Forget about vampires draining all your blood or creepy shadows lurking around the corner. Project’s schedule derailing and overruling budget — that’s what will bring fear and terror upon your team.
Since Halloween is just around the corner it might be the perfect time to cast a spell over all the project management problems that are causing trouble for you and your team.
So, before you put on your scary costume and snatch some trick or treat candy, let’s peep into what those problems might be, and how to avoid the two words that will really scare the hell out of your team — project failure. 😬
Plan? What plan?
You just scored this big new project, you have a great team assembled, and you hit start button. Wait, wasn’t there supposed to be a plan? Starting a project without planning a single task, defining clear responsibilities or setting deadlines will certainly increase your chances of having a failed project.
🧙♀️ Outplanr spell: Create a Project and add all the tasks you need to accomplish to get it done. Assign each task to a teammate according to their expertise, set a start date and a due date, plan the duration, define the priority and add subtasks if needed. Create an Event to mark the project deadline and every other important milestone. It will appear on everyone’s Plan view letting all the team know about important dates.
Closed doors are ok to keep zombies away but not your team
Another reason that can prevent even the most well-thought project from succeeding? Poor team communication. Every team member must be on the same page and know exactly what their role and responsibilities are. Making sure there’s an effective and clear communication will avoid possible misunderstandings and conflicts.
🧙♀️ Outplanr spell: Assigning a task to each team member will ensure everyone knows exactly what to get done. If you edit the task and add details like the deadline, a description, and the expected duration everyone will know what to do and by when.
The task edit panel also has a comments section where people can exchange all task-related information.
Sucking the life away from your team
When it comes to have your blood and soul being drained out of your body it’s not vampires we have to worry about but that dreadful monster called burnout. Work stress and pressure, working extra and after hours, pilling up functions and not having the necessary breaks are some of the reasons that can take people to burning out. Burnout not only affects work performance and productivity but also mental health and physical well-being.
🧙♀️ Outplanr spell: The Plan view considers that the effective maximum amount of work time in a regular day is 7 hours, to consider the natural pauses that happen during the work day. So any person with more than 7 hours of work allocated will show a red contour, to mark overtime. Then with the drag-and-drop functionality you can offload their work to someone who’s not that busy or move some of their tasks to another day.
Wasting time in zombie-like meetings
Do you keep meeting with the team for follow ups and status updates? All that time spent on unproductive meetings is probably occupying a big part of your day which you could have used to actually work on important tasks. It’s probably time to shift your focus from pointless meetings and find the right solution to save you some precious time, before you bleed your project to death.
🧙♀️ Outplanr spell: By accessing Project Details you’ll know where your team stands at every step of the way. No need to ask John if he finished the report or Mary if she started designing the landing page. Here you can quickly check the status, progress and time balance against the time planned of every task. It also shows all information about project events.
Another quick way to get status updates is heading to the Track view. It will let you know when someone started, paused or completed a task.
The impossible deadlines nightmare
Deadlines are that familiar, and sometimes dreadful, word in project management. Being given an unrealistic project deadline is unfortunately more common than it should. Most times clients want work done for yesterday and repeatedly ask for the impossible. The result can be quite the opposite as teams might not work so well under pressure.
🧙♀️ Outplanr spell: Some of the reasons for failure to meet set deadlines can be poor time management or impossible deadlines from the onset of the project. To have a better idea of the time needed to complete every task of the project, you can plan each task duration and then use task play and pause to register the time you work on it. That will also help to better access project progress. In the Project Details view you’ll get an overview of each task status (started, not started, paused or completed) and progress (%, in red if over the planned time).
Also in the same view, on the top-right corner you can see a quick balance of the hours spent on the project and how many are still planned. That will help let your client know where things stand and set more realistic deadlines.
Sometimes deadlines feel impossible because the project seems overwhelming. You can break down the project into a series of smaller milestones, and set a deadline for each. That will help you keep on-track for the final deadline. To let everyone about important project deadlines, create events that will appear on everyone’s Work and Plan views.
Too many tasks spoil the broth
Long, undivided tasks lists make it hard to get things done. Frequently big tasks have several smaller steps needed to accomplish them.
Also not all tasks within a project have the same priority. Ordering your tasks by giving each of them a priority will help you know what you have to focus on first.
🧙♀️ Outplanr spell: Split up large tasks into manageable subtasks in the task edit panel. When you create a task in Outplanr it is set as Normal priority by default. You can change the priority level at any time in the edit panel, depending if it is urgent or not.
It’s officially spooky season so what better time to scare the ghosts of bad project management away? A project management tool might be the real treat you need to run your projects with less stress and more effectively.
Give Outplanr a try! Ask for an invitation to get a full 30-days trial.
