3 Ways Technology Helps Transform Project Management
Staying competitive is getting harder every year, so efficient project management — measured in time, effort, and cost savings — continues to be an ongoing requirement. That means getting well-organized. The good news is, there are an enormous variety of tools to make it easier and optimize your project assets and talent.
Why Use Tech to Transform Processes?
Your organization’s goal is to organize your processes, make them more efficient, and be able to take advantage of new business opportunities when they appear. The right technology can help you do that.
Gain Important Project Management Capabilities
How do these translate into improvements in day-to-day project operations? Companies become more organized and efficient when they use information and operations tech to:
Automate manual work processes. Automating project tasks reduces the total time, effort, and cost needed to manage and participate in projects. Routine tasks are completed automatically, and project staff can use the time savings to focus on higher-value work. For example, automating routine onboarding, notification, and data handling tasks.
Centralize communications and collaborations. When your project scope information resides in one location, team members know where to go for the official word on project activities, assigned tasks, and planning.
Centralize data management. Creating a single data repository in an easily accessible location provides a single point of truth. Team members can store, find, and review data knowing that what they find is current, complete, and up to date.
When companies don’t use technology to transform processes, they miss an important opportunity to make better use of existing resources.
Drains on Human and Other Resources
Updating project management (PM) tools and methods helps companies avoid costs caused by:
Rework or late work. Human error delays time-to-market or incurs late fees and penalties due to missed deadlines.
Focus on low-value work. The need to constantly monitor the completion of routine tasks reduces the time managers can spend attending to team members’ needs.
Mistakes in memory or communications. It costs precious time to remind project team members about meetings or events.
Lost or inaccessible data. The resources needed to look for, get access to, confirm, or report on project data costs time and energy.
Complex, hard-to-control management processes. Without the right tech, there is no easy way to make sure that everyone is using the same data, scope of work, and status information.
Chasing down problem sources. Not having a single location with a bird's-eye view of what's happening adds to the frustration of managing people and project assets.
These avoidable situations incur opportunity costs as well as drain the energy and motivation of project managers and team members.
Your Transformation Strategy
You can transform PM practices by clearly communicating your general approach, updating management tools and processes, and choosing project or workgroup leaders.
Match Your PM Approach to Your Business
Get more organized and deliberate in your work practices by back-planning. Start by knowing and aligning your digital strategy and business goals for the transformation process. You can then work backward to determine the capabilities you need and the assets and resources that your chosen capabilities require.
Next, use the back-planning method to add details to your transformation strategy. Specific considerations include:
Clearly describing your current and desired states of PM readiness. What should your work management processes enable? Avoid?
Estimating your TCO and related ROI requirements.
Prioritizing the capabilities that you need most to achieve your business goals.
Identifying which features in commercial products and services will deliver the required capabilities.
This will help you develop a big picture plan and view of your company’s unique situation.
Gain a Detailed Understanding of Your PM Landscape
Start this piece of your transformation by getting a clear understanding of your current project management environment. Assess your internal data landscape by detecting data silos and bottlenecks. Then review your external PM environment by evaluating your competitive market landscape.
This process will help you know where you are in your project management capabilities and where you want to be.
Choose the Best PM Tools for the Job
There’s a word for the market of work management tools — abundant. Anyone wanting to organize and optimize their work practices has a wealth of choices. Not the least of which:
Traditional project management software such as Microsoft Project, Asana, Trello, Monday, or G-Suite apps.
Work or business management software that automates tasks, provides alerts and notifications (Scoro and Wrike), manages software development (Atlassian), or optimizes collaboration and communications tasks (Slack and Google Hangouts).
Free, freemium, or paid software purchased for a license or monthly fee such as Airtable, Trello, and Zoho Projects.
Functionality that ranges from simple to-do lists to large, interactive platforms that project team members can access, interact with, and customize. Do you need to integrate your PM platform with other software? No problem! Easy to install plug-in connectors (Zapier or IFTT) are available.
This wealth of options makes “the best choice” of PM tools a matter of your team’s size, the type of work you do, the reporting capabilities you need, and whether you're working remotely or onsite. In addition to these softwares, you can also choose to build your own.
Choose People to Wrangle Resources and Move Projects Forward
Finally, we get to the human element. The project manager or other specialist chooses and evaluates work management tools and employee performance and makes the day-to-day decisions that move projects forward. Ideally, this person would have experience with different management methods (Agile, Scrum, and Kanban, for example), tools, and tech.
Plan B: Outsourcing Work Management Changes
All of this might be more than you can — or want to — manage in-house. If so, an experienced consulting service is a logical second choice. Daito is familiar with the requirements and pitfalls of project management transformation and digital transformation failures. We’ve led dozens of clients through the process and reduced the risk of costly mistakes by:
Providing an unbiased view of PM in your work environment. We’ve collaborated with clients who work in remote and in-office settings.
Creating customized solutions. We create a roadmap to help you through the process and make informed decisions about the right tools for you.
Producing better results. A research orientation, deep experience, and an outsider’s point of view makes consultant services faster and more objective than an in-house analysis. We can help you determine the best tools, processes, and practices that help make your team more efficient.
Contact us today to let us help you develop the right PM transformation.