Question of the Week!

[Laura_McCarthy]

Hope everyone is having a great week! It was awesome to see the engagement from last week's post about replacing unnecessary tools with Airtable. Shout outs to @Jack_Manuel, @ramonscardua & @Tobias_LGKR for sharing how you are tapping into Airtable's full potential.  

This week we'd love for you to share your biggest learnings for managing projects & tasks in Airtable and how you give your teams clarity on what’s expected of them? We will be sending swag to 3 lucky individuals so be sure to share your insights this week 🎉

We look forward to reading through everyone's response. 

Airtable Community

[Dustin_Smith]

I think my biggest realization from managing projects in Airtable is simply the power that a single source of truth makes when combined with the ability to easily create just the right surface for different audiences. One of the major pitfalls I’ve fallen into in past roles when trying to organize work and keep everyone on the same page is the chaos of keeping things in sync. When you’ve got different spreadsheets or different slides or different charts for different audiences it creates this un-winnable game of constantly trying to make sure that even the smallest change is reflected across all of these siloed resources. The manual work to do all that is painful. 😭

For me, I love that in Airtable as a project driver I can focus on capturing material updates once and knowing that they’ll automatically translate to all of the places I’ve created for my partners and stakeholders to stay up to speed using interfaces. The ability to have an interface dedicated to my partners tackling tasks and deliverables that is rich in details, but automatically filters to just their work based on permissions saves me from having to duplicate the same view for every person.  On the flip side, being able to build a single interface that provides higher-level summary updates for my leadership team (while still giving them the ability to drill into some specifics using something like List View embedded in the interface) is a game changer. 

The other big unlock for me doing project management in Airtable is how big a deal automations can be. From scheduled reminders in Slack for my partners to update their task/deliverable statuses, to automated weekly reports for my leadership team with the most current metrics - not having to spend hours a week chasing and compiling means work is happening faster and at a higher quality.

[Ancy_Dow]

I think the best thing about using Airtable for managing projects and tasks is that you can track relevant stuff beyond just projects and tasks that are crucial for truly successful project management. This includes requests requiring triage, budgets, DRIs, vendors, campaigns, product features, inventory, QR codes – the sky is really the limit. That really helps folks see the relationship between information so they have all the context they need. For example, seeing how deliverables roll up into campaigns, and how tasks roll up into deliverables, makes it much easier to see how everyone is working on things aligned to business objectives and manage resourcing accordingly. 

A few other tips that come to mind:

• Use interfaces to manage project work: Interfaces help teams view what’s most critical for them to take action (instead of having to sift through a bunch of records with a lot of fields to try to figure out what to do.

• Use views like List, Kanban, Gantt to gain context: I find that being able to view (and group/filter) the same information in different ways is incredibly helpful in being able to understand scope, prioritization, ownership, timing, sequencing and dependencies – all in one place. And that understanding helps drive project discussions and accountability.
• Automate status updates:  Automations are also really valuable in helping me and my teammates stay on track in providing weekly status updates.

[kuovonne]

Did the two Airtable employees get access to the prompt before it was published?

Here are some random thoughts 
- If you don't have a system in place, throw something together and start using it. It won't be perfect but you will at least be able to start gathering data to inform future iterations of your system.

- Make sure you address your stakeholders workflows and pain-points. You also need to retain anything that already works the way your stakeholders like. Otherwise you won't get buy-in.

- Even if you build the perfect system, people will still need training.

- As your system evolves and before your system gets complicated, make sure that you understand database normalization and best practices. Design the system so that it can grow and adapt with you. And if your system isn't evolving over time, consider whether your management practices might be stagnating.

- And sometimes Airtable isn't the right tool for the task. Project management is tricky and there are many ways to do it. (ducks and runs)

[Dustin_Smith]

@kuovonne You caught me red-handed. 😁 

Laura has been sharing these threads internally in case employees had interesting ideas. In typical Dustin fashion, I got super excited to participate and asked for an early peek at last week's question so I could write out a more detailed response ahead of time (my calendar later in the week was jam-packed). 

Also, really really loved this suggestion from you!

- Make sure you address your stakeholders workflows and pain-points. You also need to retain anything that already works the way your stakeholders like. Otherwise you won't get buy-in.