The Proven Formula For Successfully Implementing Project Management Software

Have you struggled to get your team to use, buy in and get excited about your project management system? Well, if so, let me tell you, you are not the only one. This is actually a common issue that we've seen with teams when it comes to implementing new project management software, or really any software for that matter. Well, in this video, I'm going to be walking you through five different tips that we've used to help over 10,000 different people use their project management system more effectively and and consistently. And if at any point during this video, you want to go ahead and just hit the easy button and have my team lead you through this process, go to zenpower.com call and book a call with one of our experts. We are here to help. But with all that said, let's get started. All right, so let's start off with tip number one. And tip number one is really designing the system. First. You need to paint the picture for everyone. But before we're actually going to implement any sort of new software or system, always focus on the strategy and get the team involved. Paint the picture of what this is going to look like so that the team can get excited about it. And with that, give them a clear timeline as well. So a couple different tips underneath this. The first one is really early on in the process, you need to make sure that you're getting your team involved, because when your team is not involved, then they're just going to feel like you're making this decision for yourself and not necessarily them. We want to paint the picture of how this is going to serve them well and as well as serve us well and just make us more successful as a team in business. So a couple different ways that you can do this, and this is what we do in our blueprint process at Zenpilot is the first thing that we're going to do really through anything is we're going to survey the team to really figure out what is happening, get their insights, get their feedback, so we can have an insightful conversation as a leadership team to really know what's going on. So a couple of different questions that we asked, just to give you an example, is 1, we're going to give sort of a 1 to 5 scale on some of this because we want to make sure that we get both quantitative and qualitative feedback. So things like, basically, I show up every day knowing what I need to complete that day, or understand each tool and how we use it, where it fits into our process, or understand the roles of my teammates and what is expected of Them essentially what you can do this information is just get the one to five scale here. And what we do at zenpower is we actually benchmark this against all the different teams that we work with. So that you kind of know where do you stack up against every other sort of service based business that's team taken this survey to again see where you lined up, see how you actually are performing as a business to be able to call out and flag any of those issues. So we'll kind of give you this during our blueprint process and through this. In addition, a couple other things that we do is again we want to make sure from that let's get some context into it as well. So things like in the context of project management, how do you start each day to identify, prioritize and plan your work? We want to kind of figure out what people are actually doing. And especially in a remote environment, it's hard to know what everyone does every single morning. Like how are they actually operating, what are their habits that they're doing, what's their morning routine? We want to be able to figure that out so we can kind of design a system that's going to serve them well and be able to flag these issues here too. So also in the context of project management, what is your routine to end each day and manage any outstanding work? What are the top challenges for your team? What is currently working well and not so well? We want to figure all of that out. So, so it's helpful to get a survey out there for the team to just capture that feedback and then have a conversation about it. So that's the first thing I'd recommend. Survey your team, build that survey or we can survey them if you want. You can come through our blueprint process, go to our website. I'll post a link to that in the description below if you're curious about that. Another thing is going to be with that interviewing the team. So you can get that feedback through surveys. But sometimes it's helpful to just have one on ones with people. Interview the whole team, Interview certain departments. We want to make sure that we're having multiple levels of communication here because some people, as you could see in a team meeting, maybe you have the whole team there, maybe just a certain department. Some people don't raise their hand to say anything and that's just there's different personalities. So we want to make sure that everyone feels heard. So you want to hold one on ones, you want to hold team meetings and you also want to interview the team just to figure out again, where are those gaps? Where are things falling through the cracks? How can we build a system that's going to overcome those challenges that we're facing? You really need to figure that out. Because sometimes if you're on the leadership team, you might not see all of that. You're not in the day to day. That's why there's the Undercover Boss show, because with that show, he's figuring out the CEO of that company, he or she is going to see what's happening across their business because there's things that they don't know about. So we need to make sure, as a leadership team, we all know what is actually happening across your business. Especially for remote teams, this is super important. After you get the team involved again, they're going to be involved through this whole process. We want to really paint that picture, but we also want to provide a vision for clarity, especially when it comes to a project management system. Before you actually just jump in and get the team all in there and then all confused, we want to make sure we step out of that system and design it first for what it's actually going to look like to tell everyone, hey, we're going to be doing this to get us this, we're going to be doing that to get us that. So we want to make sure that this vision for clarity is painted. So again, as I mentioned before, find out what's working, what's not working, make sure your goals of what is this actually going to do? Make sure those are documented so we can actually know. Is this supposed to be helping us increase productivity, profitability? What are we actually trying to reach? Are we trying to increase utilization? Figure out sort of what those numbers are so that we can work towards a goal. So maybe building out something like a scorecard would be helpful as well. And also make sure we know what does success actually look like. In addition, a big important piece of this is, this is also what we do during our blueprint process is designing the system to provide clarity for all. So what that would look like is essentially I figure out what all these challenges are and then I come and whether it's a mirror board, lucidchart, whatever it may be, I'm going to actually design it outside of the system or outside of that software first so that then everyone can see it and say, hey, are we all clear on sort of what we're doing here? We all have basically our system all set up, the hierarchy, the structure, the different views, all the descriptions of what those views are for any integrations Also all those custom fields and things like that, what is all that that we're going to build into the system, give a good plan for what this is going to look like, and then go ahead and implement it just so everyone has a clear picture on what this is going to look like in the future. So that's what you want to do. In addition to that, construct an implementation plan as well. So make sure you have a blueprint just like this. This is what we can provide in our blueprint process. But also make sure you have an implementation plan and a timeline for everyone. So make sure this is clearly laid out. And we always talk about, if you've ever ordered pizza from Domino's, they have a great sort of tracker to tell you exactly where your pizza is. Is it in the oven, is it ready to pick up? Make sure you have that listed out for your team so that they know sort of when is it going to be required for them to actually be working in this new system, when are they going to be migrating work and sort of what are all those steps involved? Who needs to be involved? Make sure everyone is aware of where they fit into the process and when we're actually going to be going live. Super important to have all of that, get that vision painted early on, get the team involved in that vision so that they're bought into that as well, to know, hey, this is going to serve all of us. This is not just something that you're doing to serve you and the leadership team. We want to make sure the whole team is bought in. So the first step I'll give you is designing the system first. All right, so tip number two for you all, and this is one that's super important when it comes to actually going ahead to launch your new system is going to be training your team on both the software as well as the expectations. And the reason this is so important is because, yeah, you can train them on the software of how to do this and that, but if you don't actually tell them what your expectations of them are in that software, like what are the fields that they need to be labeled? Do they need to track their time? How are they going to communicate in that tool, whatever it may be, we need to make sure that they know what is expected of them and what are the habits that they need to have, because then we need to hold them accountable. And that's actually moving in a later tip. But we need to make sure we're training them on the software as well as the expectations as we jump into that New project management tool. So a couple of recommendations I have for you to kind of help with that is one you should do is build a training course and I don't care where this is hosted. We have training courses that are pre recorded as well as we have live training as well at Zen Palette as you go through an implementation with us. But a training course that's prerecorded is super helpful because they can watch that really whatever speed they need to, they can watch it when they want to, when they can and have the time. And as you onboard new people then you always have that training course available to you to onboard new people. So it's super helpful to have a training course built out somewhere, whether it's in Google Docs, whether it's in ClickUp, whether it's in a tool like Circle or whatever it may be, just build that out, record your videos on Loom, record them on Vidyard, whatever it is, just make sure you have pre recorded training for your team to use. So a couple of different things I'd recommend in this training course. Again you can teach them on the software all that you want. A couple other things that we're going to need here is one is going to be, I call it your ten Commandments. What are your main expectations? What are your rules of them? And really your non negotiables, what are those really laws that they need to follow? And so for us a couple examples of those are going to be things like if it's not in ClickUp, it didn't happen. Essentially if you don't put that task in ClickUp then it's not in our source of truth and we don't know that it happened. We're just going to assume that it didn't happen. So that's one, two to make sure that the team puts all their tasks, all their work inside of ClickUp. In addition, another rule is going to be due dates matter because we need to make sure we're going based off this due date driven methodology where that due date means something. You can't just push it and push it and push it. That due date is when you should do that task and actually finish it. So that's going to be important. And another one, the process needs to live where the work gets done. We need to make sure if we have an sop, a process somewhere that is connected to the task that's in ClickUp, so we need to make sure that those things are followed otherwise the system's not going to work out for us. So make sure you have something like a Ten Commandments, whatever you want to call that. It's helpful to have those non negotiables or really those high level laws or rules that you have and then hold your team accountable to those. In addition, some user settings that you want to have here. So how they're actually going to work inside of this new tool and how they're going to set up things like their notifications. This is super helpful in ClickUp because if you don't set up your notifications and pare those down, you're going to get very overwhelmed. So we need to make sure that is also built in there and we also need to make sure like how are we going to use statuses? How should you be communicating with a team? Make sure you have those specific sort of user settings in there to help the teams get set up and started inside of ClickUp. Also, the basics have tech tech tutorials in there. What does all this mean? How do I create views, how to views work, how to create tasks, things like that that people would need to know about. How you still want to have technology help inside of that tutorial as well. Also give them an overview of your design too. How is this hierarchy, where do task needs to live? How is this all structured? Make sure you give sort of a good overview of your ClickUp instance or whatever project management system you're using. Also if they want to have some advanced tutorials as well, give them some power user fundamentals on how they can maybe integrate this with their Google Calendar or integrate it with Slack. Go over things like that for the people that are ready to move on to the next step. We want to start with the Basics but then also give them the ability to advance as they go. So if you want to have some additional tutorials in there for them, you can do that too. And then lastly some FAQs. So are there any frequently asked questions? Obviously you'll build this asset as you go, but you want to make sure if there's any common questions, you have those documented so that you don't have to spend a ton of time answering those. They're just already inside of your training course as well. And to give you an example of what this looks like here at zenpilot, as you can see, if I come to our training course here we have things like a new user or veteran user orientation. We have our 10 Commandments there as I talked about earlier. And then really going over building healthy habits and ClickUp. So optimizing your user settings, setting up sort of your Task view where you're going to see all your work and kind of going over what your morning routine should look like, how to actually manage your tasks, how to communicate in ClickUp, how to manage your time and track time inside of ClickUp, building views using templates and then also the extra credit ones that I talked about in terms of those power user fundamentals. You want to make sure all that is built out here inside of a course. Again, doesn't matter where it's hosted, just make sure you have something for the team to use. The reason it's helpful to have more of a learning management system as opposed to just a doc, is because then I can take this and I can actually track my team's progress to know did they actually do it. So that's helpful there. In addition, you could put quizzes and things like that at the end of these videos to just kind of see did you actually pay attention, which is awful. Also helpful when you build on a course in a tool like Circle Jumping Back though, in addition to that, again, As I mentioned, FAQs. To give you an example of what that looks like here for us at Zen Pilot, we do have FAQs if I can find the right tab just like this. So best practices, things on custom fields, documents, operations, how all this is set up, all those commonly asked questions we can build out and give answers for people so that they have it here inside of our learning management system as well. So definitely helpful to have that build a training course, have those FAQs in there. In addition to that, I'd also recommend that as you're getting ready to launch, you also host live training calls. So it's good to have that prerecorded training, but then it's also helpful to get the team to together to help reinforce what they learned. So I'm going to have a live training call and this is what we do with teams. We have them take that course, but then we jump on a call with all of them to walk through. What are the most important pieces that you actually learned about? How can you set up your main user settings? What are the expectations of you? We go over all that on a live call as well as kind of do a Q and A. If anyone has any specific questions about what they learn there, that's a place where they can ask them. In addition, I'd recommend walking through common scenarios so if you know if there's any maybe common questions or things that come up. Like a good example is hey, I have a random sort of ad hoc task that comes in, where do I put it, where do I track my time, how do I create that? So walk through different scenarios like that to make sure everyone knows exactly what is required and how they can sort of navigate through that specific process. In addition, have Q and A, as I mentioned. And then you can also do role specific training as well. So. So for specific roles like account managers or project managers, your team leads those individual contributors or maybe even contractors, make sure they're trained on how they're going to specifically use ClickUp. Again, you can have a broad training for a broad prerecorded training for the whole team, but then you can kind of narrow that down as you get more advanced for those different users and seats there. And this is all sort of stuff that we can provide at Zenpilot to help your team go through this process to kind of take that heavy lifting off your hands there. All right, now let's jump into tip number three. And tip number three is picking a clear launch date. So as we're getting the team trained and ready to go, it's also important that we have a clear launch date here so that everyone knows when are we going to be using the new system and when are we getting rid of the old system. So what I recommend is that everything should be migrated. So essentially moving all of your work into this new system, maybe from an old one, migrate everything on a Thursday and Friday. That's going to give you sort of the weekend flex time if you need to come in and make sure everything else is in there. And then we want to make sure that the whole team is using the new system on a Monday. So don't have this like phased out approach where you kind of do one little step at a time and you get sort of like new users in there and then some people are in a different place because then you're going to lose that single source of truth. We want to make sure we always have that source of truth. So it's super helpful to have a clear, specific launch date where, hey, we're over here on Thursday and Friday, but then on Monday you're coming in first thing and we're going to be inside of ClickUp. So you want to make sure you have a clear launch date. And that's why I say migrate everything on a Thursday, Friday so that you have that weekend as some flex time and then come in on a Monday and launch in the new tool. So that's going to help us make sure that all work is going to be inside of one place. So that doesn't necessarily mean you have to go and get rid of the old tool right away whether whatever that may be. Maybe it's a sauna Monday, teamwork notion, whatever it is, you can still have that and I recommend you do have it. But that's only going to be for referencing. Maybe you have some documentation there that still needs to be kind of of moved. But all the work, all the single source of truth, all the tasks are going to be in that new tool inside of ClickUp. Don't have tasks living in multiple places. You can keep the other one for referencing things. Maybe there's some communication there that's hard to bring over. But make sure you have a clear launch date that's specific and I always recommend it be on a Monday. That way you can migrate on a Thursday and Friday with that weekend as flex time. So now moving into tip number four is we're going to now hold the team accountable. So now we've actually launched the new system and this is when it comes very, very, very important because we need to make sure, okay, we set the standard, we set those 10 commandments or whatever you want to call it now. We need to hold the team accountable to that and, and we need to continue to build healthy habits within that. It's super important that especially with project management software, you create a culture of accountability without it. Like we need to get good inputs into the system to get good outputs. If you want visibility, you want that reporting, you need to make sure that you don't just have the team kind of doing everything they want in the system. Some are tracking time, some aren't. We need to make sure they are tracking time. If we're trying to get good visibility into how long things take or be able to bill clients or be able to see how profitable we are, we need to make sure the team is doing that. So what I recommend is first is enlisting a champion. So at zenpilot, we love to call this a ClickUp champion. They are the click up nerd. They're the one that everyone's going to come to with questions, but they're also the one that's comfortable with sort of managing and holding the team accountable. So it doesn't necessarily have to be, and I don't recommend it someone on your leadership team. I recommend it someone that's going to be managing up. They're going to be someone on the team that maybe is like a project manager. This is not a full time gig or anything. They might be a project manager. They're very process Driven. They love ClickUp and they're going to be sort of in charge of managing both the leadership team as well as the rest of the team to hold everyone accountable. We want to set the same standard for everyone because that's going to be super important. So first you want to enlist a champion. I probably recommend you do that before you actually launch. Have someone that you kind of know, hey, you're going to be the click up champion. So let them know early on and make sure they're. They're pumped about it too. In addition, what they're going to be doing is they're performing daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly audits. So I, I did a video very recently that I'll put in the description below that goes through how to actually build a dashboard and let them go through sort of those routines. However, to summarize that, I'd recommend you definitely watch that if you're launching a ClickUp. However, to summarize that very briefly, essentially your ClickUp champion is going to have a dashboard like this where they're able to on a daily basis kind of see sort of and spot issues and reward people on what's actually happening. So again, this whole dashboard is in another video that I just did and how you actually set it up. But we want to kind of be going through tasks to kind of see where there is no assignee on tasks, where there's no due date on task, where there's no time estimate or where tasks are overdue. Because we want to be able to track those issues that are happening and make sure that nothing slips through the cracks and make sure there's no one that's kind of in here that's not doing what's expected of them because that's a big issue. In addition, we should be looking at time entries. Are people tracking their time? Can we see in here? Maybe there's someone that has 40 hours of estimated time for the week, but they've tracked zero of it. That is an issue when you say, hey, why are you not tracking your time? Is there anything I can do to help? Do you not know how you track time and ClickUp and so that ClickUp champions there to kind of call them out but also offer a lending hand to. Because maybe they just don't know how to track their time and they missed that in the training course and we need to help kind of hold their hand and help them do that. In addition, kind of looking at sort of are people closing tasks with the necessary fields on that with the correct time track things like that we need to make sure we're looking at all that. And what's cool and ClickUp as well is being able to see user activity to sort of know who's behind. So a super important piece of this is going to be actually clearing their inbox. If you've had an email inbox that has 100, 200, I've seen 2,000 plus unread emails, you're not actually going to check it anymore. It's just kind of worthless. And that's how communication slips through the cracks. You might get an important email and you miss it because you have so many dang unread notifications or unread email. So we need to make sure the team is reading and going through their notifications. That's super important. That's expected of them. If we're going to communicate and click up, everyone needs to be going through those and clearing them and communicating back with the team. In addition, you can see total overdue tasks. If there's issues here and we see a lot of unread notifications, a lot of overdue tasks, we need to go ahead and talk to that person. And then in addition, another cool widget in ClickUp is actually workspace points. So this is actually going to show you who's actually left comments in ClickUp, who's completed a lot of tasks, who's worked on a lot of tasks to give them a total points to be able to also reward sort of that success of the team. So with that, a cool thing that we do at zenpilot is actually a weekly roundup here where you're kind of able to go through that. And essentially every week your ClickUp champion is going to be kind of showing the top performers of the week. So who cleared the most notifications, who added the most comments, who completed the most tasks and and kind of give sort of that gold silver bronze here to sort of reward people that are doing well. Also calling out people who are struggling and then a lot of other additional things that you include in this, but kind of just a way to hold the team accountable, reward those that are doing well and also maybe flag some issues. I highly recommend you have someone that's managing that process to hold the team accountable. In addition, as I mentioned, flag those issues and celebrate wins. Super important, but also providing more training for specific team members. So as I mentioned, if someone doesn't have any time tracked, maybe that's because they don't know how to track time. So we want to provide that training to kind of walk them through hey, this is how you do this. So your ClickUp Champion needs to, on a daily basis be looking at the workspace to know if there's actually an issue, issue that is arising to be able to say, hey, can I provide training here? What can I do to help? So we want to make sure that we're holding the team accountable and that is how we would do it. All right, so now let's jump into tip number five, your last and final here. And this one is going to be providing open avenues for feedback and recommendations. So even after the system is launched in the ClickUp Champion, sort of helping hold the team accountable, we want to make sure we always have different avenues for the team to leave feedback. We want to make sure we have forms out there for people to leave quick feedback for us. Maybe it's on a process or something that we have currently give them a form for that. We also want to have recurring meetings. Maybe there's a specific team that we want to kind of bring in to say like how are things going? Maybe that's just your team leads or managers to kind of say how, how is your team doing within ClickUp? How are they feeling? Is there anything we can do to help them? Any training or whatever? Make sure you have those meetings and then also one on ones because obviously as I mentioned before, in a larger meeting, not everyone's going to raise their hand and say, hey, this is happening. We want to make sure that we also have that on a one to one conversation because that's when some people would rather talk than a larger group meeting. And everyone again has different personalities. Some people love to voice their opinions in a larger group versus one on one and vice versa. So what I would recommend at least for the feedback form, again have those meetings for sure. But in terms of a feedback form, what we do here at Zenpile is we actually have a process development form that everyone has access to. So make sure it's well in a perfect spot for the team. You can actually take ClickUp forms and build them in certain places and then actually embed them at the everything level if you want to. Because you can copy the public links here and then just go to the everything level and actually embed a view. Like if I were to do this and embed, you can embed ClickUp inside of ClickUp, which is super nice. So any website I could take that and just embed the URL from that form directly here if I wanted to. Anyways, with this form, what you want to do is just give people an ability to just say, hey, I was working on this task, this process that we've developed, and I noticed there was an issue here. So give them an opportunity, just be able to flag that and then be able to capture all of that, those requests in one place, which is a nice thing to have here inside of a process development list. So issue type, who's the actual submitter for it if they need to attach a screenshot, just make sure you have a form like that set up for your team to be able to use to always feel like there's an open avenue for them to communicate when something is not going as well, because that's going to be super helpful context for you to be able to track those issues as they come to make sure again, nothing slips through the cracks when it comes to holding the team accountable and making sure that their voice is heard. We want to make sure we open up multiple avenues for the team there because people like to communicate in different ways. So make sure everyone has their way to communicate to help just increase that change management and get the team more excited about using it and feeling like it's serving them and not just the leadership team. And that's how you get your team bought in and excited about your new project management system. And please, if you found this video helpful and insightful, go ahead and hit the like button below and hit subscribe. We're going to continue to deliver weekly content for the teams trying to get the most out of ClickUp. And if you have any questions, comments or feedback in general, please leave those in the comment section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And remember, if you're ready to hit the Easy button and have my team just lead you through this process, go to zenpilot.com call and book a call with one of our experts. We are here to help. And again, thanks for watching. Appreciate all the support. We'll see you again next time. I cannot make no more I can't replace it Trying hard just not to waste it it's about time it's about time yeah, it's about time by time.