Managing a project can feel like juggling balls of fire while paddling a uni bike on a dangling stunt rope. Managers are often required to handle a variety of responsibilities, right from meeting the project objectives to humanely understanding the team dynamics. At times, it can feel overwhelming for managers to a point where project challenges start getting the better of them.
If you’ve ever managed a project, you’d know that it’s not only about delivering work on time. It’s about making several things work at once, and you wish that you had more than two hands!
Well, smart managers know how to get extra hands working for them. No, it’s not offloading tasks to an inferior team member, it’s about choosing project management tools that help them get more done without overstretching their own selves.
A KPMG project management survey highlighted that more than two-thirds of organizations had experienced one failed project in the preceding year. Furthermore, more than half of the respondents didn’t achieve project goals as expected.
The survey also highlighted that 90% of organizations that had used a project management methodology delivered consistently successful projects.
Therefore, if you’re in the manager’s seat, wondering how to be more productive; we suggest a list of specialized tools that will help you strategize well, and defeat project challenges with high impact.
Challenge 1 – Undefined Goals
Improper goal setting or no goal setting at all can make it really difficult for the manager to steer the project with a sense of direction. In projects, setting up goals in the form of milestones, phases and targets, always helps the team to better prioritize their duties.
Working on a project without goals is like running a sprint race with no defined finishing line. The athletes will keep circling the track totally unaware if at all anyone is winning. The same happens if the finishing line keeps shifting. It’s a futile effort for everyone.
Goalscape for Better Goal Setting
We suggest Goalscape for setting definite and trackable goals for your projects. The tool offers a visual interface for pinning all your task items with clear descriptions and calendar dates so that you can track progress towards each goal.
Top Features of Goalscape
- Visual Goal Setting – Managers can create goals and always keep everything important at a single glance.
- Set Priorities – Priorities help managers reduce goal conflicts. They can accurately tell what’s important, for making the goal realistically achievable.
- Collaborate with Your Team – Managers who lead collaborative teams can always take inputs from the team and create goals with better synchronization.
- Attach Files and Project Data – It’s always helpful to keep all project deliverables and important files in the same place. You can view goals come to life and gather all documents in Goalscape itself.
Challenge 2 – Lack of Accountability
Accountability issues are an inevitable reality of team projects. Even if the team members don’t intentionally shirk accountability, such habits can lead to the demise of the project real quick. Pointing fingers and not owning up to the given project roles makes it very hard for the manager to build a productive team.
In such cases, the manager has to bridge the accountability divide by being an active communicator and introducing a single source of truth that can hold everyone accountable on its own. Project management tools that offer better ways of boosting accountability and can help you discover how to be more productive.
ProofHub for Building Better Accountability
We’d like to draw attention to ProofHub, which is an amalgamation of team management and project communication. It enables managers to assign project responsibilities in the form of tasks. Each task comes with progress tracking, comments and deadlines that paint a clear picture of how the duties are being met.
In addition, managers can easily build workload reports to analyze if the team members are overstuffed with work. Using in-built communication tools, managers can compassionately resolve accountability issues at a personal level. Furthermore, ProofHub offers several features for ensuring the health of projects such as project dashboards, custom data fields and file management.
Top Features of ProofHub
- Task Management – A diligent task management system that comes with Kanban workflows and Gantt Chart view for helping you create an efficient project management plan.
- Discussion Boards – Communicate issues directly with the entire team and openly discuss ideas in a collaborative chat screen that supports file attachments.
- Workload Reports – Generate workload reports for each team member vis-a-vis the tasks and projects assigned to them, to boost performance accountability.
- 1:1 and Group Chat – Talk to your team members in an easy-to-use 1:1 chat interface or address multiple members in group chat. Make instant communication quicker with ProofHub chat.
Challenge 3 – Poor Communication
Successful projects thrive on effective communication. If project tasks are effectively communicated, the upper management is in close reach and project updates are timely consumed by stakeholders – a lot of conflicts are avoided before they blow up.
Despite heavy reliance on communication, it’s still the leading cause why projects suffer. Broken communication reduces the team’s ability to collaborate fruitfully and undermine the potential of delivering the best quality work.
Chanty for Better Project Communication
Hence, we suggest Chanty, a quick project communication software that connects the team via chat, voice and video. It can help co-located and remote teams stay in touch with each other for all their daily meetings and work-related communication needs. Chanty offers an integrated interface that helps teams share files, audio clips and even code snippets quickly.
Top Features of Chanty
- Dedicated Team Spaces – Create dedicated team spaces for nuclear teams to manage their inherent team conversations, files and tasks.
- In-built Task Management – Assign tasks to your team members right from within Chanty’s chat interface.
- Conversation Grouping – Conversations can be easily grouped based on topics so that too many messages don’t overwhelm users.
- Integrate with Other Tools – Chanty integrates with Trello, Google Drive, One Drive, and Gitlab, etc, to help you centralize your workflow.
Challenge 4 – Impossible Deadlines
Timelines begin dwindling in the absence of proper time management – which has a lot to do with how time is utilized during the project. Basically, whenever a deadline is missed, it reflects on two things; the practicality of the agreed deadline and the productivity of the team.
If the deadline is estimated without foresight, there’s a high chance that it’ll be repeatedly missed. The same goes for the team’s collective productivity. Low productivity always puts deadlines under siege. So, how can the manager resolve these two challenges related to time management?
TimeDoctor for Better Time Management
The answer lies in better time awareness and Time Doctor is a time tracking tool designed for this very purpose. It records the time consumption habits of individual team members in order to build a collective time report that helps the managers improve time utilization across the board.
Top Features of Time Doctor
- Time Recording Tool – Time Doctor offers a time recording tool that compiles data for time spent on various tasks and activities automatically.
- Time Reports – Time reports offer insights into how the team utilizes its time such as active time, coffee breaks, non-productive hours, etc.
- Activity Tracker – Activity tracker enables managers to understand the apps and websites used by team members.
- Benchmarking – By setting a few time usage or productivity benchmarks, managers can build performance reports for employees.
Challenge 5 – Improper Risk Management
Project risks can’t be nullified, they can only be planned for. Usually, the managers who go the extra mile to identify risks early on, such as a security flaw in the IT infra or a troubling vendor in the supply chain, are able to keep the project health under control. But given the sheer amount of responsibilities a manager is attributed with, it’s easy to falter when it’s the most crucial.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid all risks, and be on-point 100% of the time but if you’re alert towards project risks, you can ensure that no risks become too harmful for the project. If you’re in a workplace where project risks must be dealt with proactively, risk management software could be a solution.
Resolver for Improved Risk Management
Resolver is a potential choice as it helps identify and mitigate risks across corporate security, information security and compliance teams. The software product centralizes areas of risk such as IT, vendors and audit, to stay ahead of potential pitfalls.
Top Features of Resolver
- Corporate Security – Bolster corporate security by enabling a system of managing corporate security risks in projects.
- Vendor Risk Management – Working with multiple vendors becomes easier as managers can fully screen vendors before compliance risks become apparent.
- IT Risk Management – IT risks account for one of the largest reasons behind tanked projects. Resolver helps you better identify IT risks and mend them before anything goes out of hand.
- Incident Management – Managers can better control the reporting and resolution of incidents as they take place in the organization.
Conclusion
Managing enterprise projects with sanctity and acuity never fails to be challenging but with new-age tools, managers are making their way to successful projects more often than not. As depicted by industry surveys, teams that employ project management techniques and tools enjoy a better likelihood of success than those that don’t. This article enlists some of the most pressing challenges faced by managers, and impactful tools that solve them.
Solution-oriented managers often choose to go the tech way to gain leverage on project challenges. Familiarizing with project management tools can put you ahead of both in your pursuit to be a better manager, and your career alike.
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