Ask HN: Organising yourself/your team: options for non-tech old-school firms?
I'm a CxO at a non-tech midsize firm (c. 2000 employees/$400m sales). One of the main duties of a C-roles is a kind of general project management ('project' being used here in a very wide sense: you could think of 'producing the monthly reporting' as a recurring project).
Until now, I've never needed much discipline as a "project manager" (both for self, team): no todo lists, few notes, and overall little formalized tracking of everything. Projects, roadmaps, tasks usually have found their place in my memory, aided by cursory looks at my inbox which I have never bothered to try to organize.
The company being growing at quite a fast pace, my scope, the number of projects, and the team are expanding - and so I'm realizing that I may need a bit more discipline if I don't want anything to slip into a sinkhole and only be heard of again because someone else asks about it...
What has been stopping me lately is the lack of an appropriate tool for the kind of old-school environment I'm in: the main ways of communicating are (async) email and (sync) meetings.
The solution is embarassingly simple: since the company's (and I suspect, many companies') primary communication channel is email, I need to 'augment' email with some form of editable notes, in the same tool so that: - all emails can be linked to one or more projects => this solves email clutter, short-term task management, reminders, etc - all projects can have one or more editable notes => this solves keeping track of a project history, meetings, decisions, etc in the same place as the main elements of the project, which are usually exchanged by email - everything being seemlessly blended into my email client, enabling easy triage/search/etc, both on mobile and on desktop
The first requirement is easily fulfilled by mostly any email client, but I know of no email client that combines that with editable notes directly attached to folders in one unified view.
Ideas anyone?
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[ 424 ms ] story [ 2313 ms ] threadA colleague and I had to take over when the co-founder and CTO of a company we had joined a year and a half earlier quit without notice. One day, he just called in sick and then he said he was no longer with us.
We took over in the midst of major ongoing projects we were involved in in a technical capacity. We had about ten projects with large organizations at the time, and meeting lined up the following days to solve bottlenecks. There were no processes, the accounting was ad-hoc, everything was in his head. We had to consume thousands of emails, documents, contracts, and go over everything, everything, to prepare.
I took everything I could off the plate of my colleague who was an expert in deep learning. The first thing I did was to create an "Operator's Manual". i.e: a handbook that would enable my colleague, and potentially anyone in the company, to run that company if something were to happen to me.
That was a repository on GitLab that contained everything. I listed all the things that needed to be done: bank transactions, taxes, accounting, etc. and distilled them into a system that allowed anyone to do that.
I used GitLab because it allows us to write Markdown and has version control to track changes even in the Wiki feature, and that's what we use for code so we leverage our expertise instead of adopting a new tool, but the "Job to be Done" is to have information dissemination and be truly async. You can use Google Docs if you're more comfortable with that.
Meaning I literally wrote guides on how to pay taxes, with pictures of a cheque, where to put the amount, where to sign, what form to send, where to go to pay taxes including the GPS location of the building, a picture of the building, which floor to go to, which office in that floor, which lane in that office.
Every single time I had to do something, I wrote it down so it could be done by me if I forgot, and someone else if I couldn't do it.
When we onboarded people, I'd notice we'd go over the same things, so that was put into a checklist of the things to do when onboarding a new member so you don't forget to create an email address before they come in to work, for example.
When having practically the same conversations with new hires, that went into an onboarding document explaining our stack, the books to read, why they are good books and what they will teach, which tools to master, what we need them for, how our workflow is structured, etc.
I listed the bank accounts, the companies we were involved with, their bank informations, points of contact, etc. I wrote down how to prepare the invoices, created a LaTeX template, found out the laws that regulated that. Everything I did was to be put there so someone else could just pick that and operate the company.
The way I do thing is for me to be able to die without impacting the team. If you get over the morbid nature of that statement, you start seeing a lot of opportunities of things you could automate or make truly async. Something there for others to consult.
One of the problems we worked on was information asymmetry. We made sure everyone had access to all the information to make better decisions. I wrote meeting minutes of all the meetings we went to, with all the details, and put them on GitLab and gave access to everyone on the team so anyone can read them whenever they wanted. They could read client meetings, investor meetings, etc.
Here's our template: