Effective project management helps ensure projects are completed smoothly and on time. While it’s a necessary component of your team’s job, project management can become frustrating and disorganized without the right tools. This disorder can lead to missed deadlines, miscommunication, and frustrated employees.
Fortunately, managing projects doesn’t need to be this stressful. Employing project management software can improve team collaboration and reduce management pain points. Outlined below are six advantages project management software can provide your team.
Increased Collaboration
The digital age — not to mention a global pandemic — has ushered in a new era of remote work. Although remote work has numerous benefits, it also creates a communication gap that can lead to project management challenges and delays. Poor communication doesn’t just impact projects. It can also cost you employees. In fact, 63% of employees report wanting to quit because of ineffective communication that makes it challenging to do their jobs.
Project management software can help close the communication gap for employees who work from home. By keeping communication in a unified location, all team members have access to project timelines, statuses, and updates. So if they’re ever unsure of what needs to be done before taking the next step, they can check the project management software.
Smoother Onboarding
Hiring a new employee is exciting. However, the process of onboarding and integrating them into a team can be frustrating for your more veteran workers. While your new hire may have gotten the rundown of their role, explaining the nuances of each task often falls on colleagues. This takes team members away from their other responsibilities, making them fall behind.
Save your team time and more effectively onboard new employees with the aid of project management software. Project management software can help recent hires learn everything they need about a new role in one place, streamlining the onboarding process. It may take some work upfront to create a role-specific onboarding process using project management tools. Yet it will save your team time in the long run.
Heightened Productivity
All too often, teams spend significant chunks of their workday searching Google Docs and old emails to answer project questions. Over the course of a week, this can result in hours of lost productivity. In fact, research shows that workers spend 19.8% of time at work searching for the information they need to perform their job. That’s the equivalent of one workday every week.
Since project management software stores information in one place, it decreases the amount of time employees spend looking for answers. It also reduces the number of update emails your team members need to send one another. Instead, all developments and changes are documented in the project management system. This makes it easier for employees to track the timeline of a project without needing to locate and read multiple different emails.
Standardized Processes
When your team takes on a project, do they approach it the same way each time? Or do they rely on many different scattered ideas to move a project along? If you answered the latter, your team isn’t working as efficiently as it could be. Creating a process that can be applied to every project will reduce mental fatigue on your team. This will improve productivity and efficiency, enabling projects to get done faster.
Project management systems provide teams with standardized workflows to help keep projects running smoothly. Not that this results in rigidity or a cookie-cutter mentality. Each workflow is customizable to adapt to the unique needs of each project. Having this robust but flexible framework established at the beginning of a project ensures each team member understands the path to success.
Improved Time Management
The success of your company relies on how well projects are executed within their predetermined timelines. If your team continuously fails to complete projects on time, you’ll never reach your business goals. Improving time management allows your employees to get more work done with less effort. This makes their jobs more enjoyable and ensures business objectives are met.
Many software management systems offer time tracking. Time-tracking features allow your team to see how much time they spend on individual tasks. This allows you to identify time sucks and craft a plan to make those tasks more efficient. It also enables you to more easily estimate project timelines so you can set expectations with other internal teams and clients.
Effective Client Communication
Email is an inevitable component of communicating with clients. However, it’s not always the most effective way to keep them in the loop about a project’s status. Using a communication medium that was not intended for collaboration can lead to sluggish responses and delayed projects.
Instead of updating clients using email or Slack, companies can use project management software to have productive discussions with clients. Some project management tools allow admins to add clients to discussion topics with their teams. Clients can also review designs and documents, speeding up the approval process. This makes it easier for all parties involved to see where a project has been and where it’s going.
Manage Projects With Ease
Managing a project doesn’t have to feel disjointed and complicated. With the help of a project management system, your team can complete every project on time with ease.
