How do you know you are working in barely managed chaos? Maybe you find yourself frazzled because of the number of projects on the go or your inbox being overflowed with client files or maybe you have to chase clients for replies.
When you come across such situations that are going out of hand, what do you do next? In my long experience of being a Marketing Manager, I have learned one of the valuable things a project manager can do is have a ‘project management tool’.
Why Project Management?
The term project management is self-explanatory. Every business manages multiple people and projects, they will have certain projects to focus on. However, an online project management software will possibly end all your project management woes. It plays a large role in being the hub for:
- A dedicated team of skilled professionals
- Task management and monitoring
- Project planning and organization
Benefits of Project Management Software for Your Business
According to PMI, 71% of businesses are reported as having used agile approaches either “sometimes,” “often” or “always.” Project management software makes it easy for project managers to manage their project from the idea stage to the completion stage. Through these stages, managers and teams are leading the charge with a software because it helps them with many functions, like:
Keep the Key Players in Loop
One of the top problems that prevent a project from being successful is poor communication between teams, stakeholders, and management. A survey conducted in the UK revealed that 57% of business faced project failure due to a breakdown in communication. How do you manage to have a clear and effective communication? As you all know, communication is important inside and outside and with all those who have a stake in the project. You can have a conversation with anyone whenever needed and keep everyone in loop through threaded comments.
Be Flexible with Management Process
Project managers certainly know unknowns are waiting to trip them up. The uncertainties may spoil the chance of quality and cost. With efficient management comes ultimate flexibility. Project managers need this flexibility to deal with changed circumstances, to move from one work to other and to map out strategies on how to complete a project. In short, the projects with a process of management that gives space for more flexibility are more successful.
Work Together Seamlessly
Collaboration is a vital feature to ensure the timely delivery of a project. It is like a fuel for productivity. No project can propel towards successful completion without teams working together seamlessly. When the collaboration is on top, it keeps everyone informed of what’s going, what needs to be done and who is doing what. Keeping your team goals aligned, here are the features that a collaborative software should possess to get work done faster.
- Dashboards: With cloud-based solutions you can keep everything placed super clean and uncluttered at one centralized location. All the data can be viewed by all assignees through visual dashboards.
- Shared workspace: Share documents, schedules, calendars, files and reports, and timelines easily with team members and stakeholders, wherever they may be through any connected device.
- Real-time chat: There is no collaboration possible without communication. One-on-one chat or group chat through a chat window is the best way to share little yet important information. With a real-time chat, project stakeholders can collaborate.
- Email integration: Unfortunately, email management is a mess but with a project management software your email can be integrated to save time and to make sure email do not get sandwiched in the email chain.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Whenever you keep your customers in the loop with the progress of your tasks, they will be announced all the steps of the project progression and will walk satisfied and happy throughout. They will keep relying on for further business and recommending the same to others as well. Smart management means more business, more profits, and greater sales.
Optimized Scheduling
Many times it becomes difficult to stay on the top of schedule always. With the growing number of projects, it becomes often hard to stay on schedule to let everyone keep aware of what tasks should be done and when it should be completed. When using a project management software, managers can make sure that the team members finish assigned tasks on time, allowing them to better manage their schedule. Let’s see the features that help in scheduling:
- Gantt charts: The tools offers a timeline that helps you stay on schedule so you hit the deadline. You can set dependencies, update, review and edit the functionality. The team members get a real-time view of the progress of project tasks.
- Custom calendars: With the calendar view, you can see tasks and events, important notes and reminders, that are linked with the teams.
- Real-time activity stream: As per the activities of the team, team members can have a real-time activity stream to update schedules.
Stay Accountable With Tasks
It’s troublesome to lose track of everything you need to do and slipping through the cracks is common. A project management solution keeps everyone accountable, whether it’s managing your time or organizing your files.
How? Let see it’s important features:
- Gets work done within the committed time frame.
- Set a start and due date for teams to better plan their work when they know when a task is due.
- Set status to notify teams with every update of the project.
- Every team member can own responsibility.
- They will know who is responsible for each area of work.
Takeaway: Everyone gets a larger view of who is responsible for what with a project management solution.
Better Project Tracking
When planning your projects, things may not happen always as planned. There might be multiple goals in certain areas to accomplish and keeping a track of each project stage is complex. This project tracking gives a clear picture of the project, the performance and results, and understanding of the project health. Here are the features of a project management tools that helps in solving an issue before it becomes a problem.
- Priorities: Choose a task to flag a priority level to tell which needs to be focussed first when the due dates of more than one task are overlapping.
- Time-tracking: The project management app lets you get a complete information on the logged hours and total working hours taken to complete a project.
- Progress reports: Quickly access to reports in your dashboard telling about the performance, time and output of everyone, tasks completed, and the progress of the project.
- Recurring tasks: Set a task to be repeated weekly or monthly if it is to be done repeatedly.
- Integrations: Collaborate with other applications to sync your data and information.
Key Takeaway: Choose a software solution that allows you to achieve your project goals while keeping up the morale of your team.
When an organization faces project management chaos, there is a need for a big bang approach ― project management software to effectively meet the challenges. Now is the time time to make a move to lead your projects to success.
