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How to Improve Resource Productivity with Simplified Project Reports

Business Managers, team leads and project owners have a common challenge – boost resource productivity!  It is a challenge in itself and more so when the entire operation is run by remote teams. Intuitive & automated Project reports have proven to be most helpful.

Constant check-ins, nagging or too many FaceTime meetings wouldn’t take you very far.

You will only end up losing focus from the key project activities & strategic benefits and get stuck with on-ground firefighting.

As managers and project owners you need a detailed view of things in real-time. You will need an all-in-one project management software that helps you with tactical and strategic insights at will.

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But how do you manage your resources and track them when they are virtually spread across different parts of the world?

Let’s take a sneak peek into some of the common resource management challenges that you can overcome to boost remote team productivity & efficiency!

Resource Management Challenges! How to overcome them?
Lack of collaboration among team members Bring them together on a single platform where they can communicate and have discussion, share important stuff. This would keep everyone on the same page and well informed.
Fear of project docs and information getting misplaced Provide them central file repository to upload Project docs so that the team can access information when needed.
Unable to track real time progress of projects. Provide a centralized platform for the projects, tasks and other information like status, estimates & activities. So that each team member stays educated about his/her role and can understand what activities are being carried out by other team members.
Monitoring resource activities and their availability When resources are working virtually, it is difficult to track their activities. So we need to provide platform where resource can

  • View their work schedules
  • Log spent hours
  • Know availability.

This provides clear visualization to managers to take any informed decision w.r.t resource allocation.

Ensuring effective time management for projects PMs need to know how much time is being spent on each activity by resources. Ensure your team is spending time on productive activities that provide business value.

So far, so good! Let us now dive into the specifics of how we can achieve the above solutions.

Resource Availability Report

As the name suggests, knowing which resources are available, for how long and when is crucial to making a robust project plan.

Having a single view that quickly tell you which of your resources are

  • Available
  • Rightly utilized
  • Overloaded
  • On leave

Works wonders for project managers and team leads. They can plan, estimate and allocate with confidence and stay on top of their projects.

Resource Availability

Tactical Benefits

  • Quickly identify resources that aren’t utilized well
  • Maintain rigor around task assignments
  • Plan leaves & personal day-offs in a non-disruptive manner

Strategic Benefits

  • Prevent resource burnout which will greatly benefit team agility
  • Better project pipeline visibility & management
  • Robust resource forecasting & planning for upcoming quarters

Pending Tasks Report

A very simple yet powerful report that usually acts as an eye-opener for both the project team and the managers.

One glance and you know what your resources are up to and the state of task execution.

The pending task report provides the following information.

  • Resource wise task count for all your team members
  • Total estimated hours and spent hours for each resource across all assigned tasks
  • Total count of pending tasks against each resource
  • Remaining hours Vs pending tasks

Pending Task Report

Benefits

  • Easily identify which resources have too many tasks assigned
  • Know if the remaining hours and pending tasks are in the right proportion to get the tasks completed
  • Verify if the estimation was correct in the first place
  • Analyze if spent hours Vs pending tasks indicate unnecessary effort spent
  • Reassign tasks to team members with more bandwidth
  • Identify which team members can be repurposed for other projects

Velocity Charts

Most product, engineering and marketing teams have adopted agile project management today.

The Sprints-based iterative approach is a great indicator of true team performance.

For one, you get more options to understand the team’s efficiency rather than just based on time time-based estimation and time tracking.

You can track a team’s progress and productivity based on the

  • #of tasks completed in the current sprint
  • #of stories completed
  • #of features delivered by the chosen sprint

A Velocity chart is a factual data based approach to understand the team’s true capabilities.

What is a Velocity Chart?

A velocity chart is an overview of what was committed and what was delivered. In simpler terms commitment vs delivered.

The metric of commitment can be number of user stories, feature counts, task count etc. It is recommended to take the average of 3-5 sprints delivered by your team.

E.g. your team worked on 3 Sprints, and delivered 23, 34, 20 story points. Hence your team’s true velocity is a little over 25.

Velocity Chat

Benefits

  • Clarity around the team’s true capabilities
  • Highlights key areas for improvements – QA, Feature knowledge, planning etc.
  • Leads to better planning of future sprints & deliveries
  • Estimation is more accurate as it is backed by actual data now
  • Future delivery & resource planning becomes easier

Sprint Reports

Sprint reports are another agile project management takeaway that are filled with objective information.

They provide the total overview of what happened in the sprint.

They list out all tasks that were duly completed and delivered as part of the original Sprint Plan

Any incomplete items are duly recorded & accommodated in other sprints or moved back to the backlog.

Just like velocity charts, Sprint reports also indicate what was missed with ample scope for sprint retrospectives to know what did not work, why, what did work and what needs improvement.

Sprint Report

Benefits

  • Identify what bugs, features or enhancements were planned & delivered
  • Root cause analysis (RCA) inputs for what did not get delivered
  • Aids in re prioritizing the backlog
  • Teams can identify knowledge & execution gaps
  • Improvise execution for future sprints.

Now, as Product Owner & Scrum Master you get to ensure the product delivery moves as per customer’s expectations.

Both velocity charts and sprint reports help in enabling the teams to be self-organized, gain control of their deliverables and align themselves with the project goals.

Bringing it all together!

Reports act as mirrors and are a powerhouse of actionable insights. The idea is not to lookout for failures.

Instead just the opposite. Prevent and promote productivity!

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The above reports, are instrumental in ensuring that your remote teams do not lose sight of the goal and are clear of the outcomes expected from them.

Note, when there is clarity of purpose, remote project teams are more focused, tend to be organized and focus on getting results.

And when you have actionable inputs in real-time you can:

  • Prevent the team from wandering off
  • Show them the value of their contribution
  • Constantly remind of what is still left to achieve
  • Analyze the quality of outcomes vs. their effort inputs
  • Reward & celebrate quick wins & success

All in all, you are able to

  • exercise rigor around your task management practices
  • improve time tracking discipline
  • address resource management issues adeptly
  • Strengthen hassle free collaboration without consuming too much time.

Well, what reports have you relied on for ensuring remote team productivity in the last 60 days?

Or are you still dependent on manual email, excel & call updates?

Enable remote team productivity with ease. Start today!

Categories: Productivity

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