5 Things You Need for Successful Project Management

You have deployed the right project management tool, have the resources lined up, all the approvals & funding and ready to take-off. The team is excited and everything goes into chaos as the team begins the project execution.

Having a project management tool isn’t enough. The idea is to make sure the tool provides you with some of the most critical project management features that enable execution as per the project plan.

Let’s take a look into the key project management software capabilities that enable successful project completion.

Work breakdown Structure – Project Templates

Project planning is the first step towards setting up your project for success. Having a feature that provides for breaking down your project into smaller manageable & workable blocks is crucial.

You can see the project in entirety and “really” understand what the project entails.

Project Managers have greater control in breaking the project into

• Milestones
• Parent tasks, subtasks and sub-subtasks
• Classifying tasks meaningfully with custom task types and custom labels
• Task estimation at the most granular level

Just imagine the power of doing just these 4 activities! I.e. end to end task management.

The transparency and visibility to the entire project, how it will flow, and the hidden task dependencies come to light along with the time and resource requirements.

Thus, project managers have a better handle on their projects to start with.

Project templates in Orangescrum allow to define the following information as part of the project plan in addition to the list above –

• Checklists
• Task linking
• Assignee
• Start and End dates

So, once you have the template ready you can link it to a project and get going. All milestones, tasks, subtask come to life and execution is focused.

The team have their tasks cut out, no guessing or confusion around what happens next!

Read on to know how you can benefit from automated project templates.

Kanban – Custom Status Workflow

The second feature that is important for project execution is having the relevant status progress queues.

No two projects are alike and have the associated tasks have their own lifecycle.

And when resources work across projects, not having their distinct task status flow may lead to confusion.

At the same time when there is well-defined status workflow, the team is clear on the flow of tasks from one status to another till successful completion.

Task Status Groups in Orangescrum allow for defining multiple status workflows for specific project types.

Each task status group will have

• Multiple custom status
• Progress or completion% for each status
• Colour code each status
• Updating task status auto-updates the task progress

And to maintain clarity, each project can have only one task status group assigned.

Thus, meaningful status ensure important execution steps aren’t missed, process alignment improves, bottlenecks are identified easily and hence prevented too!

So you are better equipped to deal with the most common project management challenges.

All in all, one glance at your Kanban board and the true progress of the project is clear and aids in effective status review meetings with the team.

Time Tracking

Time tracking is very important because our projects are majorly an exchange of skilled time for money.

So completing projects within the agreed timelines is crucial not only for client satisfaction but for profitability as well.

With the right time tracking capabilities you can

• track time spent on each task
• measure the planned vs actual hours spent
• track billable hours accurately
• identify the non-billable hours
• prevent and eliminate non value add activities to improve profitability

Also, time tracking alone isn’t enough. And this brings to the next and most critical aspect – Resource Management.

Resource Management

Project resource management consists of 3 concrete aspects

• Resource Allocation
• Resource Availability
• Resource Utilization

Resource Allocation

Resource Allocation is all about maintaining a healthy resource pool and purposing them to support your project pipeline. Once allocated to a project, resource allocation helps in understanding the resource spread across the projects to know who will work on what and till when.

Resource Availability

Resource Availability paves the way for effective utilization. Not only you know who are your available resources but also how are they occupied, on which tasks and till when.

Most importantly, resource availability ensures that your project resources aren’t sitting idle or you most hardworking resources aren’t overloaded.

Resource Utilization

It helps you measure your team’s productivity and improve their efficiency.

You know exactly how your resources spent their time, how much of it was billable, where did they overspend and why.

Robust resource management capabilities help to

• improve project profitability
• deliver on time
• strengthen project planning
• prevent resource conflicts
• maintain high employee productivity rates

So, do make it a point to ensure your chosen project management software provides resource and time management capabilities combined.

User Role Management

Running large projects with too many resources makes unauthorized access of confidential project data a great concern.

Having robust user role management capability with flexibility to configure permissions and privileges makes a project manager’s life lot easier.

It is not only about maintaining data privacy and protection but also ensuring the team has access to the right data at the right time.

Moreover, you also need to ensure that the teams are allowed to access functions that are relevant to their role on the project.

Too much information or too many features would cause distraction and lead to unwanted errors.

User role management helps to keep things simple. “Need based” access ensures people get to access, use and work with features that are of use to them.

At the same time, roles and responsibilities also become clearer and helps with better project coordination and execution.

You can define meaningful roles and permissions and hence your project RACI kind of gets reflected right within the tool.

Conclusion

Each project team has its own set of requirements but these 5 are the most common yet crucial capabilities that help drive projects to their successful completion.

Make it a point that you have the power of

• Project templates for simplified task management
• Kanban boards and custom task status workflow
• Time Tracking
• Resource Management
• User Role Management

And, imagine you having to rely on multiple systems and tools to get to all this information! What a waste of time and effort!

Orangescrum open source enterprise project management tool brings all of these critical aspects in to one and enables holistic collaboration across the organization.

Centralized access to project information, activities and tasks, resources, visibility to progress and true status of your execution.

Execution, monitoring and improvisation goes hand-in-hand with real time granular view of all moving parts of your project.

Want more? Take a look at all the enterprise project management requirements and capabilities you may need right here!