Our onboarding team can help you create excellent project management systems. But it helps to show up ready. Here are five tips from the pros for having a great onboarding experience.
Our onboarding team has helped many MSP teams transform their project management processes using Perfect Project. As with most transformations, your experience of the process will be colored and shaped by how you show up for it. We have seen teams walk away from onboarding empowered and ready to save time, improve their systems, make better decisions, and boost the morale on their team. But not all teams get everything they can from the onboarding.
Do you know what you want from the experience? Do you have specific problems you need to solve? Are you looking for tighter control, better data, or faster planning?
Here are some expert tips – from our onboarding team – for getting everything you want from this experience.
Review your project life cycle
According to Louis Bagdonas, Senior Program Manager – MSPs at Moovila, the first step to having an excellent onboarding experience is to step back and think about your processes.
“Start to review the project life cycle,” he says. “Examine the entire process. Start with sales, scoping projects, and building work plans. Examine every step, all the way to the handoff to the operations team. Look at the details. How is the project created? How do you build a work plan? Who does what?”
Stepping back and thinking about how you plan gives you a birds-eye view of your work management systems. It is great to have this understanding when are learning to use a tool that will help you clarify, automate, and perfect those systems.
Bagdonas offers some questions to ask as you examine your processes. These questions will likely come up in your onboarding.
What are the stages are steps that a project goes through in its lifecycle
Who is responsible for these steps and who are the stakeholders?
Are you scheduling work down to the hour?
How do you assign work to a single resource?
How do you assign work to multiple resources?
What is your end-of-project review process?
Examining your work processes will make it easier to recreate them in Moovila Perfect Project. It will also help you identify systems you want to improve.
Name people to manage this change
This onboarding process is the beginning of a change in the way you manage work. Someone has to manage the process. Do you know who that is? Do they know who they are? Do they have time to do this?
“Really define who your key owners are going to be in the onboarding process,” suggests Becca Campbell, Senior Operations Engineer. “Make sure those process owners – the people who will be dedicated to the onboarding sessions as well as a subsequent successful deployment – have the bandwidth to work in the platform and manage this change.”
You might need to clear their plate, lift some responsibilities, and make it clear to them that this is what they are expected to focus on.
“There's a lot of prep work that has to go into successfully onboarding,” says Cambell.
“To successfully deploy the tool, you need to have those dedicated owners lined up, to ensure that they have the support they need from other team members, and to make sure they have the time that will be required.”
Identify your champions
In addition to those that will own the process, you need people to build excitement with the rest of the team, so everyone embraces the new tools.
“The most successful customers,” says Chris Rosner, Customer Support Manager, “identify their champions.”
Your champions are the people on your team who will carry the message to the rest of your company. “They help make sure it's successful,” says Rosner. They do this by showing enthusiasm, using the tools, encouraging and teaching others to use them, and by making your new system part of your culture. Moovila’s onboarding managers will give your team the tools they need to succeed.
“But if you don't have the right players in place before you meet with them, it can turn into a pain point later on.”
So, before you get to the onboarding, name your owners. But also recruit some champions to help those owners spread the word. Both of these roles will help your onboarding – and implementation – go well.
Clear time on your calendar
This one might seem obvious, but it is often overlooked. Every process change takes time. Learning and deploying a new tool takes time. After you get it up and running, Perfect Project will save you time, keep your projects on track, and lift the load from your project managers. But only if you use it. First, you have to learn how.
“Anybody that's implementing Moovila Perfect Project needs to create the time and space to get in there and get their hands dirty after each onboarding session each week,” says Mikell Beechinor, Senior Onboarding and Content Manager.
“They will need to take the conversations that are started in training back to their team, dig into their processes, sort out who will own what part of the work, and decide what outputs they want to get from the platform. Maybe this means refining your project templates or choosing specific dashboards then coming back to the next training the following week, having spent some time working on the concepts they learned. This should also entail thinking about how the team wants to use the platform. If you put the time in between sessions, your onboarding manager can incorporate your questions and feedback into your training to make it more meaningful for your team. It will also make the concepts you learn in your training stickier.”
Don’t eat the fruit of a poison tree
“My biggest tip,” says Jared Thompson, Director of Customer Success at Moovila, “is really a best practice: Don’t eat the fruit of a poison tree.”
We see this happen when teams attempt to manage complex projects – or a portfolio of projects – manually. They see a projected completion date and believe in it without having a solid understanding of the plan and timeline that is predicting it. They believe in the data without first setting up a reliable system that can account for change as it happens. Without these things, that data is contaminated. Then they make decisions based on inaccurate data. Those poor plans are the tree and the resulting information is the fruit of this poison tree.
"Without having an accurate plan and timeline to manage, you can't forecast future demands or future needs."
“You need to understand resource capacity for your people,” says Thompson. “You need to understand the budget to run the business. That all stems from a well-structured, well-managed plan and timeline for projects. Without having an accurate plan and timeline to manage, you can't forecast future demands or future needs. You can't forecast future financials. You won’t ever know – really – if you're going to deliver your projects on time and on budget... until it is too late.”
This is why you are moving your systems to Moovila Perfect Project. It will give you the structure, a real understanding of what is happening, and help you automate communication about task completion, delays, changes, and identify risk early. Once you complete your onboarding and set up this system, you will know, whenever you make plans, that it is not contaminated by bad data.
Thinking about onboarding with Moovila? Hear from Jason Caine, Project Engineering Manager at CCP Technologies, as he shares his firsthand experience in this video.
