Increasing productivity can be stressful. It often means demanding that people work harder or longer hours. According to the CompTIA Industry Outlook Report, though, ensuring maximum productivity is an important goal for 58% of technology professionals. The report also found that stress is a problem and hiring is hard. So how do you do improve productivity without burning out an already frayed – and difficult to replace – workforce?
Focus on project efficiency
A smart, online, management tool, complete with autonomous monitoring, will reduce the time people spend communicating about status, minimize stand-up meetings, cut the workload of your project manager(s), and let you see where your processes have been breeding inefficiency and stress.
A smart project manager
If you haven’t already taken advantage of the cloud to tap into the power of a collaborative work management tool, it’s time. When used well, these tools replace the meetings that happen to provide status updates with an online hub everyone can turn to for a single source of truth on the status of projects.
Whether you choose Monday.com, Asana, Clickup, or Perfect Project, Moovila’s AI-driven project automation platform, moving your project management to a tool designed for the job will bring clarity to your processes.
That meeting could have been a glance
How much time, each week, does your team spend communicating about project status? Whether they do it in Slack, emails, meetings, or phone calls, this necessary communication is time consuming. One study found that we spend two workdays per week in meetings and email. The phrase, “That meeting could have been an email,” has become a painful joke. But many of those torturous meetings and time-consuming emails could have been a glance at a dashboard.
We spend two workdays per week
in meetings and email.
Instead of leaving the project management to one person who grills everyone about what they have accomplished during the week, a project management tool allows people to tick tasks off when they are completed. The project manager, leader, or other team members can see the status at a glance. If they have a question, they can ask it within the task and get an answer in the same place. All conversations about work become part of the work.
Instead of receiving an assignment or project update via email, you check into your project management tool for assignments. Click accept on an assignment and start working through the tasks. You can track your time within the task, chat with colleagues, leave notes, and attach relevant data and files to the task. When it’s completed, mark it done.
Most of those meetings, emails, and other wasteful status updates are replaced with a glance at a dashboard.
Make the Project Management Office (PMO) more efficient
Moovila Perfect Project can also lift much of the work drudgery from the project manager.
Before using a project and resource management tool, the PM gathered status and entered it into a spreadsheet or other tool to keep track of progress. When something didn’t go to plan, the PM recalculated due dates, assessed other tasks and projects impacted by the delay, and communicated changes to everyone involved.
Moving to an integrated project management tool eliminates the status gathering. Perfect Project’s APMM takes over the drudgery of spotting problems and updating the plan.
The PM has only to glance at Perfect Project’s RPAX score to see if everything is going to plan or if something has gone off the rails. Its artificial intelligence constantly calculates the impact of delays, notes when tasks are late, and recalculates the impact on every task downstream. When a problem requires human attention, the RPAX score takes a dip.
It takes only a glance at a dashboard to identify when there is a problem. The PM can quickly drill down to see what it is and Perfect Project will suggest solutions for getting the plan back on track.
See where your systems breed inefficiency
When you get your projects into Perfect Project, you also start accumulating valuable data about how they unfold.
Perhaps, for example, your PM, using Perfect Project, created a plan by entering tasks, choosing resources with the requisite time and skills, and calculating durations and work time. Perfect Project’s math engine used her estimates to calculate the delivery date. Together they estimated that the job would take two weeks and require two level-two engineers.
Those engineers receive the assignment in their Perfect Project dashboard, accept it, and get to work, ticking tasks done as they complete them.
A few days later, though, the engineers encounter a problem beyond their ability. They call a level-three engineer for help. While they wait for that engineer to be available, they sit idle. This slows the project progress. APMM alerts the PM to the slowdown and suggests some mitigation. The delivery date is pushed back a few days.
There is another hold-up when a material delivery is delayed. And another when one of the engineers takes time away for an event that crashes with the updated schedule. Ultimately, the project takes three weeks instead of two.
At the end of the project, the PM sits down to evaluate how it all went and what could have been done differently.
Looking over the delays and hitches, the PM sees that if she had scheduled a level-two and level-three engineer, instead of two level-two engineers, things would have gone more smoothly. Even with the added hourly wage, the project would have been cheaper because there would have been less idle time. The client would have been happier, too.
The PM makes a few changes to that project plan, capturing this knowledge, and saving it as a template. In the future, any PM who builds that type of project can use that template and benefit from that knowledge, iterating toward even greater efficiency over time.
Conclusion
Moving to a smart, integrated project management tool such as Perfect Project is a clever way to maximize efficiency. Not only does it immediately eliminate wasteful – and often painful – meetings but it cuts down on email and other disjointed communication methods (not to mention duplicate data entry), alleviating a source of stress for your team. And the more you use it, the more efficient you will become, as you leverage the data it delivers to work smarter. You can improve efficiency without demanding that your people work harder, faster, or longer.
Ready to try our AI-driven project automation platform? Sign up for a demo and see how much more efficient you can be.
