How to Tackle Challenging Activities in Project Management Like a Pro

Five Hacks for Handling Project Management Activities

•  Conceptualization

It is the first and foremost step for the project management lifecycle. It involves identifying the objective or opportunity for the project. Clients who have no clarity of what they want and with vague requirements can pose one of the biggest challenges for the project manager and the entire team. It is necessary to address this challenge to kickstart the project efficiently and meet the client’s expectations. 

The conceptualization phase starts with the creation of a business case that precisely explains the objectives of a specific project. It deals with the major concerns of the given project. A business case does not necessarily discuss the technical aspects of the project. Once the client approves the business case, the project management team takes a feasibility study for determining the viability of the idea. It involves the technical, economical, operational, and legal feasibility of the project idea. 

•  Making a Roadmap

This is another important stage of a project management lifecycle. Defining objectives and making a roadmap for the project enable every stakeholder to know where the project goes and how to achieve defined goals. Here the challenges remain as changing requirements, project deliverables, budgetary limitations, and the like. While making a roadmap for the project, the development team, and the client brainstorm to address these challenges effectively. 

Roadmap or strategy planning includes budget planning, risk management, communication strategy, procurement planning, and quality planning to mitigate various challenges without hampering the product’s quality or performance. The project management software sets team quantitative criteria for ensuring successful project completion based on the roadmap. 

Original Source: Project Tracker Tool

How To Prioritize Work?

For Most of us working professionals, we see a lot of pressure for achieving goals, tasks and deadlines Unfortunately, not all of these goals and work tasks see the daylight. This can be attributed to lack of planning and prioritizing. At some point of time every professional in their careers have been faced with how to prioritize between urgent and important tasks. There are scenarios where managers have been reported to say “Everything is important”.

In such cases how does one decide which tasks to work on and which to push back. At TaskOpad we strongly believe that the hardest part of getting work done, is not working on it, it is planning it. When priorities and work start piling up, it is important to have a system in place which helps you prioritize well. While a task management software can easily help you with that, but there is a whole science to it that professionals need to follow in order to be more productive.

Read More : Tool For Project Management

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.

7 Tips To Enhance Workflow Management To Improve Productivity

Workflow management plays a crucial role in meeting deadlines and increasing productivity. Whether you run a startup, SME, or a large enterprise, your operations should be highly efficient, and proper workflow management makes it possible.

However, managing workflow is quite a task and you need to remain alert every time. Here are some of the useful steps you can take to enhance workflow management and increase productivity.

1. Be Organized

It all starts with making a to-do list for daily tasks. A proper to-do list can make your workflow more organized and streamlined. You can either use a simple task planner or a robust task management software to make a to-do list. This list can help you set priorities and delegate responsibility to your team.

2. Set Priority

The key to improving productivity remains in the manager’s capability of setting the priority of tasks. It is imperative to separate important tasks from urgent ones to streamline the workflow. Productivity tends to suffer because of the inability to prioritize day-to-day tasks. It is the manager’s responsibility to distinguish between urgent and important tasks while assigning them to employees as per their skills. However, task management software can help them balance the time between these two types.

3. One Task at a Time

What makes the manager’s job difficult is the fact that almost all tasks demand their attention at once. It makes delegation of tasks cumbersome, and at times, it results in a complete mess. Therefore, it is essential to focus on each and every task separately and motivate employees to accomplish it in the same way. The task management software can show the real-time status of every task and you can assign other tasks to employees based on this status.

4. Measure Productivity

It is fair to mention that it is impossible to determine whether your workflow is streamlining properly without comparing various metrics. It is, therefore, essential to take steps for measuring the productivity of your employees in terms of taking time to accomplish various tasks. The customized task management tool can show the performance of every employee in real-time.

Managers can see who is working on which projects and how many tasks have been accomplished on an interactive dashboard. It helps them measure the productivity of employees. It also makes employees more productive and efficient as their performance is viewed closely.

Also Read- How to Manage Your Workload Using a Task Management Tool

5. Improve Delegation

When it comes to delegating responsibility, as an entrepreneur or a project manager, you need to consider the productivity of your employees. It happens when you give your workers more responsibility, their productivity improves. It is because your employees have a feeling of ownership over projects and they put more effort. Here, you can utilize the task management software. It can give you the entire data of the employee’s efficiency, past work history, and overall productivity for particular tasks. You can delegate more responsibilities to employees based on this data.

6. Opt for Automation

Workflow automation is a buzzword in the corporate sector and advanced task management tools can help companies bring automation into the workflow. These tools streamline the processes while reducing paperwork. It can save hours in coordinating and communicating between multiple individuals. Also, workflow automation can enhance the efficiency of your employees. You can get rid of extensive paperwork and save big on resources and effort.

7. Remove Miscommunication

The biggest hurdle in the way of smooth workflow management is miscommunication. Therefore, it is necessary to improve communication in the team. Thanks to the advanced project management software, all the team members can easily stay connected to each other and collaborate for achieving a common goal. You can also improve communication with the help of a cloud-based system that facilitates your employees to share necessary documents in real-time and in a secure way. Also, it is better to focus on improving the company’s culture and establish strong relationships among workers.

Concluding Lines

It is necessary to streamline workflows to meet the deadlines and increase the productivity of your employees. We have covered all the necessary aspects to enhance workflow management in these seven useful tips. You can count on TaskOPad for managing workflow and tasks. What’s more, you can generate reports and track the progress of your team in real-time to ensure the growth of your business.

Originally published at https://www.taskopad.com on November 27, 2020.