How to streamline your project management
Project management is a fast-paced, ever-changing scene. As a project manager, pressure can begin mounting on you to deliver multiple complex projects to different timescales and strict budgets, all whilst maximising profitability for the company.
Read on for some advice on how to better streamline your project management techniques and reap better results.
Improve visibility
One of the simplest changes that can have the biggest impact on efficiency is improving project visibility across your team.
An effective way to implement this, is to introduce a dashboard which shows all team members where a project is up to, and more importantly, what remains to be done.
This will cut down on time spent searching for a task to do and means individuals can take more of an initiative with their own workload.
Implementing project management software for greater visibility also allows you to take action if you suspect that you may have a staff utilisation problem. Using this will give you knowledge as to the extent and cause of this problem, and with key reports, you can resolve issues quickly as you spot them.
Cut time on reporting
By using software that allows you to schedule key project management reports on any set date, you can ensure that deadlines are never delayed or forgotten about.
Along with this, finances, including net profit, can be checked at any time during an ongoing job.
This means that you will no longer have to wait until the end of the month to view the health of a certain project, as you can access this information whenever the need appears.
Therefore, time that you usually spend on producing reports can now be spent on other tasks, improving productivity and speeding up progress.
Better still, these reports can be viewed on screen, printed or easily exported to spreadsheet or PDF files, meaning they meet all your reporting requirements with minimal effort.
Good communication
As your clients will have very specific requirements, maintaining communication with both them and your team throughout the project is crucial.
Doing this will ensure that goals are clear to everyone involved in the process, and in turn cuts down on wasted time which can occur due to miscommunication.
Use previous templates
One of the most effective project management techniques is to learn from your own experiences.
Using templates from previous projects and changing them to fit individual jobs will help save time and minimise errors whilst ensuring you learn from how previous projects played out.
Get help with invoicing
Invoicing is one of the main areas of project management where you can’t afford to make mistakes.
Omitting chargeable items from an invoice can lead to devastating profit issues – not to mention the embarrassment when you realise you need to send a second, while including items in error may break trust with a client.
Project management software can compare projects, enabling more accurate estimates for your invoice. As well as this, there are tools which can use other jobs as a basis to quote specific rates.
In turn, this gives you a draft invoice to look over and edit easily, making accounting much more efficient and less daunting.
Utilise milestones
Use project management software to enable you to easily compare estimated costs against current spends at certain milestones.
Doing this is a simple way to help keep your job on track and avoid exceeding the project budget.
This method allows you to eliminate nasty surprises by helping you to easily spot when a certain area of the project is slipping, meaning it can be changed before further issues develop.
Taking these changes on board in your role will help to keep your team moving in the right direction, despite the ever-changing nature of project management.
