Project Management Tips to Keep Your Employees on Track

When it comes to business success, you must be proficient in project management. Project management is very straightforward. You can set a deadline and set right people in the right place to get things done correctly.

A majority of my conversations with business owners have a common theme of not getting desired outcomes even after long work hours pumped in by their employees. And I would answer them back with – How good is your Project Management? & How empowered is your PMO?

Requirements to resource mapping are critical in defining your project team and thereby crucial to project success. Running a project with a team without the required skills will always lead to scope creep and delay your delivery.

To overcome these situations, let’s have a quick look at some of the important project management tips to keep your teams on track.

“Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That’s what management is all about.”  –  Tom DeMarco

“Project management can be defined as a way of developing structure in a complex project, where the independent variables of time, cost, resources and human behavior come together.” –  Rory Burke

Create Small and Flexible Team:

Before assigning any task to your team, make a small and flexible group/team and define their roles. The chances of miscommunication are less in a small flexible team and there is increased accountability to deliver end to end results. Each team member gets involved with the sprint planning to do their specific tasks.

Align Team with Company Goals:

As a project manager or company owner, ensure your projects & teams are aligned with the company goals to obtain optimum results. Absolute clarity on the strategic direction among the team would go a long way in having a motivated and productive workforce.

Implement Kanban Principle:

Kanban principle really helps the company in achieving the business goal. It clearly visualizes the workflow, shows the work effectiveness from beginning to end, highlights opportunities for additional visualization and required process improvements. Kanban plays a vital role in keeping your costs to a minimum, eliminate wasteful efforts and maximize customer satisfaction.

Value Time Management

Time Management helps de-stress your workplace and leads to rising productivity levels. There are a zillion articles and content about the importance of time management, but the underlying principle is the same – plan your day in advance. Define your tasks for the day, factor contingency tasks and make progress with one task at a time. As a Project Manager, the project team effectively use timesheet and time tracking tools for more productivity.

Set Clear Workflow and Checkpoints:

Before assigning projects to teams make sure that everyone should have a clear idea about their deliverables and timelines. You can also define checkpoints to know the “in progress” and “on-hold” tasks of a project. You must perform a periodic assessment of the outputs across all stages of the project life cycle. This will help you identify and mitigate risks proactively.

Communication and Collaboration:

Nothing beats the power of good & timely communication. Having a project Communication plan is just as important as the project plan itself. All team members must be familiar with the defined communication schedule, modes and time. E.g. daily/weekly status meetings, email or presentation status updates and specified times for these updates. Collaboration is the best working practice where individuals come together to achieve solutions to common project problems.

Prioritize your tasks:

Task Management can tell which task need to start early with importance and which need some time to start. You need to do the highly important tasks right from the beginning and the less important tasks later. It keeps a balance between urgent and not important tasks. The daily meeting helps to set the priority within the task pool. A project manager should hire good talent and challenge them with inspiration to accomplish company objective.

Conclusion:

Project Management is always a challenging job. Proper planning, workflow management, and resource utilization can make your work simple maximize productivity. Project Management Tool like OrangeScrum has a great role in managing your project and employee’s time tracking. Hope the above project management tips must help you to keep your employee and people on track.