Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / By Tim Lauenroth
“Operations keeps the lights on, strategy provides a light at the end of the tunnel, but project management is the train engine that moves the organization forward.”
Joy Gumz — Director of Project Auditors, LLC
Joy Gumz’s quote underpins the importance of project management in organizations. Through effective and agile project management, companies can gain a better edge over the competition. Today, we want to give you 5 tips on how to do just that with your business and your team. We’ll give you 5 effective tips on how to most effectively organize the projects in your team and why we think the Microsoft365 work environment is the best way to take your project processes to the next level.
1. Monitor the progress
One of the big challenges is to monitor the parallel running projects. By monitor here we mean to check the progress of the running projects. It is necessary for a good organization in project management to quantify processes in order to draw conclusions and evaluations. This in turn enables more specific changes and adjustments. Since today’s focus is on being agile and able to react quickly to changes, visible representation is indispensable for evaluating processes.
There are many options for mapping processes. These can be project management programs like Asana, Microsoft Azure DevOps or Microsoft Planner. These give you great options for presenting your processes and projects in a clear and measurable way. Here you can learn how to manage your tasks in Microsoft Planner.
2. Good communication
Communication within your team is becoming more and more important, especially due to the increasingly hybrid solutions of working. The personal contact to your team decreases due to the work from the home office. That’s why it’s even more important that you communicate actively and, above all, regularly with your team and inform them about current challenges, priorities, deadlines and other important things that affect the team. Because at the end of the day, even the best plan has no impact if your team doesn’t know or understand it.
3. Stay agile
The Oxford Dictionary defines agile as “able to move quickly and easily.” So the goal is to respond and readjust quickly to change. When implementing multiple parallel projects, adapting quickly to change is especially important. The prioritization or urgency of a project can change, or the challenges in another project are greater than expected. In order to be able to react to these changes, you need, on the one hand, an overview of the importance and urgency of the projects. On the other hand, lean structures for incoming changes are necessary to be able to adapt quickly to the new circumstances.
The best way to implement effective project organization is to use agile methods in your company. User stories, task boards or daily meetings are techniques that correspond to agile implementation. For example, Microsoft Planner or Microsoft Azure DevOps are suitable agile software solutions for your company.
4. Plan deadlines and hold them
Every successful project implementation also needs a deadline in the organization to which the team can adhere. On the one hand, a deadline for the completion of the project. On the other hand, depending on the length and size of the project, deadlines can also be set between projects. These project stages are called milestones. These milestones can be used to check again and again whether the final project deadline can be met. With this question, project organization tip no. 3 becomes crucial again, because it is again about the quick adaptability to the current situation of the project.
5. Time tracking
“time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed”
Peter Drucker — Management Consultant, author
This quote describes the relevance of time tracking well. Time is the most precious resource we have. Especially in today’s world it is more and more limited, because it is all about being faster than the others and achieving more in less time. So it would be disastrous not to deal with this issue and trying to make time more useful for oneself. In project execution, time is one of the most important factors for success.
If deadlines are not met or budgets are exceeded due to overtime, this is an indication that time has not been managed responsibly. Time tracking tools create awareness of time within teams by having employees enter their tasks into the software. This in turn creates great opportunities in evaluating and viewing the progress of projects.
If your team deals with the time factor and also manages to display it in a measurable way and clearly for the whole time from the projects, you will automatically take your productivity to the next level when implementing projects.
Project time tracking integrated into Microsoft365 environment
With timeghost we offer a project time tracking system that is integrated into the Microsoft365 environment. The advantage of this integration is the possibility to connect to other Microsoft365 programs and many third-party apps that you can integrate into your Microsoft environment. This way you can create exactly the network of programs you need to implement projects and link them all together. Our project time tracking is one of the many third-party apps that can be integrated into the Microsoft365 environment.
With timeghost, your employees can assign their working hours in the form of time entries to the tasks in the respective projects they are currently working on. In doing so, you have a wide range of evaluation options that support you in organizing your projects with the overview you need at the moment. Through various filter options you can display the information you need now. Here you get a rough overview of the possibilities and features that you can use with the recording of your working hours in timeghost.
Conclusion
Finally, we want to give you an effective summary of the mentioned tips, so that you can organize your projects even better in the future:
– Use project management software (e.g. Asana, Microsoft Azure DevOps, or Microsoft Planner) to clearly display projects and tasks.
– Communicate regularly with your team what the most important tasks and projects are at the moment
– Stay as agile as possible with your team and create structures so that you can quickly adapt to new circumstances
– Plan deadlines and divide the implementation of a project into several milestones
– Create a network of different programs that are all linked together with the Microsoft365 working environment.
– Integrate project time tracking in your team, which allows employees to assign their working hours to the projects and tasks they are currently working on.
Hopefully you got a little insight into what we look for when organizing projects.
Feel free to try the 14 day free trial of timeghost to get to know all the features of our project time tracking.
Try it yourself
We really appreciate all the feedback we can get, so please feel free to contact us and tell us what needs improvement or what you are missing in timeghost.
If you need any help in setting up timeghost, please don’t hesitate to visit our Support Center or send us an email to support@timeghost.io.
Get the timeghost Teams App
You only need to install the timeghost Teams App directly from the AppSource Store in the application. You can find a manual on how to do this right here. The timeghost app includes all features that you know from the web client and since you use your Office 365 account in order to access timeghost you’re set and done in only a few seconds.
