How To Use Visuals To Manage Projects, Teams, And Financials In One Place
We’ve gone well beyond the age where projects were just numbers in a spreadsheet.
Over the years, studies have been conducted to better understand how we humans work and what processes need to be improved to make us more productive. All results have led us to understand that by nature, we are highly visual beings, not mere “mechanical turks”.
Humans can process complete images in a matter of just 13 milliseconds. This proves that we are by nature visual learners. Even more so, this has had tremendous effects on the way we work. Pairing text with images has been proven to help us remember as much as 65% of the information even 3 days later.
But, how does this all tie to project management? 🤔
What is visual project management?
Visual project management refers to the approach where you rely on visuals to plan projects, monitor progress, and analyze work.
Frankly, this is perhaps the most convenient way for managers like you to get a complete overview of your projects, team’s workload, and your own duties.
Beyond just data visualization, visual project management takes work, team, and task management to another level through highly visual apps and methods.
You’re no longer simply staring at a chart, infographic, or timeline. But rather work with this information, monitor it, and keep a change log of all tweaks. All in real-time and with multiple collaborators coming in to help. Kind of like you would with actionable tables, calendars, and other image-based structures.
We don’t just learn visually. We communicate with the help of symbols and images too. We use intentional hand gestures when our words aren’t enough, we add in emojis to our conversations when we feel like amplifying our sentences [or just don’t know what to say đź¤], and we’ve been creating complete discussions based on gifs.
That’s just for fun. Truth is, we’ve been using images and symbols a lot to save time or fill in the gaps when missing the right words.
Putting all this together, written information is made actionable through Gantt Charts, Kanban boards, dashboards, and other visual representations in project management.
Visual project management applies to all areas and elements involved in one project. Even at a company level. From projects and teams to individual employees, tasks, reporting, and finances.
Getting started with managing your first projects
With project management, you’re paying extra attention to how your business goals align with the work that goes into a project, the team members and resources needed, and budgets.
Paymo, a work management software for small-to-medium teams, helps you get accurate data on all project matters and keep analytics in sight at all times. All this without having any information distorted.
To start, you’ll need a full look at everything you’re in charge of. Paymo’s Home module reunites tasks from all projects either for yourself (My Tasks) or the whole team (Team’s Tasks) so you can keep operations in check and focus only on the most pressing activities.
Depending on how you’d like to visualize your tasks, there are 3 different task views.
List View
Similar to a to-do list, this view gives you a quick look over the most important task details like description, assigned users, status, and priorities so you can take action right away, with all the necessary guidance.
Table View
Lets you display or hide certain task details as columns, for increased visibility. These can be further edited inline, for convenience, as opposed to having to enter each one to fill in its details.
The Table View is best suited for project managers or team leads who want to see on a visual burndown graph how much time their team has spent against every task from the task budget.
Each task list sums up the total estimated hours and price at the end. In case you run retainer clients, just rename a task list with the desired month in mind, for example March 2020.
Kanban board
This is my view of choice since it’s definitely the most visual one of them. It basically allows you to view activities on a board with columns (phases) and move them through a drag and drop action to another column as they advance through the project.
The Kanban method is not just handy for your team who’s likely to enjoy using it since it saves up so much time. In general, it’s useful for managers who want to get an overlook at work and spot potential bottlenecks ahead of time.
To see how you can use Kanban boards for your own projects, check out our list of hands-on examples.
These kinds of visual project management tools are also convenient for cutting down on the number of back-and-forth emails sent among your team members. As everyone in your workspace can see the project’s progress through its various phases.
Managing projects through visual project management software
If you don’t need to have your hands in all buckets, start by seeing how all projects stack against each other and whether there are any red flags you should pay attention to.
Paymo’s Projects’s Table View gives you a perspective about each project’s overall health in terms of the time spent on it vs the total hourly budget. Just like an individual project’s table view, it renders all project details such as the number of completed tasks, hours booked, or Unbilled AR as columns to be further displayed or hidden.
“But I have 100 projects.”
Filters allow you to be more granular when the situation asks for it.
Want to see only the projects and their status for a particular client? Just add a filter by client and select the desired one. Then click on the Export as button to download.
Or use stronger combo filters, such as a client’s projects that your team’s worked on for more than 40 hours.
If you have two or more lengthy projects that span across the same or similar period, it might be more difficult for you to take on extra work for a small team that’s caught up with other tasks.
