3 Proven Formulas to Take Your Project Management Skills to A New Level

 

Project Management App

Every project manager has to keep track of the entire process and manage all the tasks efficiently to meet the deadline, right? In today’s ever-changing business scenario, project management has become increasingly difficult. Though we have an advanced project management app & other productivity tools, it is important for you to level up your project management skills in 2021 and beyond. 

Let’s go through three top formulas for enhancing project management at your workplace. These tried and true tips can assist you to take your project management skills to a new level. 

Top Three Tips to Enhance Project Management Skills at Workplace

1. Effective Time Management With Project Management Apps

This is the most important and useful tip. These days, reliable time tracking software and project management app are available to meet this objective effectively. But, as a project manager, you need to have the trait of defining the timeline for every project so that your team can meet the deadline without compromising on quality. It is better to divide any project into five different stages-Initiation, Planning, Execution, Tracking, and Closure. This can help you manage time for each project more efficiently. 

Initiation or discovery and planning phases are crucial because they will decide the direction of your project. You can delegate tasks to your team members after having proper planning and deadlines. You can assign tasks as per the past records and skills of every team member so that they can complete their work on time.

Finally, during the execution phase, the project manager needs to track the progress regularly to identify any issues in advance. With the help of a project management app, project managers can assign pending tasks to available resources to meet the deadline. As multitasking has become the need of the hour. It is necessary to handle it smartly so that we can save time and complete all the tasks with higher productivity. 

Original Source: 3 Proven Formulas to Take Your Project Management Skills to A New Level

Ultimate Work-from-Home Tips and Tricks for Your Organization

Team Task Management Tool

The pandemic age has made remote working and work from home new norms for all industry sectors. Though work from home (WFH) looks intimidating first, if you use the right collaboration tools for remote teams, it can remain even more productive than office work. Apart from utilizing the technological advancements in a feature-rich team task management tool, we would like to mention the top tricks and tips to make WFH highly effective. 

Let’s start by discussing the situation. 

Top Tips and Tricks to Make Work-from-Home Productive and Effective

1. Settle Down!

Both the office and home have completely different environments. Employees or your team members may not find a home as a proper place to work initially. All you can do to ensure that your team establishes a home office in a way that can work as best as it can to keep them efficient and productive. Here are the most obvious requirements of a home office-

– A seamless, continuous Internet connection

– A chair and table with proper back and arm support at the right height

– Adequate lighting

– Electricity outlet for charging

With this, you need to have a comparatively peaceful place or corner at your home and a laptop with an inbuilt team task management tool. 

Original Source: Ultimate Work-from-Home Tips and Tricks for Your Organization

Tips to Optimize Task Management for Better Productivity

 

Task Management System

Streamlining processes and smart work can help you achieve the holy grail of productivity. Though productivity tools can help you boost productivity at the workplace, it is necessary to think of other ways to boost productivity. An official survey has revealed that 56% of small business owners consider communication is key to boosting productivity. Whether you are a startup owner or running an SME, the most powerful way to boost productivity is to optimize task management system effectively.

It is fair to mention that effective communication and time management can contribute to managing tasks at the workplace. These days, many companies use a robust task management system to achieve this objective.

Better task management can boost the productivity and morale of your team. Here are the top five tips to optimize task management for increasing the productivity of your startup.

Five Tips to Optimize Task Management at Your Workplace

1. Define

The first step for every project or process is to determine why it is necessary to accomplish the project. Once the checklist is created, you can know every task necessary to get the end result. It is necessary to begin task management and come up with a proper strategy to complete the tasks on time. As a project manager, you will have an idea how much time it will take to complete the project after outlining the process. You can also know which tasks you should complete first. You can instruct your team accordingly and manage tasks efficiently as per their priority.  

2. Prioritize

Prioritizing tasks is one of the most important tips for optimizing task management. After outlining the necessary tasks, it is better to start categorizing and prioritizing them. Usually, a project consists of many tasks, and out of which some tasks are mundane or repetitive and some tasks need to be prioritized. For example, the digital marketing campaign has two important tasks- writing content and the commissioning of necessary materials. Other tasks include social media posting on a regular basis. 

Original Source: Tips to Optimize Task Management for Better Productivity

How to Leverage Project Management & Discussion Features of TaskOPad

TaskOPad, as a project management software, assists SMBs (Small and Mid-sized Businesses) to grow with industry-standard features and seamless functionality. It is an easy-to-use team task management tool and corporate users can easily create and assign tasks to their teams right away after registration.

Brief on TaskOPad

As an end-to-end team task management tool, TaskOPad can make all tasks achievable and assist companies to accomplish their projects on time. It simplifies key organizational functions like sales & marketing, budget & spending, document management, project management, and task management. It assists small to mid-sized companies to streamline the workflow and achieve their targets as per the deadline. 

Whether you are an entrepreneur, a project manager, or a team member, you can easily track all the tasks & collaborate with other team members using this reliable and secure team task management tool, TaskOPad. 

Project Management Feature

TaskOPad has many useful features to track, collaborate, and manage multiple tasks. One of its useful features is Project Management.  It enables the users to collaborate with external parties and assign tasks to outsiders along with the team members and work in sync. TaskOPad facilitates project managers to add external organizations or third-party companies with whom they want to collaborate. All they need to do is enter the email ID of the external organization. 

Original Source: How to Leverage Project Management & Discussion Features of TaskOPad

Top Ten Reasons Why Workflow is Important for Your Workplace

In whatever way we define a workflow, it remains useful for accomplishing the projects on time by managing every task. Whether you own a startup, a small or mid-sized business & a large enterprise, you need a workflow for processing a set of data. Simply put, the workflow management tool paves the way for a project to reach its refined stage from the raw stage.

Talking about the importance of a workflow in modern businesses, it is fair to mention that without a well-designed workflow, chances are high that your project hits a roadblock in between and the deadline can be missed. Therefore, it is necessary to use workflow tools to make a proper workflow based on the vision statement & project objectives.

Workflow connects the tasks or work involved as a part of a bigger picture. Though workflow and processes are mistakenly considered the same, the basic difference is workflow is mostly a series of repeated activities & whereas a process includes more information with a bigger scope. Similarly, we cannot consider the checklist & workflow as the same in an organization.

A checklist is just a list of the basic requirements for a particular task, & the workflow is a detailed outline of how we can complete the specific task. Let’s dig deep into the importance of a well-defined workflow and the role of task management software in implementing it into your existing business system.

Top Ten Benefits of Well-designed Workflow in Today’s Businesses

1. Makes Everything Systematic

A well-defined, comprehensive workflow includes all necessary aspects for accomplishing the project. Even startups and small businesses can get a clear scope of work with a workflow. Also, the external vendor can get a clear idea of the expectation and scope of prioritized work with the help of a workflow.

Original Source: Workflow Management Tool

How to Manage Workload Effectively – Top Tips to Follow for Managers

 

Workload Management

Workload management is essential for meeting deadlines while maintaining the high efficiency of employees. As a systematic process of managing the workflow accurately & project managers distribute work to team members and monitor their work routine.

This monitoring enables managers to utilize the skills of available resources effectively that assists them and identify any loopholes and make adjustments. Though task management software can help you manage workload efficiently & here we share some useful tips that will make your life easier.

As a project manager, you need to ensure that the assigned work has been completed and delivered on time. You should maintain a subtle balance between the number of tasks and the abilities of your team members to accomplish all the assignments on time & maintaining the optimum productivity level. But then, managing all the aspects at once itself is a herculean task & therefore, workload management comes into the picture. 

Poor resource allocation, inaccurate estimation of deadlines, the underperformance of the team & work-related inadequacy at an individual level can create an imbalance in workload management. If you want to implement proper management at the workplace, these aspects need proper attention.

Let’s understand the key factors that contribute to proper workload management.

1. Delegate tasks as per the employee’s skills and overall performance

2. Compare actual workload and estimated workload as per the project

3. Identify processes necessary to be accomplished for ongoing projects

A team task management tool can help you delegate tasks effectively as per the employee’s capabilities, and you can easily identify necessary processes. These factors are important to manage workload systematically. 

Original Source: How to Manage Workload Effectively – Top Tips to Follow for Managers

How to Execute The Tasks Systematically for Accomplishing Your Project

Project Tracker Tool

There is no one size fits all approach for executing the tasks. The project tracker tool can assist you to meet multiple tasks effectively at the workplace. But, as a project manager, at times, it is necessary for you to use multiple procedures to resolve some issues and execute tasks efficiently. All you need to follow the best set of methodologies that suit the project requirements.

Here are a few important steps to initiate a project and execute the tasks systematically. 

Top Techniques for Effective Task Execution and Project Completion

Whether your project is large or small, complex or simple, proper planning and scheduling is crucial along with integration of all necessary operations. You can take assistance of a project tracker tool to ensure a timely completion of the project, but before executing any task, it is imperative to blend the Ying with the Yang of the project, i.e. planning and scheduling. 

Let’s dig deep into the necessary steps to address this objective effectively. 

1. Make a Roadmap

First things first. The scope of the project or a roadmap can assist you to go through goals, methodologies, and other important aspects at once. Every project needs a careful planning, and therefore, a clear roadmap is essential. You can arrange a meeting with teammates and discuss all the points of your planning with them. Based on the meeting’s outcome, you can make informed decisions before initiating the project. 

2. Find Resources

Traditionally, the project manager allocates tasks to team members based on their own thinking and beliefs. There is no role of data in it. But, this method may fail to achieve the desired goals for your organization. Thanks to evolving technology, you can check the previous records of your team members on the project management software and define roles based on their skills. This strategy can help you attain desired productivity while executing the project. 

Original Source: How to Execute The Tasks Systematically for Accomplishing Your Project

Your Handy Guide to Create the Good Work Plan (GWP) for Agile Teams

 

Team Task Management Tool

It all started back in 2017 when Matthew Taylor gave the solutions of the issues encountered in the workplace in Taylor Review. These solutions are known as Good Work Plan (GWP) and they are bringing revolutions in the modern workplaces. Let’s understand GWP with team task management tool from scratch and dig deep into its fundamentals. 

Introduction of Good Work Plan (GWP)

A good work plan is just another name for the Project Management Plan. It is aimed at achieving the ultimate goal at either a department or a company level. A GWP has an outline of the steps necessary to be taken by breaking tasks into subtasks or smaller milestones, considering resources and deliverables under the given deadline. 

Whether you are handling larger projects or planning for a venture, the Good Work Plan is essential. However, it is useful at any level in your enterprise as a roadmap for the entire project or process. It assists project managers to keep their teams involved in the project in an organized manner. Once the Good Work Plan is prepared, a robust task management tool can be used to keep the entire team in sync. 

Before going through five fundamentals of the GWP, let’s go through its objectives. 

Core Objectives of Good Work Plan

A GWP is designed to improve three main aspects of the working life in the UK and other countries globally. 

– Fair and just employment

– Clarity for employers and workers alike

– Legal transparency through tighter enforcement

Original Source: Your Handy Guide to Create the Good Work Plan (GWP) for Agile Teams

Step-by-Step Guide for Effective Project Control and Management

 

Project Management App

As a project manager, you know very well that often things do not go as they are planned. It is, therefore, necessary to keep all factors in mind that can affect your project. Simply put, a backup solution or a Plan B should be ready to keep control of your project and accomplish it properly. Here, project controls come into the picture. Before moving to the procedure of project controls, let’s have a glimpse of quick facts on the importance of project management app. 

Quick Facts

1. For every $1 billion invested in the US, $122 million was wasted simply because of a lack of project performance

2. 75% of business and IT executives expect that their projects will fail for multiple reasons

3. Fewer than a third of all projects were accomplished on time and on budget 

4. Low-performing companies can complete only 36% of their projects, whereas high-performing companies complete 89% of projects

These stats are sufficient to show the importance of project management and control in your organization. Project controls or a project control system can assist you to serve this objective effectively. Even if you have a detailed project plan and a proper budget estimate, then also project controls are essential to keep an eye on your budget when different aspects keep on changing. Project controls can give a robust solution for accomplishing projects on time in this challenging time when the competition keeps on increasing. 

Let’s understand the concept of project controls before understanding its procedure. 

Introduction and Importance of Project Controls

PMI (Project Management Institute) has mentioned that a project control system is aimed at minimizing the gap between planning and execution of the project to achieve project goals, i.e. cost, time, and content. In other words, project controls are the affirmative actions along with a detailed documentation to keep projects on track and successfully deliver them. They are one of the crucial parts in a project management lifecycle. 

Though project controls are not that visible, they have a great impact on the structure and flow of your project. You can easily anticipate all upcoming opportunities and hurdles with the help of project controls. Every project manager has to act as a project controller as well, and it is possible for you as a project controller that you need to buy some time from the client and apply changes in the project. However, this comes with more budget cuts. 

Original Source: Step-by-Step Guide for Effective Project Control and Management

Top Seven Project Management Issues Solved by the Right Tools

 

Project Management Software

What is better than on-time and successful completion of projects for a company? But, on the other hand, if a project fails, it impacts negatively on the entire company. Therefore, it is inevitable for project managers and teams of employees to put all effort to avoid any grave mistakes that lead to project failure. 

In this article, we are going to discuss the top seven project management issues that you need to solve by using the right tools. 

Seven Frequently Occurring Errors that Right Tools can Fix

Every project is unique and with different requirements. You can accomplish it either by using a traditional Waterfall Model or an Agile way, or in a combination of both these methods. They can be either small or big, and complex or lengthy. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for it. Let’s discuss the seven most prevalent issues related to project management. 

1. Lack of Motivation

What if your team members are not motivated when you are ready to kickstart the project? Unhappy team members who always come late and work on the project for the sake of working are major hurdles in the way of successful project completion. Their negative attitude can cost your project and company high as you may miss the deadline or suffer a setback in the product performance. 

As a project manager, you need to address this issue as soon as possible to avoid any poor and unwanted results. The motivation matrix tool can be useful to address this issue effectively. It assists you to evaluate the most suitable form of motivation for every team member. All you need to find answers to two questions-

– Why does the employee remain unmotivated? 

– How can I motivate the team members in a positive way?

Original Source: Top Seven Project Management Issues Solved by the Right Tools

Useful Tips to Manage Multiple Projects Simultaneously

Managing multiple projects at once is a herculean task, and yet there is no escaping for companies in today’s competitive business scenario. As a team lead or a project manager, you must have witnessed the situation when you need to handle multiple projects at the same time. Here, project management software comes into the picture. 

A user-friendly project management software or app can easily simplify organizational processes across different departments including sales, marketing, development, budget, and workflow management. It enables project managers to handle multiple projects simultaneously. But, we are going to discuss some of the useful tips for handling multiple projects in this blog. 

Top Six Strategies for Effective Management of Multiple Projects

Here are the top six strategies you can follow to keep every project on track even when you manage multiple projects. We will start with the obvious hurdle in the way of managing multiple projects simultaneously- lack of visibility. 

– Visibility

It’s time to kickstart the project after weeks of planning and brainstorming. But then, if the strategy is scattered across different documents, and your team coordinates through email and meetings, you find the project management time-consuming. What’s more, you may miss essential pieces of information because some of the files are not copied on an email. It may also end up in duplication of work. 

A flexible, easy-to-use, and secure multi-project management app enables you to save all the information together in a single platform, and your team members can easily get access to or share their tasks in it. Such an app can enhance the project’s visibility and your team can readily manage it without missing the deadline. 

– Prioritization

Another major hurdle in the way of project managers is there is no defined strategy for prioritizing tasks and work for their team. Some project managers tend to follow the strategy of completing the easiest project first, but it is not a good practice to follow. Instead, it is better to prioritize tasks or projects based on their impact on the overall goals of your company. As a project manager, you can prioritize work based on a macro level and micro level strategically. Here the macro-level priority is about pushing projects with low impact to the next quarter, whereas the micro-level priority consists of to-do lists for daily tasks. 

Also Read- Seven Factors to Keep in Mind while Choosing Task Management Software

– Consistency

When it comes to handling multiple projects at once, consistency in the project management process is essential. You can set a few team-wide conventions for ensuring consistency. A feature-rich task management tool enables you to share status and real-time updates for progress with every team member. Such a tool assists you to get rid of gathering information from multiple and discrete data sources. You can get and share project-related information with ease using the task management tool. 

– Tracking & Reassigning

One of the most important factors to consider for managing multiple projects simultaneously is to track shifting priorities and reassigning tasks. As a project manager, you need to be flexible in changing priorities for timely completion. However, it is quite a task if you track your team’s work in spreadsheets and to-do lists. Also, you will find it difficult to reschedule and inform your teammates about the change of priorities using the traditional methods. 

The project management software can act as a single platform for all the projects on hand. You can easily shift priorities and inform your team members with the ease of using the software. In a way, you can avoid unnecessary delays in project execution. 

– Collaboration & Communication

Lack of visibility and transparency affect communication. Teams that suffer from communication and collaboration issues fail to meet the deadlines. The project management software can assist the project manager and the entire team to communicate in real-time and show every team member how the project is progressing. Real-time updates and access to necessary information empower your team to know how tasks are accomplished. An advanced task management tool also facilitates users to store data and stay connected whenever is necessary to share the corporate data in real-time. 

– Productivity

The secret sauce for maximizing team productivity lies in proper scheduling. The project should be scheduled in a way that makes the most of your team’s potential while considering the project duration and overall impact of the project. Let’s understand this with an example. You want to launch three different websites at the same time and your team works on these web projects at once. 

Chances are fair that these projects stretch up a bit because of internal conflicts as your team attempts to do too much at once. Here, proper scheduling and better coordination can work wonders. As a project manager, you can remove duplicate tasks and define dependencies for proper execution. Altogether, multiple projects can be managed with the utmost productivity.

Also, you need to take care of the delegation of work without hampering visibility. Customized task management software can act as a single platform for tracking all the work, and you can easily see the individual’s progress. It enables you to get rid of micromanagement for every project and you can handle multiple projects simultaneously. 

 This Blog is Originally Published on Project Management Software

6 Amazing Strategies For Successful Project Management Road Mapping

Strategic planning plays a vital role to meet deadlines and maintain productivity for every project on board. For effective strategic planning, the project managers have to visualize the objectives and key milestones of the project. Here, the project roadmap comes into the picture. It not only assists the stakeholders to get insight into the project’s goals but also facilitates managers to allocate resources and expect deliverables in a given timeframe.

These days, many project management software or tools are available for making a roadmap to get the big picture. Here in this blog, we are going to give you effective tips and tactics for making an effective roadmap to manage projects efficiently. Let’s start from scratch and understand the meaning and importance of a project roadmap for modern industries.

Project Roadmap- Brief Introduction

It is an easy-to-follow source of information that enables stakeholders and managers to visualize the project strategically and make critical decisions without putting much effort into understanding the minutiae. Unlike the project plan that breaks down the project into tasks and subtasks, the project roadmap gives a big picture of the entire project completion process.

Simply put, the project roadmap acts as the project dashboard from which stakeholders and the top management can track the progress of the project while assessing all the strategic details through charts, updates, and graphs. The project roadmap considers all the data generated from an ongoing project and converts the same into structured, actionable insights.

What to Include in Project Roadmap

The project roadmap is aimed at showing the link between various variables and their role in accomplishing the project.

Here is the list of major components that should be included in the project roadmap-

1. Key Objectives

The project’s key objectives should be included in the roadmap. In other words, the project roadmap should answer the questions like- what are the goals for the particular project, how we can achieve them rapidly, and can we achieve these objectives on time. The project roadmap includes all the targets, deliverables, resources, and tasks associated with the particular project. It helps the company management to find whether the effort is on track to achieve all the key objectives.

2. Milestones to be Achieved

Milestones for the project indicate various levels within the project. In a way, the milestone tracking offers a unique and effective way to measure the progress of your project by checking the outlined completion levels. In other words, milestones are included in the project roadmap for tracking the completion levels of the project.

3. Details of Deliverables

Project deliverables are nothing but the material results that are aimed to be derived from a project within the given time limit of the project. Stakeholders can readily measure project progress simply by viewing deliverables in the project roadmap.

4. Management of Resources

It involves a count of the resources allocated to a project for measuring their impact and make real-time decisions for increasing or decreasing allocated resources. Here, the project management software can provide real-time data regarding the performance of employees, and you can easily modify the allocation based on this data. It helps you gaining objectives quickly.

5. Timeline and Associated Risks

The project management timeline is important to measure the project’s progress and find out how long it will take to accomplish the project. While considering the timeline along with other factors, we can easily and accurately visualize whether the project is on track or at risk.

Finally, the project roadmap also contains the potential risks or obstacles that may prevent the successful completion of the project.

After discussing the necessary factors to be included in the roadmap, let’s go through the top strategies for making an effective roadmap in project management.

Also Read- How a Task Management App can Help Managers Delegate Effectively 

Choose the Right Project Management Software

It is essential to choose the right project management tool for building an effective project roadmap. The project management tool can show you the employee’s tasks, their performance, and overall productivity of the company that can achieve the deadline. These tools can provide the real-time data from different sources and the project manager can track and visualize the process with ease.

For example, TaskOPad, a robust project management software, takes care of necessary aspects like dependency tracking, project collaboration, and time tracking for making an effective roadmap.

- Identify Project Objectives

The second step is, of course, defining project objectives that can be tracked in the later stage of the project to measure the progress. The project tracker tool can track the predefined project objectives like the target audience and scope of the project. It is necessary to define project objectives in a way that we can get an answer to the question ‘what are we aiming to achieve?’ in trackable terms.

- Determine the Timeline

Timeline or project deadline comes next. Based on the project objectives and other variables including the scope of the project and overall efficiency of employees, the management can define the project’s timeline. It involves extensive planning on how much time it will take to accomplish the project.

- Make a Mock-up

Once we have a project tracking tool, defined objectives, and determined a project timeline, we are ready to create a mock-up. Creating task dependencies can make it easy to track the project in real-time.

- Get the Reviews

As mentioned above, the project roadmap is designed to facilitate the key stakeholders to check whether the project goes in the right direction. The project sponsors or stakeholders can give their reviews about the roadmap after going through it.

- Keep on Updating the Roadmap

As the project kicks off, the project managers need to keep updating the project roadmap to drive the project successfully.

Concluding Lines

In a nutshell, project roadmaps play a critical role in accomplishing various projects across different industry sectors. When the roadmap is properly created, the project can be successfully managed. All the strategies mentioned in this post will help you create the effective roadmap. Project roadmaps offer a reliable source of actionable insights for the project management team and stakeholders of the project. With a robust and feature-rich project management tool like TaskOPad, you can successfully create an effective roadmap for your upcoming projects.

Originally published at https://www.taskopad.com on December 2, 2020.