Project managers often shoulder more responsibilities than you can count –planning and scheduling, assigning tasks, tracking progress, meeting deadlines, running meetings, collaborating with team members, managing resources and budgets, getting the whole team to work as one, and analyzing reports to name a few. The workload becomes quite overwhelming if done manually. This is when project managers need state-of-the-art task management software that can automate time-consuming tasks and help them run a large team of professionals.
Utilizing the latest technologies helps you amp the performance of project teams. Here are a few key tasks that a task management software can simplify for you.
Collaboration
A large project team may consist of hundreds of people, all working on a different task, having different expertise in their fields. Not to mention, project team members may frequently need to discuss ideas, make real-time updates together, brainstorm concepts, or even access each other’s work where dependencies come into play. Collaboration becomes easier when you are relying on state-of-the-art task management software.
Top-notch task management software incorporates features for contact lists, shared calendars, and options for file sharing. In addition, task management software incorporate a built-in messenger app inside the tool, which facilitates effortless team communication, especially where remote employees are involved.
Most software solutions let you create team dashboards that everyone can access. You can add key performance indicators (KPIs), visual metrics, charts, and graphs to your dashboard, which actually acts as your project KPI report. This dashboard lets everyone know at a glance whether goals are being met, which leads to more informed decision-making and helps you decide on how to improve performance.
A shared team calendar for organizing and scheduling meetings that synchronizes with popular calendar tools is another benefit of project management software. Establishing a shared calendar ensures that everyone receives notifications about allocated meeting slots and no one arrives late or misses an important meeting.
Planning and Scheduling
The project planning process is highly time-consuming since you have to map out all the important steps and have everyone’s tasks and responsibilities outlined and visible. Knowing who to delegate which task, as well as recognizing which task is more urgent, helps you avoid misunderstandings and confusion. A task management software helps you establish a hierarchy of tasks for efficient and effective completion.
With the help of such tools, you can easily assign tasks to team members and set priorities and deadlines. You can also ensure that no team member accidentally neglects a task by adding due dates to each assigned task. This way, the team member in question is notified if the scheduled completion date approaches and the activity is still incomplete.
Ensure that nothing falls through the cracks due to inefficient management, lack of time, or simply forgetting when you are using automated software. In addition, a top-notch task management software also lets you prioritize your tasks so that you don’t get lost in the completion of small, low priority tasks, and leave out important ones for another day.
If an urgent task suddenly arises, you can move other tasks ahead and make room for these high-priority ones without having to manually reschedule other tasks and inform each team member separately. A real-time overview of everyone’s unscheduled time and assigned tasks helps Project managers set realistic deadlines and to avoid overburdening people.
Tracking the time spent on every task also helps project managers collect data about team members, and learn their work pace for precise time estimations and future project planning. This would also help the PM allocate different types of tasks to different team members playing on their strengths.
Not to mention, if one team member finishes their task ahead of the planned schedule, you can always assign something more urgent to them in real-time. In short, a task management software helps you attain a seamless workflow, which contributes to a company’s sustainable future and creates cohesion within a team.
Ease of Documentation
Wouldn’t you love to have all your project information accessible in one place? Be it files relevant to the project, datasheets, project resources, calendar events, and even planned and completed tasks? Having all your data assembled under a single tool enables you to easily share it with your team and access it in a few clicks no matter where you are.
Considering that a majority of projects involve a large number of documents, by creating a centralized document storage plan, task management software ensures that members can easily edit and contribute.
Every team member can share anything relevant to the project into the system and everyone else can access whenever and wherever they need it. This alleviates the need to send thousands of emails back and forth with attached documents where things are bound to get convoluted.
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