[00:00] Office Manager: Okay, so, um, let's talk through how I handle it when a new project lands on my desk. This is — I guess this is the process I've sort of built up over, gosh, probably eight years now of doing this. [00:22] Office Manager: So, um, the very first thing — and I mean the very first thing, before you do anything else — is you read the brief. And I don't mean skim it. I read it twice. The first time just to get the shape of it, and the second time I'm actually looking for what's NOT there. Because there's always something missing. [00:55] Office Manager: What's usually missing — nine times out of ten — is a firm delivery date, or, or a named budget owner. People will say "oh it's roughly Q3" or "finance is sorting the budget," and that's — that's not good enough. So before I commit to anything, before I even think about who's doing what, I get those two things in writing. The delivery date and who owns the budget. In writing, an email, whatever, just — something I can point back to. [01:35] Office Manager: Um, so once I've got that, then — then I move on to the team. And this is where I see people go wrong a lot, so let me — let me explain what I mean. The mistake is starting with the timeline. People want to jump straight to "okay when does this need to be done by, let's build a Gantt chart." No. Don't do that yet. You build the team first, because your timeline depends entirely on who's actually available, and you don't know that yet. [02:20] Office Manager: So, building the team. First thing — and this took me a while to learn — you name one owner. Not a committee, not "the project group," one person who owns it. If three people own a project, nobody owns it, that's just — that's just how it goes. [02:48] Office Manager: Then under that owner, I split the work into what I call two information streams. There's the internal stream and the external stream. Internal is anything inside our own business — past attempts at this, existing processes, people who've done something similar before. External is everything outside — engineering, quality, logistics, whatever departments are actually going to be doing the work or affected by it. [03:30] Office Manager: And — this is important — one person per stream. Not the same person doing both. I'll come back to why in a minute, but just, trust me on that for now. [03:45] Office Manager: Now, when you're picking who does the internal and who does the external, here's the thing — you don't ask the person if they're free. You ask their line manager. Because the person will say "yeah, yeah I can fit it in," and then two weeks later they're buried and it's — it's too late by then. The line manager actually knows what that person is already committed to. So, confirm availability with the manager, not with the individual. [04:25] Office Manager: Okay so, the internal information stream. This is one person — one person only — and their job is to go around and interview people inside the business. What have we tried before? What processes already exist that are relevant? Who's actually done this or something like it? And the output of that — and I'm strict about this — is written notes, back to the project owner, within five working days. Not "I'll pull it together eventually." Five days. [05:10] Office Manager: The reason for the five days is, if it drags on, it just — it never gets written down properly, people rely on memory, and then you lose all of it later when you actually need it. [05:30] Office Manager: Right, the external stream then. Different person. Their job is gathering from outside — so, engineering, quality, logistics, wherever's relevant to this particular project. And the thing I really drum into people here is — you're asking for constraints, not opinions. So instead of "what do you think about this approach," it's "what would stop this from working," "what are the constraints on your side." Big difference. [06:10] Office Manager: And on chasing people — you chase once. One follow-up. If you still don't hear back after that, you escalate, you don't just keep sending polite little nudges for three weeks. Escalate to their manager, say you need an answer by a specific date. [06:40] Office Manager: The reason it has to be a different person to the internal stream — and this is, this is the biggest mistake I see — is if one person's doing both, the external half is the one that gets dropped. Every single time. Because internal is easier, it's people you already know, so external quietly slips, and then you find out about some engineering constraint three weeks before delivery and — yeah. That's a bad day. [07:20] Office Manager: Okay, so, um — once both streams have reported back, that's when — that's actually when you build the timeline. Not before. And you build it backwards. You start at the delivery date and you work backwards from there, not forwards from today. [07:50] Office Manager: And here's, here's the bit people get wrong constantly — buffer. They put a little bit of buffer after every single task. A day here, half a day there. Don't do that. It just gets absorbed, every time, the task before it runs long and eats the buffer, so by the time you're near the end there's no buffer left at all. Instead, you put one buffer, a proper chunk of time, right before the actual deadline. Not scattered through the plan. [08:35] Office Manager: While you're building that timeline, you also want to mark what I call the fatal slip points. These are the points where, if that particular task slips, the whole thing slips — there's no recovering it elsewhere. Usually it's, it's things like a piece of equipment arriving, or a sign-off from someone external. Mark those clearly so everyone knows those are the ones that can't move. [09:15] Office Manager: Last piece — and honestly this is the one people skip most often — the first check-in. You book that before anybody starts any work. Not after a week, not "let's see how it goes" — before. Get it in the diary at the same time you're setting everything else up. [09:45] Office Manager: Keep it short. Fifteen minutes. Not an hour, you don't need an hour, if it's taking an hour something's already badly wrong. Fifteen minutes. [10:05] Office Manager: And there's really only one question that matters in that check-in, which is — what's already behind. Not "how's it going," not "any updates," specifically — what is already behind schedule. Because if you catch that in week one, it's a small conversation. If you catch it in week four, it's a crisis. [10:40] Office Manager: So just to, to run back through it quickly — read the brief twice, get the delivery date and budget owner in writing, name one owner, split internal and external with different people, confirm availability through line managers, internal notes back in five days, external — ask for constraints and chase once then escalate, build the timeline backwards with one buffer before the deadline, mark the fatal slip points, and book that first fifteen-minute check-in before anyone starts. [11:25] Office Manager: That's — that's genuinely most of it. It sounds like a lot written down, but once you've done it two or three times it's, it's maybe an hour of actual work spread across the first couple of days. The thing that matters is doing the steps in that order and not skipping the check-in. [11:55] Office Manager: Okay, I think that's — that covers the intake and team piece. Let's stop there.