Project Management’eur

Professionals who perform services, whether B to B or B to C are always looking for ways to save time, reduce effort, and overall cost of projects. One part of that effort is to find ways to execute the project more efficiently. This would include the ability to communicate to all the project participants, including team members within the company and/or around the world – including the stakeholders – up to the minute project status, detailed requirements, and clearly defined individual responsibilities required for successful completion of the project.

Collaborations can flounder months after they have launched, sometimes simply because conditions with one or both of the partners change or because one of the parties doesn’t meet the terms of the agreement—unknowingly or otherwise. — The Economist Intelligence Unit in Collaboration Transforming
the way business works

With better communication among all participants it is more likely that:

1. The project will succeed because the results will reflect the goals of the stakeholders’ business objectives.
2. The project will be completed in a more timely fashion because common errors can be avoided, such as:
   1. Team members can often be referring to wrong versions of documents when distributed to the team members via email. Scenarios I have seen are:
      • Various team members who distribute the documents don’t always have a complete distribution list since these lists are often kept in their individual email clients.
      • When multiple versions of a document are distributed, some members lose track of the most current document.
      • Wasted time and money is spent on conference calls to correct the above.
   2. When team members are assigned a task or tasks for the project, they are only given information about what is expected of their specific task(s) without being given the context of how their task(s) will contribute to meeting the overall project goals. This discourages team members from taking “ownership” in the project as a whole, and conceals information from them resulting in a possible negative affect on the team members’ analysis of how to perform their portion of the project, preventing them from asking important questions that may prevent them from going down the wrong path with their work and later having to make corrections. This omission by the project manager may not be intentional, but not carried out due the extra work in communicating all of this to the members and keeping them all current on changes in requirements in a timely manner as they occur. This can also result in wasted time and money on conference calls to make course corrections.
3. Because of the improved success of the project meeting the stakeholders’ objectives, and probable more timely delivery, improved customer loyalty and a more competitive advantage can be achieved.

It is no wonder that project managers are beginning to actively seek out project management software to aid in project communication. With the trend toward outsourcing on an international scale on the rise, many are seeking web-based project management software that can be accessed and run by anyone with a browser and an internet connection, thus eliminating the need and cost of setting up an IT info structure that can bridge across various participants’ platforms in a seamless and user friendly architecture.

A web-based project management tool can provide the means to facilitate this project communication in an organized manner and make any updates immediately available to all participants, sharing the knowledge in real time. This can be done in a secure setting so that the information is only available to those who have a need to know.

Effective communication
is the single biggest enabler of effective collaboration among companies. –The Economist Intelligence Unit in Collaboration Transforming
the way business works

One of the complaints about some project management software is that they are too complex. They contain many features that are not commonly used in the “real world” and are difficult to learn and use. Also in some applications as you delve into some features, you lose the “big picture” of what you are trying to manage.

One project management tool , Project Management for the Real World developed by Windsong Enterprises addresses the issues of communicating detailed project management data in a simple to use, organized fashion with a minimum amount of data entry, and the ability to delegate some of the data entry to other team members while protecting the integrity of the data by imposing limits on what may be updated by these other team members.

The hierarchical view of the project(s) is always in view in the left pane in collapsible tree format so that you can quickly drill down to areas of interest.

Color coding on percent complete data for projects and tasks quickly highlight areas that may need extra attention.

Windsong Enterprises believes that with careful project planning with clearly stated project goals and requirements and by gaining the commitment to success of each participant including the stakeholders, The Project Management for the Real World web-based project management tool will make it a snap to empower your team to easily stay on the same page and have more successful projects.