Implementing plans is hard for teams. I get it. I see it all the time.

Struggling to implement plans is one key roadblock most teams have in common. I’ve worked with countless teams over the years to overcome planning issues.  I’ve noticed they all seem to get caught up in the same kinds of energy-sapping, time-draining mistakes. Even when their plans progress, they pay a high price in terms of lost productivity, team morale, and often, lost business.

You or someone on your team is likely suffering the consequences of at least one of the five common mistakes I’ve identified. Fortunately, you can learn how to identify them, too – and fix them, so you can recover team trust, time and other scarce resources.

The five mistakes are:

1. Fuzzy plans
2. Lack of reporting team progress (below)
3. Not using tools
4. No support for task managers
5. No accountability

In this series of five articles, I’ll be highlighting one of these problems each week. By looking at these one at a time (which is a great strategy to help teams overcome roadblocks: one at a time!), you’ll have the chance to consider how you can implement these fixes at work and with your volunteer teams.  If you’d rather read the entire report immediately, you can access it here. As a bonus, the full report also includes clarifying tips to help you improve your team’s plan implementation!

Fix for Mistake #2: Appoint a status manager: a person to remind task managers, track progress, and report to the team. 

Here’s the trick to making this work: don’t try to make the status manager responsible for keeping the team moving forward or for the success of the project. That kind of ultimate responsibility needs to rest on the shoulders of someone who has the authority to hold people accountable –  in other words, a status manager is not the same as a project manager. Instead, choose a status manager who is a capable, detail-oriented, well-respected person. Put this person in charge of checking in with team members frequently. Their job is simply to ask if tasks are progressing, record the responses, and report back to the entire team on a regular basis.

While you may rightly assume this is what a project manager does, remember not every project or business employs a designated project manager! And not every project manager is good at reporting back to the team. If you already have a project manager, make certain they are doing the critical job of reporting project status to the team.

Next in this series: Mistake #3, not using project recording and reporting tools.

Download the complete series by clicking here.