I am a software delivery manager (in a Fortune 500 company) working with a 15 member team at onsite and offshore. I work with various stakeholders from technical teams, testing (QA) teams, senior management, customers. At times, it is challenging to track various action items in the context of receiving more than 150 emails/day. I have provided a few steps that I am following and I am able to prioritize and track the action items successfully.
1. While going through your emails, identify the items where you or your team need to respond and set them as action items or todo items. After identification, you will see all the action items in the email tool.
If you have to provide response, please do that. If the action is from a team member, please ensure that someone responds. If nobody responds within 1 day, follow up with the team for response. Upon providing the appropriate response (and recipient is ok with the response), remove the flag “todo” or “action item” for that item. (When I say appropriate response, I mean that the response is complete and sufficient. We should not get questions on what is missing in our response.)
2. For important items, defects, acknowledge the receipt of email even when you do not have complete answer in hand. Follow up and keep recipients posted as you/team get clarity.
Set up Appointments/Reminders
3. If you need a reminder to do something (like registering for an event or completing timesheet before a due date or doing payment, checking for readiness of a deliverable, etc), set up a gentle 15min reminder in your calendar to yourself , preferably, 1 or 2 days prior to the expected day of action. That will give you enough time to take action or follow up.
Set up Discussions in Place of Emails
4. If there are more than 5 email responses on the same subject and they are still flowing-in, set up a discussion. That will reduce the email traffic and turnaround time.
Inform on Non-Availability at Work
5. Vacation, planned short term leave, sick leave, out of office: In general, provide a heads-up by sending an email to stakeholders well in advance. Please set up out of office message in the emailing tool clearly (to work during your absence) indicating the start date of out of office and end date of out of office, point of contact in case of any urgency, etc. As soon as you are back, remove the message.
6. Coming late, going early to office: Drop a note to colleagues, managers and other important stakeholders that you will be coming late or going early. Provide tentative time for arrival or leaving. When you reach office, you may reply all informing that you are in.
7. Public holiday for offshore team: Drop a note to stakeholders in advance about the holiday (which is not a global holiday) at offshore with clear details on the schedule, any plan to continue the business/work, etc. Send a meeting invite for 15 minutes to be scheduled for early morning as a gentle reminder that should occur on the holiday we wanted prior information on, on the previous day. This is for information to manage dependencies among the team members.
