Managing a Project: Brainstorming & Doing the Homework

Episode Summary

In this episode of Simply Trade [Tips], Hammer and Heels (Renee & Julie) kick off their new Project Management series. They break down how to confidently launch and manage a project—whether it’s a massive ERP implementation or something more focused like writing a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

Their secret to getting started? Two simple but essential steps:

Brainstorming — Define your project, identify your stakeholders, and get their buy-in early.
Doing the Homework — Research your options, analyze internal vs. external solutions, and always widen your perspective when talking to vendors or IT teams.

Whether you’re a trade manager or new to project ownership, this episode gives you a framework to get your next initiative off the ground efficiently and with purpose.

Key Takeaways

Identify & Scope Clearly: Define what problem your project solves and who benefits from it.
Get Stakeholder Support: Involve cross-functional teams early to ensure buy-in and alignment.
Do Your Homework: Explore both internal and external solutions before committing to one.
Ask the Right Questions: When meeting with vendors or IT, leave time to learn about other potential solutions they offer.
Think Long-Term: Every small project builds skills for handling larger, enterprise-level challenges.

FIO (Figure It Out)

Action Item: Find (or assign) a project!
If you’re a team member, ask your boss what challenges need attention and create a small project to address one.
If you’re a leader, assign a project that helps someone on your team build project management skills.
Then share your progress in the Trade Geeks community!

Keep the Conversation Going

Join the conversation on Trade Geeks and tell us:

What project did you pick or assign?
What step of the brainstorming or homework process helped you the most?
Any surprises you found while scoping your project?

👉 Trade Geeks Community

Credits

Hosts:

Producer:

Lalo Solorzano

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New TIPS episodes every Tuesday.

Presented by: Global Training Center — providing education, consulting, workshops, and compliance resources for trade professionals.

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Don’t forget to rate, review, and share with your fellow trade geeks!

📩 Want to be on the show or suggest a topic?
Email us at SimplyTrade@GlobalTrainingCenter.com or DM us on X/Twitter @SimplyTradePod

Machine Operated Script

Renee Chuichiarelli 00:00

Hey, welcome back to simply playing tips with hammer and heels. I’m Renee piccarelli, and I’m here with Julie Parks. Hi Julie, as always, we’re gonna leave you with some calls to action and help you to FiO figure it out. And we say in less than 10 minutes, we’re hoping for five. So today we’re going to cover managing a project, but I wanted to mention our first series, which is on tariff chaos. Our second series is on career. So take a look at those if you get a chance. But today, series three is about managing a project. So Jules, we are going to tell our audience how to swiftly manage a project, and we have two things. One is brainstorming and doing the homework, right? So, and I’m going to talk about smaller type projects, and my partner in crime, I’m going to call her heels, is going to talk about the larger projects. So, okay, Jewel, if we’re going to brainstorm, what are we doing first? Well, let’s start first like

Speaker 1 01:01

the main the main one step that we wanted to do in this episode was kind of identify the project. So What project are you working on? And then, as Renee mentions, we kind of got two sub steps to that. One is brainstorm, and the other is do your homework, right? So on the first step, I think that when you brainstorm, you really want to pick a project that is good for your department, or not only good for your department, but is is good for some of your other stakeholders. So there’s an element of making sure that there’s something for everyone, or most people, that might need to fund or change or support this project along the way. And Renee, I know that might be a little bit different depending on if you have a big project or a small but we think that some of the brainstorming activities are the similar. But how would you go about running a team to kind of brainstorm?

Renee Chuichiarelli 01:50

Yeah, I mean, like you said, I want to get stakeholder support. So for larger projects, you to your point, we’d probably have to get many cross functional teams. So let’s say I’m going to do an SOP for classification, then I’m going to look at my compliance. Where am I? What are my risks? What are the roadblocks? You know, do I have enough skill set? Do I have people that can write SOPs? Maybe I’ll survey the team, you know, in the case of writing a standard operating procedure for tariff classification. And then I’ll, you know, what other scope Can I include when I do this? Sop, am I going to be able to solve other issues, you know, throughout my team,

Speaker 1 02:26

right? And it’s important just to make sure that you understand at that gate what is the key thing that your stakeholder wants out of it. Because it’ll come in handy, I promise in the future episodes. But the second step that we were talking about was doing the homework. So you know that you have make or buy decisions that you need to do with regard to software, there might be some cool people out in the consulting world or training world that can help you do things. So you need to identify what your project is, not only that, but kind of identify those market solutions or internal solutions that you might have, and Renee, maybe there’s some tips there that you can use on how they might go about identifying market solutions.

Renee Chuichiarelli 03:07

Well, I mean, one you’re going to look at the scope of the project that includes pricing. What are you missing in maybe your ERP solution? What do you you know in the case of Julie’s larger project, let’s say she’s implementing an ERP on my smaller project. I’m doing, like we said, a standard operating procedure. So what’s the scope? What’s the cost? In my case, maybe I would analyze the resources it’s going to take to implement this. How many people do I need on the team? How much time is there? And then I’m going to review solutions, call vendors if I need to. Maybe even in the case, there’s outside counts, or outside vendors that would help us write standard operating procedures, right, like, right?

Speaker 1 03:45

And I think, I think it’s coming from the vantage point of what, as Renee mentioned, is kind of the enterprise solution is your kind of big systems projects you generally will kind of go through. There’s, there’s definitely a number of players out there that you can review. But in this phase, you’re kind of kicking the tires of all of these to get kind of a rough order of magnitude. But also, the other part that I found is, please, when you bring solutions providers or service providers in to your office for a discussion, please give them an opportunity to discuss the other things that they’re working on, the other solutions. So, right, don’t, don’t just kind of narrowly focus on, yes, you want the majority of the bulk of the meeting to be on the new thing that you want them, the problem that you want them to solve. But also think about giving the opportunity for the last like 10 minutes for you just to get an introduction on other things that the service provider might be working on, or the internal group might be working on. And when it comes to internal just a tip, there’s several different IT groups that might be involved in your project. So you kind of need to solicit, depending on the number of departments that you have in it. It’s like a medical office where there’s multiple specialties of it. So you might need to go to an AI team for an AI solution. You might need to go to. Do a database provider for the database solution, so just be good about casting your net as wide as you can in this space.

Renee Chuichiarelli 05:07

Awesome. So I mean, the moral of the story is, we’re going to brainstorm, we’re going to get stakeholder engagement, we’re going to look at our risk and problems that we want to solve, because maybe we can solve more than one problem. This is for large and small scope, and then we’re going to do our homework. We’re going to look at vendors, we’re going to see and to your point, we’re going to expand the scope in our vendor analysis, you know, to help us maybe solve, obviously, the problem we’re looking at, but other problems. But what are we going to tell our audience? What is our FIO? Figure it

Speaker 1 05:37

out. All right, guys, so how are you going to FIO? The only way you do this is we have discussed in our previous episodes, is to do you got to do things, right? So we think it’s good if you find a project to do or to assign. So we know that if you your boss, you could ask your boss, what are the things that are troublesome to you? And create a project out of that. But essentially, what we want you to do is to figure it out. We want you to find a project to do, or, if you’re a manager, something to assign to someone, to give them the opportunity on walking through all these project steps that we’re about to uncover in our future episodes.

Renee Chuichiarelli 06:15

Awesome. And don’t forget to hit our trade geeks, our community, and tell us, did you do the FIO? Did you get a project? Or did, if you’re a manager, did you assign a project? All right, we’ll see you next time.

06:26

Thanks, Renee, you.