Being a successful manager boils down to two things, essentially: get it done on time and within the budget. Getting those two things to happen is a much more difficult feat than it first seems. Once you know that less than one-third of projects are on time and under budget, it’s easier to understand why successful project managers make the money they do and are so valuable to a company. Planning and executing a successful project as a project manager can be much easier by switching up a few of the ways teams normally handle teamwork and communication during projects.
You can increase productivity, team cohesion, and efficiency to be a successful project manager with these few tips.
Simplify communication methods:
One of the biggest inhibitors to not just success in project, but company productivity in general is poor, outdated communication methods like internal email. Employees waste over half their time at work dealing with internal email and are distracted from actually getting to the real work. An efficient project team should be spending less time getting organized and communicating information, and 100% focused on getting the work done. Exchanging internal email with a company chat platform is a great way to increase the speed and efficiency of communication between team members to get things done. With company chat, the conversation is inclusive among team members and organized. It can be searched and saved where everyone has access. Hibox is a great tool that allows your team to chat and collaborate better than over email.
To be a successful project manager, make task organization a priority:
If you do not implement a way to assign, organize, delegate, and track tasks early on, it will become a confusing mess early into the project as the weeks and deadlines start rolling by. Any miscommunication or missed task can cause bigger problems and set you back on time or put you over budget. Using a task management system that is works with your company chat to help make the conversation actionable and centralize all your team’s planning. Hibox task management is already integrated into chat. The project calendar in Hibox makes it really easy to assign and delegate work leading up to deadlines and keeping everyone informed with how your team is doing.
Set standards for communication and checking in as project manager:
Particularly with remote teams which many teams are now, it can be really easy to lose track of communication and end up working completely separately. Even in an office, this happens. This is where mistakes and miscommunications happen. Avoid this by setting standards for how your team will communicate including methods, frequency, what you need to communicate about, etc. Having face time with team members is important for keeping up personal connection and motivation for projects. For instance, you may decide to have a video conference call with all project team members for a 15 minute game plan at the beginning of the week and a 15 minute video call at the end to discuss what was covered. Hibox has built-in group video chat so your team doesn’t need to leave the platform to get on Skype.
Eliminate old school rules that inhibit productivity to be a better project manager
For whatever reason, there are just things companies continue to do that, despite slowing down productivity significantly, are second nature to work environments. There are no need for long progress update meetings. 37% of employee time is spent in meetings. If you’re trying to meet a project deadline, this is a team habit you need to change. Instead of meetings, plan for simple chat brainstorming sessions to hash out ideas and provide updates in organized streams in Hibox. Switch out long meetings with short calls when necessary to go over details. But let your team actually work and not worry about talking about work.
Promote collaboration on as much work as possible
There is always going to be a certain amount of time spent on individual work with projects, of course. But improving team collaboration can help generate better ideas, find solutions to problems, work more efficiently, and avoid miscommunications and mistakes. Having everyone work separately and then trying to put it together can be where things start to derail. Make collaborating on work easier by using tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Hibox to share files so that everyone can edit one document at the same time together. Brainstorming and getting feedback on work is really easy when you can share files directly in a stream as well. This cuts down the time needed to email files back and forth, make changes, review, and send back to a cohesive and collaborative process instead.
There are a ton of factors that go into a good project team, but eliminating the pain points of productivity and collaboration is a great way to guarantee a more successful project. For an all-inclusive project management tool, try Hibox with your project team.
