At Storyboard PM, we specialize in practical project management to best progress your career, your teams, and your organizations (even life). Professional Project Management is the best go-between from Vision to successful reality.

You will want to create some form of a storyboard, a high-level view of how you want your career, business, organization (even life) to go. The more people you employ on your team the more important the use of project formats (as well as systems and programs) become to get and keep everyone on the same page from beginning to end.

Here’s how you can organize and begin to project manage your storyboard!

When mapping out a journey you need to know where you are starting and where you are going. It especially helps to know critical points in between and/or junctures for safe passage to ultimately arrive at your desired destination if you want to make the most efficient trip. This is the research phase.

We will discuss in our quarterly newsletter how you may assess your company’s level of organizational management and organizational project management and how to improve from Level 1 to 5, one level at a time, primarily by utilizing whatever resources you already employ and how to sustainably scale company initiatives (projects) and growth. Spoiler Alert: It takes corporate sponsorship, change advocates at every level and a lot of teamwork. Disclaimer: You don’t need any drawing skills.

In time you will learn how to navigate the integration of project management to ensure best practices in advancing a continuous improvement model to get ahead and stay ahead of your competition.

But today, we will just focus on developing your story and storyboarding…

Building your team’s storyboard requires blueprints, which is technically the project of discovery before the project. Yes, executive teams perform high-level projects. Starting a business is a project. You likely already have a Vision, maybe drawn up on a napkin, of how you want your Story to go, but how well is it drawn out may have left something to be desired. Can you and your team picture it in action? Can your potential customers picture in their head how your business story will make their life—your target audience’s—life better? If everyone on your project teams cannot envision how the projects answer business needs and fill business gaps then it is back to the drawing board for you the owner, or Executive Team, Steering Committee, or other type of sponsor.

To build a storyboard you should know how to construct your business story that keeps others interested. Allow me to suggest a great book that brought clarity to our company, “Building a Storybrand”, by Donald Miller. Its focus is on the marketing story, but there is great value in emphasizing the key components of any great story as you outline your business offering by different departments. Every great story has a main character (protagonist/customer) who will be the hero of the story, who has a problem in the way of them being the solution their customer needs their offering to be, who meets a guide (say, Storyboard PM posts, newsletters, and programs like this one), who gives them a plan (such as, to project manage business progress), and calls them to action, so their story ends in success and helps them avoid failure.

How have you positioned yourself (meaning your business offering) as the guide for your customers? What will they as the hero be able to succeed at as a result of your services? Your story will help you grow interest in your venture. We can help you prepare and optimize growth and efficiency, and effectively manage change projects for your corporate initiatives. Let us be your guide! Sometimes the difference between a great idea and a great business is simply sharing your story more clearly. Let me show you how I have outlined my story to share over time on LinkedIn (focusing on marketing posts, but you could do it for other functions). You’re welcome to do it the same way!

Open an Excel spreadsheet. Enter at the top of the spreadsheet the reason consumers need to use your products or service to transition from one state to a higher state of being themselves (Note: It may take a good deal of time to come up with or refine your Vision to then create the equivalent of an actionable Mission Statement.). On the next line add 3-5 storylines that are areas of influence your services will enhance their life in (such as mutual goals, values, skills, and problems you solve). Section out the rows (line items) by categories (topics of interest aka milestones). Create larger boxes and fill in the progression of your shared story (it’s a great way to organize those aha moments you have scattered across your desk on sticky notes), noting problems and solutions, across the guide (up and down and left to right).

This method allows you to storyboard at the same time you are lining up areas of work on your calendar (5 columns can represents 5 days of the week. You can repeat subjects if you want to keep it simple. I chose a few project management subjects at the 3 levels of business with a couple bookends to provide context since administering business and going to market overlap with project work. This allows a solo business owner or a team to brainstorm and wire frame the work activities (assignments) in one sitting, in other words practical project management, where it combines a few things with the similar elements of running a business, writing a story, and managing a portfolio, program, and/or projects.

You may want to chart (storyboard) iterations across spreadsheet tabs, from sticky note ideas to problem solution grids to refined posts in AIDA format. The point is to come up with a storyboard for each area of your business that aligns your work activities and your stakeholders (including your project teams and customers) with your Vision. As you can see, after relating storyboarding and project management this week the focus next week will be on project managing your Vision into reality.