glad we have created such a solid product that can help 14-19 year olds plan their future.

Tameside AWP (Area Wide Prospectus)
www.yourchoiceintameside.co.uk

Tameside ILP (Individual Learning Plan)
www.ilp.yourchoiceintameside.co.uk

Careerstube
www.careerstube.com

For more information on the product and other Idaho products visit - www.idaho14-19.co.uk/products/prospectus/

Let's all be Geese

I have completed the first two days of the new Accidental Managers course and don't know where to start in describing what we have covered. Not only did this course deliver some amazing managerial skills and insights it also, as strong as it sounds, potentially improved my whole way of life and how I interact with people.

The course was expertly delivered by Greg Orme (Founder of Kirkbright) and Adrian Banger (Paradigm Partnerships) and they instantly engaged the group and had us actively involved in the activities. Both tutors obviously have amassed a huge amount of knowledge on the subject and interweave often comical real life stories to explain their points.

The course involved a series of activities that needed to be completed before hand. One of them was a DISC profile. This is possibly a more honest and accurate view of me than I would even care to admit to myself. I would say that after completing the online survey and getting the generated PDF immediately back that 99.5% of all the information in it was spot on. By using this profile it is possible to work out what kind of person I am, how best to deal with me and what characteristics can be seen. By using this model it is also possible to start assessing others behavoir and work out how best to deal with them. This is extremely useful when trying to get the most from a team. For example, if you have someone that is a 'High S' as it is termed (See the link above for explanation of terms) they may be the kind of person who is non confrontational and just because they sit there silently in a meeting when you offer a solution to a problem does not mean that they agree. Therefore you begin to learn how to draw out what you need from different team members and how you need to act with different characters and situations in order to get the most out of the situation.

There were several sessions on team building/management, being a leader, understanding yourself and understanding others. I also now have a load of suggestions for follow up material and books to further delve into the area of managing people and building teams which I am looking forward to reading. It has really lifted my spirits and made me actually excited about the possibilities and the ways in which I can improve the teams at work.

I still have a few more days split over the summer that will cover things like finance, law, intellectual property etc etc and I have a personal project to complete within my company to try out what I have learnt and try and improve an area of the business.

Basically, there is a hell of a lot of content that was covered in the first two days. Far too much to cover now. I need to sit down, process it and work out how I am going to apply it to my business. Bottom line is...... I couldn't recommend this course enough so if it is ever running again make sure you are first in the queue. I will create another post after my last few modules for an update.

I learnt a lot from just the first two days of this course. I won't go into too much detail as I am sure I will be implementing a lot of it into everyday life at work and I wouldn't want to spoil the teams fun by giving it all away too soon.

Below are a few links to useful documents, sites of the people running the course etc. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

http://www.kirkbright.com/

http://www.paradigm-partnership.co.uk/

http://adrianbanger.typepad.com/

http://www.kirkbright.com/files/accidental-managers-prospectus-1.pdf

Visit accidental managers

Finally, an explanation for the title of this post if it is unclear. It refers to a slide in the course which asked if you would rather have a team of geese or canaries. Canaries are very much self focussed, with their own needs at the front of their mind and are oriented toward shorter-term targets. Geese work as a team. They fly in a V which creates an up-draft and allows the geese behind a much longer flight. When the front one becomes tired they switch to the back. If a member moves away from the pack two follow in order to help it and either rejoining the group or make their own group. They are far more focussed on a common goal and look to long term targets. I think this is quite an important if not abstract metaphor as if you have a team full of geese you are more likely to have a happy, effective and successful team than if you have a team full of canaries.

How to Spot Quality within Web Design: Examples & Tips by wefunction.com

We all have certain RSS feeds we regularly keep on top of. I have certain ones pulled to my Google homepage that I like to check often like Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall etc etc. I have recently added a new one and found an interesting article on how to spot good web design.

Below are a sample of points taken from their article to give you a taster. Make sure you get over there and check out what they have to say.

Design using a grid system
Using a grid certainly helps you to understand the importance of spacing

Try & Try again
You can always use a method of trial and error until you find what looks right.

White Space isn’t a wasted space
Just because you have an empty area, it doesn’t mean you have to fill it.

Less really is More
Rather than trying to fit more in an area, fit less, give it space and keep just the vital important information.

Keep it Subtle
Small details that compliment the content are the key.

Think in Pixels
Borders, gradients, lines and shadows etc don’t have to be huge to be effective.

Before & After
Compare your results to how they looked before you applied the effects. Then you can see just how effective they are.

Is it Readable?
Don’t be scared of making your titles big and bold.

Have you thought about spacing?
Spacing can vastly improve readability.

Do your fonts fit the mood?
Make sure your fonts compliment the design.

Design using a Grid
Grids allow you to make the most of your space.

Test the Placement of Elements
Be the visitor, would you be able to use it.

Remove any unnecessary Elements
Anything that isn’t essential should be removed, or out of the way

Balance of Attention
Some things need to stay simple to allow others to shine

Build up your layers
Never just use one brush or texture, build your details up.

Experiment with opacity & Colour
Sometimes even 3% opacity can have a positive impact.

Don’t worry, Be Brave
Done be afraid to be too subtle, or too faded.

Experiment
A boring topic doesn’t have to have a boring colour scheme.

Variety
Try using gradients, patterns, brushes on your colourful backgrounds. Colour alone doesn’t make something look good.

Stick to a Theme
Make sure your colours are relevant to your product/service.

Keep it Relevant
If you’re going to do something very new and unique, ask yourself “does it make sense” and “does it fit with the branding?” if so then go do it!

Ignore everything you know!
Okay maybe not everything, basic principles may stay the same, but there’s no point looking for inspiration on new ideas, you’ll just be heading in the wrong direction.

Keep a level of quality
I think generally if your new idea looks good, and works well it’s much easier for you to justify.

To view the article in full click the link below.

Quality within web design

Text and image above are sourced from the article in question and copyrighted to FUNCTION

I managed to get a place on the heavily sought after Accidental Managers course

'Accidental Managers is a training and development programme to help the rising stars of the creative and digital industries in the Northwest'. The course is to be delivered by Kirkbright a specialist in creative industry management training. After visiting the launch party at the Tate, Liverpool only a few weeks ago I am to attend the first session later this month and believe I will take an awful lot from the course. As the title suggests it delivers training to individuals who perhaps did not attend university courses in management but who have found them selves "accidentally" in that role as their positions have expanded and progressed within a company.

I believe that, combined with my Prince 2 practitioner qualification, this will make a great addition to the management side of my qualifications.

I have just had to complete a psychometric test before starting on the course and the results are spookily accurate.

I am definitely looking forward to the experience and will post again once the course is complete on my experiences.

View the programme here

Careerstube - The Largest Collection of Inspirational, Relevant and Real Careers Based Videos Online

I just realised today that one of our products at work has never been featured on my site so I thought I would give it a bit of publicity. One real issue that education has is that learning paths and careers are getting more specialist and young people are increasingly disengaged from the way that information about their future is presented. Look at their consumption of online self published video and you immediately see where Careerstube fills the gap.

Our solution was to develop a sophisticated video publishing system that can take any type of self published video - even from mobile phones - and publish, in context, transparently into any member website. Relevant content from people like them resonates in a way that cannot be achieved with traditional methods. The simple licencing and video sharing model offers members all the content for a fraction of the overall investment.

What it boils down to is an enormous pool of videos that 14-19 members can search through, add to and rate and then call upon the library to insert relevatn video content in their 14-19 prospectus sites. This is an amazing product and has already ammassed great interest and some great content. If you would like to view some of the content follow this link to Careerstube.

The new Idaho Site is Live

After much hard work and sweat the new Idaho site is live. It is a million miles from the old one and I have really enjoyed working on it. It reflects the product based company Idaho are and the subtle, minimalist colours allow the vibrant product branding to stand out.

You will see many little fancy bits like a 3D flash carousel that uses XML to pull in images of each side of the box, a google map on the contact page that uses the latest in Google map functionality allowing directions to be pulled through to the site and styled and also a subtle little javascript effect that means the quote on the homepage fades up to black when hovered over rather than simply going from one colour to the next. We are also using some nice carousel effects on the product detail pages that allows you to scroll through the key benefits and then jump down to more detail.

http://www.idaho.uk.net

Take a look and let me know what you think.

IE8 Compatibility

As most know IE8 is now available to download. Yet another browser to test in. Think I'm up to 3 IE's, Firefox, and then Safari and Opera on the Mac. Life would be so much simpler if all browsers rendered the same but that will never happen.

Just a little pointer to help you guys out. If you have it looking right in IE7 and want to force IE8 to render it properly you can simply add:

(<)meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /(>)(<)!-- IE7 Mode --(>)
without the rounded brackets obviously. The code tag doesn't seem to work with blogger posts for some reason.

just below the title of the page. This isn't a proper fix. Ideally you should be making it work in IE8 with a separate style sheet if needed but if you have a load of sites you want to temporarily make work while you look into any issues then this might be useful.

Nypocreative in a design book

I am pleased to say my portfolio site has appeared in a new design book by Patrick McNeil called Web Designers Idea Book. It is actually the old version of this site that you can access here. It appears in the Muted Colours section and I would like to thank Patrick for including my work in his very useful resource that you can buy here.

Pixel Perfect - an amazing tool

I colleague recently told me about a firebug plugin called Pixel Perfect. I thought the idea sounded good so had a look - creating looks of concern from the surrounding developers who already think I pixel push too much already. I was amazed. This simple tool creates another tab in your Firebug extension and allows you to overlay a jpeg visual in the actual browser. This has two benefits:

1/From a designer/bug checking point of view it allows you to overlay the visual and see what is out of place.

2/From a developers point of view it ensures precision by allowing them to overlay the visual when creating a layout, lower the opacity so they can see what they are coding below and ensure the visuals are met exactly. This will result in fewer visual issues needing to be fixed at the end of the project.

This tool seems to be feared by many developers who are happy enough to make it close enough to the design. However, they know deep down that the designer will only come along and say move that 2px up please so they might as well start harnessing the power of this tool and improve their accuracy and standard before it's spotted.

www.pixelperfectplugin.com

BT Challenge Cup Site goes live

BT run a competition called The BT Challenge Cup every year that rewards it staff for creating ideas that will improve the service in some way. It required a pop up site that would fit in seamlessly with the BT Intranet and provide the ability to register teams for the competition and update information about your team members, travelling details etc etc as the final was in Portugal.

As this was to be based on the BT Intranet there was relatively little design work involved as many of the styles had to come form their existing style sheet. However, it was still nice to work on a job for such a large client and to try and insert a bit of creative flair and general tidying up of certain styles.

Smart City futures goes live

The website for Smart City futures is now live. This was a great job to work on and I enjoyed the simplicity and cleanliness I applied to the visual treatment. It was nice to create a site with such nice imagery. The site is completely content managed down the the main pages in the navigation (only Home and Contact Us are set in the navigation structure). The site was built in .NET and couldn't have gone better really.

www.smartcityfutures.co.uk

PRINCE2 Practitioner

I am now a fully qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner.

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based method for effective project management. It is a de facto standard used extensively by the UK Government and is widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally.

As part of my Project Manager and Design Manager role I thought it might be useful to attend the week course. This involved 5 intensive days of learning and a 1 hour foundation exam and 3 hour practitioner exam. The end result is a basis to work from for managing projects with less probability of failure.

It is a 50% pass mark and I received 248 / 360 which is 69%.

http://www.prince2.com

This course was provided through Sianti by Ian Proctor - one of the co-founders of Prince1. www.sianti.co.uk