So Noted: A Case Study in Productivity
My efforts continue with studying for my professional certifications (PMP certification, Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification). After completing my Lean Six Sigma White Belt certification studies, I switched back to the PMP course that had been interrupted previously. I found very quickly that I couldn't just pick up where I had left off — I needed to back up a few chapters and review key definitions of Project Management terms and concepts as outlined by the PMP test prep.
"You can't get there from here. You have to start from somewhere else."
I've been a little surprised to find that out of the two courses, I resist sitting down and studying for the PMP exam quite a bit. Six Sigma is new from a formal study point of view, but I've been working as a Senior Digital Project Manager for more than a decade. Even despite the warnings of the Instructor of the online class, I didn't take the kind of notes that I will need to pass the exam because of course I know what a 'project' or a 'program' or a 'portfolio' is. I've been running them at one level or another for a decade now. Why would I ever write down those terms?
As a result, after taking my Six Sigma White Belt certification and seeing how particular the wording on the exam for that happened to be, I knew that it would be better for me to back up and do things the right way now, rather than set myself up for frustration and time wasted later with the PMP.
Personal History with Productivity Apps
When Evernote first appeared on the scene I was an immediate subscriber and power user. The ability to create notes, specifically checklists, and to access them on desktop, mobile, and tablet meant that I was using Evernote constantly as part of my work as a Digital PM — storing screenshots of whiteboards, even recording audio of conference calls for later review, but most of all to generate and work on my daily to-do checklists.
I was working freelance for a marketing startup where the employees had been using, and hating, Wrike. My task was to source a replacement, and just about that time, Notion came onto the scene. The ability to build relational databases and galleries at one click was amazing to me, and the team fell in love with the UI of the app even way back in the earliest days. Collaborations were a breeze, and best of all, it combined Kanban (like Trello), Lists (like Airtable), and shareable relational databases (like Filemaker Pro), all for a low per-seat enterprise license, with personal plans available. It was the next stage in personal productivity tools, and I learned quickly how to construct process-based database workflows for myself in every job I held.
The one factor which had blipped on my radar as a user of both Evernote and Notion was the fact that my data was living on their servers. This led to several workplaces rejecting the deployment of them as tools for their teams.
That issue was resolved with the release of Obsidian. Obsidian is free with some premium service plus-ups that you absolutely do not need as an individual or small group. A big selling feature for Obsidian is that it is completely local. You keep all copies of your own data. Any computer judged 'secure' by IT for any company would not be in data breach risk for handling sensitive information just from the app's data structure alone. Not only that, but Obsidian worked with command-line structure and is primarily a Markdown text file format processor. All of the articles are stored locally as text files. Even to this day years later the total size of Obsidian files is less than 100 Mb for me, not counting attachments. I quickly began to use Obsidian for most everything, and I also taught myself how to adapt Niklas Luhmann's method to Obsidian's environment, as well as developing a process for my personal workflow at one company which ended up boosting productivity significantly.
A Case Study in Productivity
Although the names of the company have been changed to protect the guilty, let's say for the sake of argument that I was working at "Protogen" (a biological R&D subsidiary of Mao-Kwikowski). Part of the workflow there involved reliance completely on Workfront for a 100% templated Project Management experience. By this time I had stepped away from the PM role there and was working in Resource Management for a dedicated team of freelancers for one of the many departments along the digital assembly line in the neo-factory of Protogen.
The Challenge
Every day, the bell would sound on the factory floor at Protogen (or the departmental Zoom meeting during COVID-19 would end) and the Workfront Machine would groan into life with a shudder. All tasks would be listed for the day's workload in Workfront, and as Resource Managers our job was to interpret the many tasks, gather the necessary file paths to the server, and translate the ask into a comprehensive checklist of instructions to be sent to our remote freelance team by 11am, so that they could have enough chance to complete the tasks and return things for QC and feeding back into the system by 4pm.
The recurring issue was that Workfront, as deployed by Protogen, had no way of predicting daily workload farther than a day out since the client approvals were the immediate preceeding task, and those approvals took the time they took with no way for us to control pacing or the delivery of the Inputs for our department. As a result the workload which we balanced nightly for the following day could all-too-easily be completely swamped by late "emergencies" and "bad planning" on the part of said clients.
With a fixed set of resources available this would frequently lead to having to prioritize deliverables across multiple clients in the morning, which would cut into our time in processing the comprehensive checklists for our freelancers to follow. What's more, each client had their own style sheet for how to execute the tasks, so while the overall process remained pretty consistent within a few options, the variables along the way were completely in flux and could never be assumed. This meant that we had no choice but to provide our brand knowledge to the freelancers on a task-by-task basis. As a result, the average time to write the emails took between 20 to 40 minutes per email on average.
As a secondary concern, the Project Management team was seeing high turnover rates since few PMs in the industry appreciated the templated workflow and limits of their job duties to what essentially amounted to Project Coordinators or old-time Traffic Managers more than any active amount of Project Management leadership empowerment. Since Protogen operates in a specialized Biotech industry the language of the shop was heavily jargon-based, and the average time for a new hire in Project Management to pick up all of the jargon needed to write effective tasks in the first place was about six months. Every time a new Project Management batch of hires were introduced to the floor, errors and defects in the task writeups would skyrocket, which also ate significantly into the time it took for our team of Resource Managers to verify what, exactly, they wanted us to have our team do.
This led to a wildly variable daily lift in order to meet our aggressive timing to meet the client expectations, reasonable or not. Since we had no way to control the standard learning curve to compensate for the inadequate training prep of new Project Management hires, and no way to control or even gain predictive insight into the volume of work which may or may not come through on a given day, I quickly figured out that the only variable over which I had any amount of control at all was in my own efficiency at converting the tasks in Workfront into checklist emails with all the relevant style sheet options called out for the freelancers.
The Solution
From my own onboarding to the Resource Management department at Protogen, I knew that there were factors in every task that needed to be understood for the successful checklist generation for our freelancers:
领英推荐
Step One
I requested and received sample emails from the entire department and added them to my own past emails. Using this as my dataset, I first organized everything by Protogen product being prepared, and then assembled all of the possible checklist item variations and discarded the obvious outliers that belonged in the third bullet. For the rest, I devised standardized language for all common checklist instructions and generated a "default" checklist for each digital product.
It became apparent to me that the 'Default Checklist' changed slightly depending on which round of preparations the task belonged to, as the same product would be resubmitted to the Client team multiple times before final approvals let the job continue down the Workfront assembly line. I took the opportunity to split out each Default Checklist depending on whether it was the Initial Round, Final Round, or "Round 2+" for all the intermediate iterations of approvals and preparations.
On the next bullet, I knew that work had already been done by a colleague to collect in one shared resouce a list of each Client, Brand, and Style Sheet with each specific detail called out. I used this to inform the official standards of the second bullet point.
As a 'value add' to myself I also mapped out which of the fields in our Workfront Daily Hotlist provided the information that cued us as humans to decide what the final email checklist needed to contain.
Step Two
Since the Style Sheet amended and modified the Default Checklist for each separate property I combined them for every permutation of Style Sheet and Product Default, and then updated those based on the Round of Review iterations. While this produced a significant amount of checklists, they were all standardized and could be copied and pasted into a template email structure. This had immediate effect to standardize the language of communication out to the team and reduce confusion among our freelancers.
The real genius move, however, came from setting up each of the iterative checklists in Obsidian. Notes in Obsidian are capable of having YAML frontmatter, a way to generate a header that can be hidden where user-created variables are stored. Two plugins for Obsidian (free from the user community) can read and work with those frontmatter variables — Templater, to pull the data from the frontmatter of a file into a template akin to a merge-sort or a digital form of Mad Libs; and Dataview, a real-time updating SQL database code snippet that would execute a search query on the Obsidian files and display formatted tables, hyperlinked to each file displayed, based on which properties in the YAML you wanted to display.
I created template files using Templater which would allow me to fill in a templated email that would pull in all the assorted variables from the frontmatter of the file, and use that information to pull in the correct templated checklist sections from other template files. Once the frontmatter was filled in with the variables correctly for the task, the email would assemble itself with a keypress.
Templater was also used to create a Job Jacket for each job number that came through which would use the same frontmatter from the first job task and the Dataview SQL query to create a hyperlinked table arranged in blog order (newest first) of every round that had been prepared previously for the same job number. It displayed the link to the job code, the date, the client, and the freelancer who had worked on it previously. As each new iteration came in, the Job Jacket would automatically update.
Step Three - Automating the Process
The real efficiency came about with the third stage of innovating this new personal work process. By creating a custom Daily Hotlist report view in Workfront for myself, I was able to export an Excel spreadsheet every morning with the full list of details needed to process every task for that day.
This Excel spreadsheet was then run through Microsoft Power Automate, which split the table into rows and then stored each column under the appropriate variable name. These were then output into two text files, saved into the Obsidian directory. One file was for the Job Jacket if none existed yet, and the other was for the immediate day's email task.
Both files contained the YAML frontmatter with all of the necessary variables listed out, including all paths, standard jargon for Protogen, abbreviations, job code, etc. Every piece of data that previously had to be referenced in Workfront was exported and converted to Obsidian files ready for Templater.
Instead of having to write out each email separately, I was now able to open each task for the day and do a quick QC check of the email text which had been generated when the file was created by Power Automate. Assuming the data in Workfront's report was correct, the emails were correct and complete, minus any of the outlier special requests or considerations which might be necessary, which were pulled in with the comments section into the frontmatter. No need to leave the Obsidian file at all.
The Results
By identifying the repetitive tasks in my daily workflow, analyzing and organizing the data into standardized checklist templates, and then automating the whole process down to minimal clicks with a daily batch process, I was able to significantly reduce the time spent daily in the task of writing out the instruction lists, reducing overall effort to one third of the initial lift.
This automation project not only improved my overall productivity, but it meant that instead of concerning myself with repetitive tasks of email writing taking between 20-40 minutes per email, I could prioritize checking the quality of the drafts against the task itself, and finish each email in 5 minutes, including any listing of outlying special requests.
The standardized language and the way I broke up the instruction emails into modular sections of a templated whole also led to reduced confusion by the team, since the jargon use and way of expressing it was now also standardized. This increased team confidence and lowered the length of time of each project, since there were far fewer questions from the freelance team.
Conclusion
While this didn't eliminate the work, it sped up the workload. This freed me to spend the time needed to provide internal customer service and support to the Protogen PM and Account Management teams, who relied on my subject matter expertise to be able to help them select the correct variables and options in the first place. It also allowed me to spend more time providing mentorship and onboarding assistance for each new batch of Project Manager hires who joined the team every quarter or so, further increasing proactive teamwork efforts.
The model was presented to both my Supervisor, who adopted the style and format of the emails themself, as well as the VP of the department. Alas, the decision by the team to invest in Trello instead had already been made elsewhere in the shop, so Obsidian was not rolled out officially to the rest of the team.
However, I was still able to make a difference in my own performance on the job. And sometimes, that's really all you can ask for. One month was spent working through the Case Study from start to finish, but the process which resulted ended up being something I used for the remainder of my time at Protogen. A front-loaded effort, but well worth initial investment.
About the Author
Adam Pacio is a Freelance Content Writer, and a Digital Project Manager by trade currently residing in Manhattan, NYC. A veteran of the Advertising Agency world, Adam has a reputation for managing multi-million and billion dollar plus programs and projects from discovery to launch. From negotiating global contracts to managing geographically distributed teams, Adam keeps all the plates spinning and completes projects on or under budget, on time, and certainly within scope. A polymath with diverse talents and interests outside of the office, Adam relishes being able to leverage the breadth of knowledge and skills of a jack of all trades generalist within his profession pursuit of the project management discipline and process optimization as a whole. He is currently available for freelance, consultancy, and full-time opportunities.