Work Hack: Leveraging Project Management Software to Improve Team Productivity
Are you a futurist? Ask yourself this before you read this article.
The world is getting smarter. A lot of jobs or roles which were relevant a decade back might look redundant or too unnecessarily manual. Automation is becoming all-pervasive. Everywhere around the world, human intellect is given higher priorities, and machines are replacing repetitive and dull jobs.
AI washing is happening and is expected to rise and flourish at a swift pace.
In a study by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, 20 million jobs were analyzed and found that machines will replace 7.4% of these jobs. This means close to 1.5 million jobs can be automated.
The general idea is to make life better and easier, make the work more comfortable, and enjoyable and employ precious time into more productive channels.
Let’s discuss this at a micro-level; what happens in a typical project management scenario?
There will be a team and a project manager to whom the team reports.
There will also be other stakeholders and senior management in the organization.
The fundamental objective of automating a project management cycle is to achieve better results with available resources by ensuring a seamless flow of work and enabling the team members to focus on the primary goal of the project.
This can be easily achieved by extensive and useful reliance on project management software. When it comes to automating business processes or projects, there are several considerations based on three questions:
- To what extent should the automation take place?
- In what areas should it be applied?
- What would be the cost vs benefit analysis?
Strategies to Improve Team Productivity
Improving team productivity is the main goal of every company out there, but do you know what’s the best way to achieve this?
Building an innovative, full-proof strategy to improve team productivity.
Why?
Strategies go a long way in not only ensuring team productivity but also evaluate your teams’ weak spots and train them to do better.
But, creating a perfect strategy can be difficult. That’s why, in this blog post, we cover a few strategies you can adopt in your organization to exponentially improve team productivity.
1. Setting Overall Strategy and Planning With Quality
It is highly necessary before the start of a project that an overall strategy is set and documented, which will serve as the basis for further detailed planning.
Extensive documentation is required at this stage, and proper communication with the client about the same should also be ensured. Running a (SWOT) Analysis will give confidence to the entire team that all the available resources and expected circumstances have been accounted for.
It is also essential to understand that project planning is not a discrete process that hangs around at the initial stage of a project. It is a continuous and iterative one that should include reviews and revisions throughout the life of the project. This will enable the analysis of deviations and a guide for future projects.
PM tools help you create an overall strategy and share it with teams, making sure everyone is in the loop and understands how things need to be implemented.
2. Always the Big Picture
It is always crucial that each team member is aware and conscious about the overall objective of the Project. This helps in cutting out the less productive activities. All the team members are given enough opportunity to set standards and deadlines for themselves.
Also, the flow of the work can be measured reliably, and it can be seen whether the work is moving towards or away from the project goal. It also helps in evaluating the contribution of each member of the team.
Setting standard hours/resources required to complete a specific job or activity can be quite a tedious task. There are a number of considerations to be made when it comes to the efficient allocation of resources. For this reason, it is necessary to rely heavily on relevant data and run tests and analyze the results based on scientific standard-setting procedures.
PM tools with complex data processing methodologies and functions should be used to plan and monitor the standards.
3. Prioritizing
Imagine you start working on a project, but have no clue where to start.
You take up a few tasks, and simply complete those tasks without seeing what needs to be implemented first to meet the deadlines.
As a result, you end up crossing deadlines or completing the project without meeting the set quality standard.
So, to escape bottlenecks and deadline pressures, the first technique/method to be applied is prioritizing. Just as a student preparing for a competitive exam, it is necessary to rank one task over the other and to work out a program. This will also help to intensify the focus on each task at hand. It is also helpful in planning estimates and to streamline the workflow.
The effectiveness of proper prioritizing can be easily understood from the circumstances that may arise from the absence of it. A vast array of activities at an initial glance will receive an overwhelming response from the team unless there are proper means to prioritize them.
There are several task management services available in the market that enable efficient allocation and ranking of various activities. It also helps in creating lists and dashboards, tracking their progress and easily switching over to the next one according to the priority.
4. Enhancing Commitment
At the start of a project, teams will be active, but the members in the organization are bound to know each other from years of co-working experience. This is something to capitalize on. When the entire team shares a sense of belongingness, they will feel responsible for the work they perform.
It is the responsibility of a good leader to ensure that the team shares the vision of the project and that they channel their energies and passion towards its achievement.
Project managers rely on past-years’ performances and data to analyze the capabilities and weaknesses of their team members. The team leader can use such data to give private performance evaluations and establish a close relationship with each member. Such an inventory will also enable the manager to plan the resources in a better manner.
Collecting, organizing, and compiling employee data can be a scary thought, especially when the organization is huge. For this reason, high-end team management software should be availed and employed. Such tools enable the management to monitor employee performance and provide constant feedback through automated procedures so that such communications are impersonal and bias-free.
5. Client communication
It is always ideal to keep in touch with the client on a regular basis and keep them as involved in the project as the team to avoid misunderstandings. The constant and regular feedback will accentuate the overall efficiency of the project. Involving the relevant personnel of the client will also help address the issues that may arise in the future right at the beginning, and ensure that the product is tailor-made.
Therefore, it is highly necessary to plan such meetings to be more productive by charting clear scope and topics of discussion on the agenda. Hence, having a clear agenda before each meeting is of utmost importance. This will also ensure that the needs and requirements of the client are properly addressed and checked.
Relying on advanced remote access and file sharing technology is necessary to ensure the mindful involvement and regular feedbacks of the clients. Such systems will help prevent under/over expectations and unnecessary disputes in the course of the project life cycle.
6. Implementing Procedures and Systems With an Intuitive Element
When there is a new member in a team, the systems, and procedures, let alone the actual work might seem confusing, and the person might end up let down. This creates a tear in productivity. So, how to increase team productivity and avoid such a scenario?
The systems must be smart and continue to grow smarter as time passes.
They must also fundamentally exist to streamline and secure operations and not to pull it down. Therefore, incorporating simple procedures into the project management systems is essential to avoid unnecessary procedural hurdles/delays.
Every corner of the world is getting more tech-literate. Yet, having a lot of unnecessary complexities in your systems can bar the effectiveness of education of the system. In this light, it is ideal for designing and planning systems in a way that might more or less appeal to your granny.
A lot of project management tools such as ProofHub, ProProfs Project are built around the principle of simplicity. The user should instantly feel a sense of intuitiveness while working around the systems and procedures. A few of the salient features of such tools that allow this to happen include:
- User-friendly dashboards
- Seamless navigation
- Normalized data structures
7. Effective and Professional Internal Communication
Quality work can never be delivered without effective team communication. It is always a cornerstone of productivity. Streamlining communications at and across various levels is necessary to ensure that everyone is on the same page and there is no confusion or misunderstanding.
For this, the jargon must be familiar to all the members of the team. The team leader is responsible for ensuring that there are receptiveness and response at each end of the network. There should be a conscious system to regulate and monitor the network.
Other innovations in communications should be invited, like incorporating an IM-system within the network of the Project Team or sharing a common platform for addressing and resolving potential issues affecting workflow, etc. Putting such a system into place will also enable the manager to tactfully manage the staff-hours using various techniques like the agile approach.
An efficient PM Software can assist the team leader in ensuring that the workflow is evenly distributed across the network, and there is no idle time.
Improving Team Performance: Leverage Project Management Software
Three elements that need to be identified to structure a communication system are:
- Audience: The parties to the communication, the recipient lists should be planned and the modes should be carefully designed.
- Objective: The Medium of communications should be chosen according to the priority and the expected responsiveness.
- Message: According to the varying needs and purposes of the communication, the message length and formats should be opted to have a certain length, font size, and colors.
Effective Project Management solutions can enable the management to ensure that communication across teams, clients, and stakeholders. A properly structured form of communication is essential to ensure necessary attention as and when required, serve as proof of information and prevent leakage of confidential matters and intellectual assets.
So, when adopting a project management software for your organization, ensure it has features like task dependencies, team collaboration, and reporting. These features are essential to not only monitor team productivity but analyze and understand the pain points of team members. This makes it easy to create training sessions and improve the overall teams’ productivity hassle-free!
Author Bio: David is a technical writer, his works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals. His rich experience in project management software helps him offer a latest and fresh perspective on improved efficiency in workflows across organizations. His informative works on similar lines can be viewed on ProProfs Project. Follow David on Twitter @davidmiller4312 or connect on LinkedIn.
