Meeting timelines is the ultimate goal of every workplace. When teams struggle with delivering timely results, it is time to adopt a project management tool.
According to PMI, only one-third of all projects succeed in meeting their goals. Further, the rate of organizations that can complete 100% of their projects successfully is less than 3%, indicates a Gallup report.
Low success rates could be because of any of the following issues in your company’s work management:
- Lack of a standardized approach to work
- Poor resource allocation during execution
- Failure to communicate properly
- Poor real-time collaboration between teams
- Assigning the wrong project manager for the project
- Failure to manage the scope of the project
These reasons hamper the efficiency of your team, and they struggle with delivering timely results. When this happens, it is time to adopt a project management tool. After all, meeting deadlines is the ultimate goal of every workplace.
The 6 signs indicating it’s high time you should adopt a project management tool for your company are:
1. Teams working in silos
Let’s start with the example of Airbus A380, the world’s largest commercial aircraft to show how teams working in silos can affect a project.
Production facilities across the globe were building individual parts of the jumbo airplane. The teams used different CAD (computer-aided design) programs. It was only during installation that they realized that the different parts made by individual teams did not fit together. The project went south, costing $6 billion and a delay of two years. Flawed and disconnected teams affected the outcome of the project.
Efficient team collaboration is built on transparency. If the processes, product roadmap and project reports are not visible, it’s hard for your team members to keep track of every stage they are working on. Moreover, real-time communication between teams and clients is vital to ensure the project remains on the right track, and information gets appropriately exchanged.
A project management tool helps your team members in having an insight into other people’s roles and responsibilities and getting updates from your clients. However, if they still don’t get the updates, that means the tool fails to serve your needs and should be reviewed immediately.
2. Lack of a standardized approach to work
The majority of projects start on a positive note, only to end up sputtering due to the lack of set processes and procedures.
Every employee has a different way of approaching a task. When many employees work together on a project as a team, conflict is bound to arise. How employee A completes a job might not be as efficient as compared to employee B’s way of working.
Create a project plan with standard work processes to indicate who is responsible for what, when tasks are needed and what steps would lead to their completion.
A project management tool indicates the way all tasks should be managed. The software generalizes the approach to work and provides better visibility of functions and responsibilities across the company. Is there a baseline that helps you compare the set timeline and the current one to know the delay? Consider changing your existing system if you are unable to get an update about how the task is progressing.
3. Lack of team collaboration
Collaboration is becoming embedded in the way we work, with 34% of the workforce expected to work remotely by 2020, as per Intuit. Ineffective collaboration within and between teams is noted to be the root cause of project failures in workplaces, according to Salesforce.
With multiple stakeholders involved in a project ranging from employees to vendors and clients, collaboration impacts every stage of a business. The downsides of dealing with multiple projects in the absence of streamlined collaboration include duplication of tasks, missed deadlines, low-quality deliverables, hindered productivity and a negative effect on revenue.
A collaboration tool makes external and internal communication for projects more manageable. As more than half of all projects fail because of poor communication, a project management solution shows vendors and clients project progress.
4. Unsupervised team members
Project managers are responsible for the entire project team and answerable to both the company and its clients which is why they are always on their toes when it comes to team management.
If you are a project manager, there are a couple of things you can do. For starters, hold a “kickoff meeting” before the beginning of a project to clarify the responsibilities and KPIs of your team, and how every team member’s contribution fuels the project’s goals.
Secondly, choose a project management tool that:
a. Helps you keep track of the various tasks assigned to your team
b. Enables you to give feedback or ask for an update
If you work with in-house and remote teams, select a tool that helps you manage both efficiently. Look for features such as time tracking, task dependencies, inline comments, single dashboard view and data visualization.
5. Poor resource allocation during execution
Isn’t it unfair if a single team member does 70% of the job, while the rest of the team only looks after 30% of the project? Once you have a project management tool in place, you can evenly delegate tasks so that every person on the team has an equal role in accomplishing the task.
If a team member is unsure of their role, they can check the tool to understand where they stand, and how they fare against everyone else. Your project managers can reassign responsibilities if that will help in the faster completion of the project or reduce costs.
6. Obstacles in making data-driven decisions
The responsibilities of a project manager include breaking down projects into tasks and workflows of limited size, complexity and duration. Based on previously completed projects across other organizations, they make contingency plans and forecast the output according to:
- Reasons why the team couldn’t finish the project within the budget
- Reasons that stopped a team member from completing a specific number of tasks
- Areas where the team fell short on providing deliverables
For major public projects in Denmark and the U.K., project management is mandatory. Without a project management tool, conducting a comprehensive analysis to make the right call becomes a challenge.
Over to you
In this day and age, far from being a luxury, project management is an essential business discipline worth implementing across your company to achieve goals efficiently. A sophisticated project management tool helps you centralize your team collaboration, evenly distribute the project workload, and hold your processes in line.
Assess your current business strategy to identify the collaboration software solution that will help you meet your objectives. Your efforts before the purchase are going to make all the difference. Choose wisely.
