These Communication Tactics Will Make Everyone Envious of Your Project Management Skills
Worker bees do a considerable amount of work, day in and day out. Working as a team, the specific jobs and duties they perform during their lives vary as they age. In order for a hive to function, everything has to be in sync and each bee has a particular role to play – much like all the moving parts of a project.
In the world of project management, work projects are often collaborative by nature and characterized by multiple steps, task dependencies, timeframes, and people across different teams, companies, or even geographies. To keep a project moving forward, you’ll have to perform a variety of tasks, and clearly communicate with stakeholders. You’ll not only need to watch for missed deadlines and potential road blocks, but also be able to quickly communicate that information to specified individuals.
Six questions to ask yourself before you begin a project
The right communications and collaboration tools will make all the difference in enabling you to deliver your project as promised, on schedule, and within budget. When choosing them for your initiative, here are a few things to consider:
- How will you share (and manage) information so that everyone has timely and secure access to the latest data?
- Where is the best location for this workspace?
- Does your project involve only employees, or partners, contractors, and vendors as well?
- How often do you plan to communicate with team members?
- What communications vehicles do you anticipate using?
- How will you keep stakeholders in the loop to avoid any unexpected surprises?
Where do you go from here?
If you’re looking for speed and effectiveness, you won’t want to weigh your project down spending hours managing by spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls. Instead you’ll want a more modern set of tools to support your project management efforts—ones that will enable you to focus on higher value activities such as:
- Quickly solving problems
- Eliminating obstacles
- Responding to requests for the latest information
- Fine-tuning and streamlining processes
- Simplifying and speeding reporting for better insight …and more.
And you’ll want the tools you choose to be easy for you and your team to learn and use, so maximum time can be devoted to the project, right from the start.
Put information at your team’s fingertips and drive seamless collaboration
To help ensure that your project runs smoothly, look for a project management solution that is designed for multi-user access. Consider one that enables team members to work together and retrieve data from a single, source of truth—from anywhere—even mobile phones.
You’ll want your solution to integrate with other tools your company may use (such as Salesforce or Slack), as well as support automated workflows across applications and departments, based on custom business logic. It should also support streamlined document management that enables you to bring all related documents together in one place and make them accessible with a single click.
Tailor the view and control what you share
Your project management solution should provide each user with only the project details, tasks, automatic reminders and notifications relevant to them. It should also support information security, so customers and partners don’t see each other’s information.
Oversee and manage with ease
To help you boost productivity and keep stakeholders on the same page, make sure your project management solution offers at-a-glance visibility across task assignments and delivery dates as well as instant status on changes, delays, and completions. It should also enable you and others to enter progress details and other information and then automatically update all reports with the latest data—removing the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual reporting.
Dashboards: essential tools in your arsenal
Creating personalized dashboards—something easily done in Quickbase—gives you and your project stakeholders a visual summary of the metrics that matter most to them. Everyone can quickly see where things stand with respect to their tasks, which reduces complexity and confusion and encourages focus, accountability, and timely action.
With Quickbase, project data can be viewed in many different formats including summary reports, charts, maps, calendars, and timelines. Being able to segment your data in the way that works best for you, your stakeholders, and your team members, enables you to set yourself up for a much more successful project and process.
Want to know more?
Sharing the right information and tools is just one of five proven strategies we’ve outlined for successful project management in our new eBook: A Tactical Handbook for the Accidental Project Manager. In it you’ll find a wealth of information and advice on how to:
- Build a solid project management foundation and make sure that everyone has the support they need with our Planning and Enabling
- Establish processes to effectively coordinate and carry out a project plan with our Leadership and Process
- Define a key set of easily understandable measurements to keep things on course with our Create Useful Metrics to Track Progress
- Maximize returns by keeping your eye on the prize with our Watch Your Milestones and Other Measurements
Get ready to take your project management skills to the next level. Get your free copy of this helpful eBook now:
