The plan for a successful project

As an assistant, you’re going to be tasked with completing both large and small projects. Whether tackling this year’s holiday cards, planning a multi-leg trip for 3 executives or just ordering lunch for the board meeting, each project can be thought of using the below “outline” to achieve maximum success.

Granted, you’re not going to have to follow this plan by writing out each action or idea for each step every time—especially for the lunch ordering—, however just thinking of both large and small projects from within the below frame work, you’ll greatly improve your chances for success while not missing any important step or overlooking a specific detail.

Take a look:

Outline for a successful project

1. Define success - it’s important to know what you and your boss view as a success for each project you’re assigned.

2. Brainstorm - you need to think of anything and everything needed to reach your definition of success. Don’t worry about being neat or making sure everything is in order, you just need to make sure that your brain is opened up for everything needed for success.

3. Organize actions and steps based on priority and time line - For larger projects, create a work-flow document that lists these actions/steps in order along with level of priority. This is especially helpful when working with a number of different people on the project.

4. Do the work and delegate specific tasks to the proper people/departments - as an assistant you’ll need to do a majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to completing your projects however don’t lose sight of the fact that at most companies, you have other departments and resources at your disposal to help for specific tasks.

5. Frequently check completed work against your time line & priority work flow document - these “check-ins” need to be used to make sure you’re on track to complete the project on time.

6. Once complete, reflect on the outcome of the project - What worked? What didn’t? What could have been done differently for future projects? These questions are very useful for streamlining processes and making sure your next project goes even smoother than the one before.

Next time you have a project, either large or small, think about these steps to ensure complete success. If you have any ideas for steps we might have missed or tactics that you use that help you with your projects, let us know in the comments.

Email Triage: What it is and how it can help you

To be honest, I don’t know exactly where I first read the term “email triage” before—and if it was you who coined the term, please let me know in the comments and I’ll edit this post—but when I read that term, I realized that I was performing email triage for a very long time without actually having a name or term for the process.

It’s an extremely useful technique for dealing with the vast amounts of both work and personal email that comes in on a daily basis but before I go into detail about what email triage is and how it can help you too, let’s first start by defining the term “triage”:

tri-age
Function: noun
1 a: the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors b: the sorting of patients (as in an emergency room) according to the urgency of their need for care
2: the assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or are most likely to achieve success

When I read that above definition in terms of “email triage”, here is what it says to me: “the sorting of an allocation of treatment to emails… according to a system of priorities designed to maximize success in the shortest time period”.

Now I’ll detail how I use email triage with the hope that you see a use for this technique in your dealings with both work and personal emails to “maximize email success in the shortest time period”.

On Sunday evenings, I log onto my work email from home to take a peak at my inbox and perform my initial round of email triage so I don’t feel caught off guard come Monday morning bright and early when I boot up my computer at work. In this round of triage, I go through and delete any emails that I’ve signed up to have delivered to me daily like The New York Times since I usually keep up with the news over the weekend.

Then I quickly scan through for any emails from my boss as action items for the upcoming week. It’s not that I’m going to actually do anything with these emails, just make myself aware of them for the week ahead. Then, I go through the number of Microsoft Outlook invites that are sprinkled throughout and delete the ones that I can and leave the ones that need to be accepted on Monday morning in my inbox.

Lastly, I familiarize myself with which emails deserve priority. When I log out, I am familiar with what’s happening and have my inbox in tip top shape to tackle the following Monday morning. Two of the best benefits of dealing with my work email in this fashion is that I’m not stressed out come Monday morning and I’m on top of any questions my boss has first thing in the morning.

Email triage has also crept into my personal email habits which allows me to label emails and keep them as either read or un-read so I know what I need to get to and what can be left for when there is a break in the day… again, reducing my stress—even personal email can be stressful—and keeping me on my game with email communication.

What about you?... how do you handle the massive amounts of email you get on a daily basis?

From Executive Assistant to CEO

The New York Times has a great article about Ursula Burns, the new CEO for Xerox. She has held many different positions throughout her 30 years working for the company but what is particularly interesting to us here at ProAssisting is how Ursula was mentored in the executive assistant position by her two different bosses.

During downtime, they would talk with Ursula about her communication style and how she could round off some of her edges so she performed her job better. Here is a key section of the article:

He offered her a job as his executive assistant. It was January 1990, she was 31, and the offer felt like a dead-end. “Why would I ever want to do that?” she answered, assuming that the title meant secretary. The job was much more, of course. She would travel with Mr. Hicks, sit in on important meetings, help get things done.

She accepted, and, Mr. Hicks remembers, they talked a lot about leadership. Mr. Hicks, a vice president overseeing marketing and customer operations, explained the need to manage people in different ways, not to intimidate them, and to make them feel comfortable by listening carefully.

And then this too:

Later, the phone rang. Mr. Allaire [Xerox’s President] wanted to see her in his office. She figured that it was not good news. But Mr. Allaire wanted to poach her from Mr. Hicks, so she could be his executive assistant.

They, too, would talk about leadership during down time. He didn’t want to discourage her candor, but, like Mr. Hicks, he offered tips about how to be more effective—“like giving people credit for ideas that they didn’t have, but you sold to them, to give them ownership,” Mr. Allaire recalls advising her.

These working relationships are a perfect example of how much more the position of executive assistant can be and what that can lead to in the future. Finding the right boss who took the time—when there was time—to mentor her was key to Ms. Burns’ future success. You too can make the transition from executive or administrative assistant onto the career path of your choosing and when you think you can’t, just remember Ursula Burns and how she did it.

Photo credit: Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Entertainment Biz 101

As a way to “spread the word” about ProAssisting toward a target market that would benefit greatly from our training, I recently conducted a call with students and alumni from the University of Wisconsin where I gave a presentation to them about the business of entertainment.

Titled “Entertainment Biz 101”, the presentation is based on what I’ve learned while working in the entertainment and advertising industries here in New York City over the last 14 years. The truth of the matter is though that a lot of the tactics and strategies that I talk about on the call are the same ones that you should apply in any industry you’re interested in making your mark in.

We plan to hold more of these calls with other universities in the future and after a few more tweaks to this presentation, we’ll be presenting this information in ebook format as well as the recorded calls.

If you’re interested in hearing the call and how you can either use the information to break into the entertainment business or conquer your own chosen industry, I’ve linked to it below. Let us know in the comments what you think of it and if you have any questions, ask away and I’ll do my best to help answer them for you. Enjoy:

Here’s the link:
Click here to listen to or download the .mp3 interview

To listen now, just click the link.
To download the .mp3 to save and listen to later on your computer, iPod or other mp3 player:
For Mac users, hold “Ctrl” and click the link then select “save linked file to…” to save it to your desktop.
For PC users, “right click” the link and “save link as…”.

Flickr Creative Commons image by Echo_29

Page 1 of 20 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »

ProAssisting Links powered by IngBoo

Stay in the know!

Assistant Training for Professional Success

Archives

Copyright 2010 ProAssisting - RSS Feed - Sitemap - Customized by the genius Men with Pens