Not all companies and teams have a formal project management process. Whether it’s a large organization or a startup, formal project management may not have been one of the priorities for your team until now. However, let’s just say that it is increasingly difficult to stay organized and collaborate with teammates? One asks oneself several times if it is not time to do project management?
At Task and Flow, we believe that project management tools help teams complete projects more efficiently. Finding a way to plan, manage and execute work is important for all teams and companies. Even if you don’t need all the elements of a traditional project management system, your team will certainly benefit from many of its key elements.
But what then is project management?
Project management helps teams organize, track, and execute work limited to a specific project. We can consider a project as a set of tasks necessary to accomplish a certain goal. Project management enables teams to plan, manage and carry out work in order to meet the project requirements according to the stipulated deadline. With a project management tool, your team can organize work in one place, share feedback, track progress, and consequently collaborate more effectively.
Read: How to choose project management software for your team
Five advantages of project management
If you have doubts about the need for project management, read on to learn about its advantages and see some simple ways to incorporate these ideas into the way your team works.
- Clear and organized planning improves collaboration between teams
If you have ever started a project without planning, you know how disorganized things can get right from the start. One can end up skipping essential steps in the project schedule, racing against time to complete a forgotten last-minute task, or answering the same logistical questions over and over again, “What’s the deadline? What do we do next?” And what is worse, the quality of the work can suffer as the project progresses.
- Defining everyone’s role eliminates confusion
Once the preparation work is complete, you move on to the actual project management control stage. However, if there is no project owner to lead the team through the work, it is more likely that colleagues will abandon tasks, forget details, or not know where to turn for questions.
Read: How to manage your team’s workload effectively
- Well-defined goals increase effectiveness and efficiency
There is no success in projects when teams are unaware of their own goals. Without clear goals, teams feel demotivated and also run the risk of dedicating themselves to the wrong goal or spending all their energy on work that has little impact.
With a project management tool, it is possible to define the project goals in advance. This way, everyone involved in the project is aware of them and can optimize the steps needed to achieve them.
Although there are numerous options to choose from, it is best to avoid the more traditional project management tools, as most of them are developed with conventional processes in mind, and their setup and integration can be very long and time-consuming.
- Defining a communication plan keeps the team aligned and focused
The term may even be project “management,” but managing a project is only one piece of the puzzle. Before work can even begin, it is necessary to define a communication plan. Chances are that your team already has at least one tool for email management, one for instant messaging, and one more for project management. A communication plan establishes when each one should be used.
Experience these benefits with Asana.
Regardless of the company or industry, your team will always benefit from adopting some of the basic principles of project and work management. Asana is a work management tool that helps teams organize and carry out their work more effectively and efficiently. Learn more about Asana, request a free consultation!