If you want your project to be successful, you absolutely need effortless, seamless, lightning fast and precise collaboration.
The main problem with having poor collaboration is associated with the increasing amount of time needed to perform various tasks. Moreover, the smaller some tasks are, the more time they start to require. What a paradox, don’t you agree?
Here’s the thing: when you have a small team, which consists of like two or three guys sitting in a room together working on a project, you probably won’t need any tech to help you. Hell, you would even be able to get away with a notebook and a pen that can be shared among the three team members.
However, as teams grow and become bigger, that’s where problems start to increase in a geometrical progression. Some team members might be working from their homes, some might even be in other countries and others may be plain out of internet coverage reach for various reasons.
All of this creates chaos and confusion in terms of effective collaboration, communication and the ability to even stay on the same page with your peers. Tasks get increasingly harder to push further down the completion funnel, since there is always some crucial information missing: information that only one of the team members has.
And the worst part is, if you can’t get ahold of that person, you will just never be able to proceed with the task and hold ups will start to pile, and as the pile gets bigger and bigger, your project success rates will become smaller and smaller, until they evaporate completely.
This is exactly why large teams (particularly, large marketing teams) absolutely need something to take care of their team collaboration so that every single person would have access to required/desired information, anytime, anywhere, on any device, as long as there is internet connection.
Well, this is pretty much the reason for the existence of project management software. Those tools are the lifesavers of big teams that really want to keep up with their schedules, deliver everything on time and maintain the high quality of their work. In fact, 89% of successful organizations value PM software and 57% align their projects with overall business strategy.
Benefits of project management software
- A single platform to rule them all If there is one thing that the internet can help deal with in a godlike fashion, it’s providing information sharing and accessibility options all over the globe. Your project management tool will give you the chance to stack all the information about all your projects on a single platform that is hosted on the cloud, and can be accessed easily, by every single person on your team.
This solves a ton of issues connected with real time information sharing and also deals with geographical issues for geo-split teams. There will be no more hold ups or confusion due to lack of critical information and you will be able to proceed with your project seamlessly.
In their success story, Concordia University shares their experience on how useful it is to have every piece of data on one platform and how Project Management software helped them improve communication, real time sharing and saved them thousands hours of time each year:
“I want everything logged in Easy Projects, I want everything in there – from the original request, the drafts to the revisions that are requested because that way I can show my boss everything. That’s been a big thing.”
The University had a hard time dealing with tons of papers, all split all over the place and couldn’t manage the time needed to distribute tasks effectively:
“We were spending a lot of time printing and handing out tasks to team members. You can imagine how time consuming that was – plus it was a big waste of paper.”
Pm software helped the University to:
- Plan and predict resource availability
- Have a clean, paperless environment
- Improve communication and the ability to get requests from cross teams seamlessly
- Save up to 24.000 hours of time annually
- PM software was built with communication in mind Today, every average pm software out there is designed with seamless collaboration in mind. Every inch of the design and development code is aimed to simplify communication and make it as close as possible to the three-man-team scenario that we had before, except that instead of three people, you can have 13, or 103, or 1003 for that matter.
The intuitive and easy to use user interface of the PM tools eliminate user adoption time and give you all the tools you will ever need to classify and share information with all of your team members effectively.
All information on one platform PM tools will eliminate the need to keep a truckload of different docs in different places that you need to spend extra time to find and make use of.
All the project tasks can be distributed on your dashboard and information about each of them can be found easily, without any confusion. Even if there is some kind of data/information/document that cannot be directly uploaded onto the dashboard, it can still be linked to each project task on the corresponding level.
Since clear communication has been repeatedly reported to be the most important factor in achieving success for highly complex projects, this should be taken into account seriously.
- Direct, real time communication Emails are excellent means of communication, but they become significantly less good when there are more than two people involved or when the conversation translates into a chat.
Pm software allows you to comment and chat with your team members directly, thus giving you the chance to talk with several people at once and share knowledge/information real time.
- Less meetings (I knew you would absolutely love this!) – While team meetings are still an important part of management and collaboration, when there is too many of them, it starts to get irritating, and honestly, they add little value (sometimes even zero value, ok maybe even NEGATIVE value) to the overall success of the project.
Spending a few hours every day in a meeting room about insignificant stuff is one the best ways to kill motivation and productivity in your team members, not to mention that some team members can simply be unable to attend those meetings, even when needed.
Smart utilization of PM software allows you to improve team collaboration to a point that there will be no more need for endless meetings that are simply meant to get everyone on the same page. Use the tool for small chats, and hold only those meetings that are really important.
- A proactive and transparent environment – Since it’s possible to assign different tasks to different people, calculate the time needed for each task, assign deadlines and have everyone see/track the progress of each task, you will end up with a much more clear and transparent environment where each person will have no problem understanding on how he or she should proceed, what comes next, manage responsibilities, etc.
When everything gets updated real time, your team will have no trouble keeping the project alive and kicking. Moreover, tasks dependencies will be crystal clear among all team members, so everyone will know what information they should expect, by when, and how much time will be needed to carry a set of tasks forward to their completion.
Greenpeace Mediterranean shares their challenges of having trouble to decipher and keep track of task dependencies in their success story and how PM software helped them overcome those.
“The task dependency feature has allowed the entire project team at Greenpeace Mediterranean to easily link together various campaign tasks, saving them a great amount of time in task tracking and entry.”
Combined with an easy user interface and the ability for everyone on the team to keep track of everything clearly, Greenpeace Mediterranean had no trouble keeping up with their projects.
“The application offers many complex features, yet it is able to provide a very user friendly interface and easy to follow work structure.”
The business world has become a lot more complex today, but technology is doing its best to simplify all communication issues, which is the key to running successful projects. Give it a try, it won’t disappoint you.