A brand new year has just started. Time to set new goals for the next 365 days. Whether it’s signing up to a gym (and actually going regularly 😅), planning a lifetime trip to Southeast Asia or simply cutting-down the time you spend on social media, there’s a whole world of possibilities. And why not taking advantage of this widespread motivation for a fresh start on the work front too? It might just be the perfect time to make a few improvements to the way your team has been working till now.
Is your team missing deadlines (constantly)? No one never knows who’s doing what? Are you scribbling your to do’s on random post-its? Have you been clueless on an important project update because someone forgot to click “Reply all”?
If you’re nodding your head as you read this than you might want to consider a slight shift to improve the way you keep track of your tasks and projects. And that shift is called a project management tool.
With the right tool your team will keep up with rapidly changing task status, have a clear overview of all the tasks they need to accomplish and streamline work processes and communication.
If you’re still not sure that a PM tool is the right thing for you and your team, here are some essential benefits that will make you change your mind.
1. Get Your Project Planning in One Single Place
Every project should start with a plan. No matter the size of your team or of the project, it’s crucial to map-out all the important steps and milestones from the very beginning. The team should be aware what are the expectations for the project, who is assigned for which task and what is the deadline. The clearer this is, the easier it will be for them to focus on achieving the ultimate goal.
With Outplanr you have the ability to create, maintain and share project plans and timelines on a central platform with real time changes. If you’re the project leader, you can start by adding a list of tasks and organize them in different Sections. From there it’ll be easier for you to know which tasks to assign to whom.
2. Track Your Projects and Don’t Miss Any Deadlines
Many teams still rely on Excel spreadsheets, whiteboards, or post-its to register their to-do’s and keep track of their project progress. But, at the end of the day, tasks outlast these lists as you can’t just update them in real time.
One of your team’s main goal, besides delivering a great project of course, is delivering it on time. Tracking your time will make sure there are no delays and you can complete the project on time without compromising its quality. Besides, tracking the time spent on every task allows you to understand the work pace of your team members, making it easier for you to plan future projects.
In Outplanr, if you plan a duration for each task then you get an estimate of how much time you’ll need to get everything done. Each team member can log in time for each of their tasks. They can start a task, pause it when they need a lunch break and complete it when it’s done. This way you can track the total hours already recorded and the hours still planned. In the Project View you can quickly check all the tasks, who they are assigned to and their status.
3. Get All Your Team on the Same Page
59% of US workers say communication is their team’s biggest obstacle (source: Atlassian).
A breakdown in communications leads to bad task delegation and, in the worst case scenario, to a major project fail. It doesn’t matter if your team is working on the same location or on different continents, team managers should always foster communication.
Everybody who’s working on the same project should have an insight into other people’s roles and responsibilities. Good collaboration is build on transparency. It’s important that all the processes, tasks and activities of a project are visible to everyone on the team. It will make it easier for everyone to keep track of what they are working on. They’ll know how to organize their tasks better and what their next step is.
Outplanr offers a clear view of who is doing what and when. In the Track view you’ll see your teams activity across all projects or in a specific project, you choose.
4. Share Your Calendars and Documents
Having access to your teammates’ calendar is really convenient. Imagine you have to meet George to discuss a particular aspect of the project. If you both have access to each other’s calendars it’s much easier to coordinate available dates and times.
To help you with that, in Outplanr you’ll have what we call the Plan view. It looks just like a calendar where your tasks and events are displayed across your working week.
Along with projects comes documents and files. It’s much easier to execute your tasks without having to send thousands of emails with attached documents because sooner or later things will get tangled.
In Outplanr you’ll be able to attach files related to each task. This way every time you need to check a detail about a task you won’t need to dig through your endless inbox as everything can be found in one single, safe place. The communication flow will be simple and straightforward.
5. Reduce Your Inbox Nightmare
According to Forbes, on average, office workers receive 200 messages a day and spend about 2.5 hours on reading and replying to emails every day.
What about you? How many emails do you get in your inbox every day? Probably so many, that work ends up getting buried there. Although in many companies emailing is still the preferred form of communication, it is slow and ineffective, and might even lead to projects getting delayed.
Outplanr streamlines the communication between your team members. Next time you need to ask something about a task you just have to open the task edit panel and use the comments section to do it. Or when you have to let the entire team know about something you can use the Notifications section to do so. Only by taking advantage of these features you’ll already be cutting down a few emails from your teammates’ inbox.
6. Improve Everyone’s Work-Life Balance
According to the World Health Organization, burnout is now a workplace issue. Burned out and demotivated employees have a great impact on the company’s performance. That’s why businesses should make it a point to provide a good work-life balance to their employees.
When assigning tasks managers often ignore booked calendars which leads to unrealistic deadline setting and more stress and resentment to their teams. Having a place to check who is available, when and for how long allows managers to better balance every team member workload.
In Outplanr you’ll have that place. In the Plan View you can see how the working week looks like for everyone on your team. If you need to start a new project you can check who’s available to start working on it. Also, if you see that Mark is too overloaded (because a red contour will automatically appear if he’s working more than 7 hours) you can offload some of his work by reassigning some of his tasks or perhaps extend some deadlines.
Running multiple projects can be challenging. Whether is a short project or a project spanning over months, a project involving a small or bigger team, between tasks, meetings, resources and deadlines, there’s just too many things to manage. And too many things that can go wrong and ultimately jeopardize a successful project delivery.
That’s why a Project Management tool can be extremely useful for your team. It allows you to manage tasks in a central hub and share all kinds of project-related info. You’ll worry less with managing timelines and more on deliver a great product.
It’s just as the saying goes “out with the old, in with the new”. In this case, out with ineffective project management, in with streamlined resources and project tracking.
