Starting a new project can bring many different emotions – excitement, nerves, and stress to name a few. It takes a lot of spinning plates to keep a project on track from start to finish, including juggling everything from team members, deadlines and unexpected bumps in the road can be challenging.
There’s no one way to achieve successful project management. Instead, it’s all about understanding how to manage a project and anticipating potential roadblocks effectively – a continuous learning journey for the whole team. It’s important to ensure that your team is encouraged and motivated as it helps in achieving your project goals more easily as everyone works to make their “task” a huge success.
Here are 4 tips to help manage your project with your team!
Set milestones
It’s important to plan together with your team much as possible to ensure that everyone is engaged from the start of the project. This will help the team understand the scope of the project and allow for proper documentation, enabling realistic dates for the project that everyone in the team agrees on. It’s crucial for the team to be across the detail and on the same page at the start of the project – using a tool like kadray® to help create those milestones with due dates.
Don’t forget to celebrate the milestones either! Acknowledging team members for their work can help the team stay motivated and focused on the end goal. Feeling appreciated in a team goes a long way and is a surefire way to boost morale!
Create smaller tasks
To help make the workload of a huge project less daunting and overwhelming, break down the project into smaller, achievable tasks. This helps with productivity as the low-hanging fruit appears to be a relatively easy task, rather than a stressful one. To assist in managing the smaller tasks, ensure each task is then assigned to a team member with a due date.
Breaking the tasks down means you can sequence as required, identifying any dependencies or work that can be conducted concurrently. Breaking down the tasks means you can identify delays and blockers sooner and adjustments can be made as required. This gives your team to work more agile, adjusting to changes as they are needed. MINDBLOWN!
Check in on the progress
Speaking of identifying delays and blockers, you will need to meet regularly as a team and over-communicate to ensure everyone is up to date and check in on the status of what is being worked on.
It’s important to have the right team member fulfilling the task and ensuring they’re not overloaded with other work. Every team member plays an important role in the success of the project, so it is important to keep them accountable for the work required of them. You need to understand their capacity and what can be achieved.
Using a collaborating tool like kadray® can give you a view of your team’s capacity and help keep track of who is assigned to which tasks and the status of those tasks.
Prepare for risks and obstacles
It’s not always possible to predict when things go wrong. Brainstorming and creating a list of ‘what if’s with rough contingency plans with your team can help mitigate the pain when something goes off track. Get input from other parts of the business too as their perspective is unique and can catch early gotchas – and help you and the team avoid some risks.
