3 Ways BrightWork Makes Task Management Easier For Your Team
Most people on your team are working on more than one project at once. With so many competing priorities, it can be overwhelming to stay on top of what needs to be done.
Here’s a common scenario we hear from customers:
- It’s difficult to keep track of their assigned work and when it is due, especially across competing projects.
- Team members struggle to contribute to projects and providing status updates is too time-consuming.
- There is no objective way to highlight when they have an issue or have too much on their plate.
- Project deliverables are not managed in a central library and version control is lost.
Task Management Made Easy with BrightWork and SharePoint
SharePoint is the perfect platform for team collaboration, with some robust task management capabilities. BrightWork is designed to extend those capabilities to give team members a simple work management system in SharePoint.
With BrightWork, all team members can:
Find your work
Project management templates from BrightWork give the team a virtual workspace to connect and collaborate on the project. At any time, team members can check the BrightWork site to find out what they need to do on a project and how it affects the overall success of the project.
All BrightWork templates contain “My Work” reports, which show users all the work that is assigned to them. Work reports can be filtered for different views, for example, Open Work, Work Due Soon, and Overdue Work.
Not only does this guide team members through their top priorities, these reports provide insight for the project manager as well. If a project manager sees that overdue work is piling up with one resource, they can intervene and shuffle the workload to others who have more capacity.
While it’s great to have such easy task management in a BrightWork site, unfortunately, you can’t count on a team member to regularly check the project site. So BrightWork also has the ability to schedule automated emails to give the team members a friendly “nudge” about upcoming or late work.
Here at BrightWork, we receive an update every Monday morning with our open work across all the projects we are working. Most BrightWorkers use these updates to guide their weekly planning process. You can send updates daily, weekly, or at any interval that makes sense the cadence and processes of your team.
Do your work
Naturally enough, we should spend most of our time doing the work! And BrightWork leverages the collaborative capabilities in SharePoint to give team members the tools to collaborate and get work done.
BrightWork leverages the native SharePoint document management features like version control, co-authoring, check-in / check-out, and workflows. These native SharePoint features make it incredibly easy for the team members to share documents and collaborate on deliverables. There’s no need to search desktops or emails for the documents, as the latest version is always available at the project site in SharePoint.
Inevitably, team members will encounter issues during the course of the project. In BrightWork, all they need to do is check a box to flag an issue. Simply open the task and tick a box to indicate an issue, and that task is then transferred to the Issues List where it will get the attention of the project manager. Alternatively, if a team member encounters a bigger issue, they can log the issue directly and add with notes and commentary as necessary.
The collaborative nature of the SharePoint platform lets team members search for answers when they hit a roadblock. SharePoint Search ties it all together and makes it easy for team members to find the resources they need. This creates a culture of collaboration in which team members are empowered to proactively seek out the help they need. No more waiting until the next project update meeting to ask a question!
Update your work
One of the most difficult jobs of a project manager (of which there are many!) is getting timely and accurate updates from the team. BrightWork makes it very easy for team members to provide updates and summary reports on their work. Using the datasheet view, team members can make bulk edits to their tasks and easily mark work as done.
When a more detailed update is required, they can open the task to provide the update and add status comments. Fields like expected due dates, comments and percent complete, are designed to help team members provide a quality status update. The key is that the system is set up to prompt team members to enter the information required for better reporting on the project.
The portfolio reporting capabilities in BrightWork mean that when a team member makes an update, all the reports are done. Those changes will roll-up to all dashboards that report on that work so you can spend more time productively working the project!
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in 2016 and has updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
Originally published at https://www.brightwork.com.
