Make Your Team More Effective With Teamwork

Lack of organization is a time waster in many offices.

‘Project management’ has over 300,000 Google search per month. It seems many of us are looking for solutions.

Consider these questions:

• Have you found yourself wondering if there’s a better way to work?
• Do you sometimes feel like you’re having the same conversations over and over, but never moving forward as a team?
• Have you woken up in the middle of the night suddenly sickened by a task you forgot to complete?
• Do you struggle to keep your team up to date on projects?
• Have you wasted time searching for lost emails about a specific task?

We’ve all been part of processes that have left us shaking our heads wondering why things seem to get so stuck, or why people don’t just do the things they need to do.

It would be great if everyone was on the same page, understood what needed to happen, and could move forward in unison.

That is something project management software can help achieve. Setting it up for your organization or department can help you boost effectiveness and save your sanity.

How Project Management Software Can Help Your Team

 

Easily systemize processes

Systemization of processes is one way to become more effective as a team. It’s possible to create recurring tasks and template tasks in many project management tools available.

This way, you can record all of the steps involved in completing a task. For example, if you have a task to write a news release, you might have the following subtasks:

• Send news release questionnaire to client/department rep
• Complete questionnaire
• Send completed questionnaire back to communication lead
• Review questionnaire and ask follow up questions
• Write first draft of news release
• Send draft for review
• Receive edits
• Make edits
• Send revised draft for review
• Approve news release
• Schedule news release
• Distribute news release

These are tasks that happen each time a news release is created. Once you’ve made the template, if a news release is part of a project you’re working on, you can quickly add the tasks and assign them.

As your team works, you’ll no doubt find ways to improve processes or identify missing steps. You can easily add those to your templated tasks.

Eliminate The Need for Daily To-do List Creation

My husband and I met at work. I use to tease him about his habit of shuffling papers on his desk at the end of the work day. His routine to prepare for the next day includes creating a massive list of all of the things he needs to do. If he doesn’t do these steps, he can’t shut his brain off.

With project management software, you don’t need to spend the time thinking about every task on your plate because it’s all recorded.

Sure, you may still make a paper list if you’re that type of person (I am), and you might want to tidy your desk, but you’ll find you worry less about tasks because they’ll be right there waiting for you when you log in the next day.

Lower The Risk of Forgotten Steps

This point is related to the first two benefits. By recording everything in the software, there’s less risk of human error. New team members will quickly understand what’s expected of them, plus be able to see if others are waiting on them to complete something before another task can begin.

Allow For Remote Work and Easily Integrate Freelancers

Our work environment is flexible. While we have an office, we don’t require everyone to be there, or even in the country, in order to do their work. This isn’t a unique way of working. There are a lot of remote work environments today, and it’s a benefit that appeals to many workers.

Your project management software will allow you to offer this benefit more easily by having a virtual way to track everything happening within your team.

You can also easily involve freelancers in your work because they can be given access to the projects they’re part of.

Improve Team Communication

Most project management tools have a way of commenting and recording updates about specific tasks. This will allow you to move conversations out of email where they get lost. If you’re a team leader, you can view the conversations taking place about tasks and stay updated on your team’s progress.

It Will Take Time to Set-up Your Project Management Software

Software alone won’t solve your problem if you don’t take the time to set it up and commit as a team to using it.

If you’re a team leader, your adoption of the practices is critical because your team will look to you to model how to work.

At Digital Giants, we use a program called Teamwork. Here’s why we like it:

• It allows us to have standard processes with the tasks ready to go
• We can set up recurring tasks easily
• We can set tasks or projects to be visible only internally, or include the client if there are items they need to complete or approve
• All conversations are stored within the tasks so it’s easy to look back at what was discussed
• It integrates seamlessly with GSuite including GMail and GDrive, so we’re able to attach the relevant files
• All team members can view their late, current and upcoming tasks, and record time spent on tasks
• Allows for billing to be done inside the app and integrated with a variety of third party tools and applications
• We can easily look at time spent on specific clients or projects

Many of our clients are nonprofits and work with o365, which has its own project management function. Asana and Trello are two other popular tools. A quick search will find you others.

In addition to Teamwork, we also use Slack. Slack is a communication tool that lets us have one-to-one or group conversation, as well as maintain team conversations about specific projects.

Let us know what you use on your team to keep you effective by commenting below.