1. Utilize your team members
Effective and agile project managers often have strong leadership abilities and soft skills and can bring out the best performance from all team members.
Soft skills such as problem-solving, flexibility or adaptability, interpersonal skills, and communication (we’ll circle back to this one later) will help you get to know your team members, what they’re great at and which areas they can use a little improvement.
Then, you can devise a plan to strengthen those areas and/or play up their natural talents during the project.
In addition to understanding each team member’s strengths and weaknesses, a successful scaled agile project manager needs a good grasp of their capacity in order to plan the project schedule. A Work OS makes it easy to get a bird’s eye view of the team’s progress, and also zoom in to see each member’s work, all on the same platform.
On monday.com, you can even manage your team’s workload with live, up-to-date data on capacity so you can make smarter decisions on how to best utilize your team members.
2. Leverage tools for project management
Technology has played a huge role in project managers’ success. Software like a Work OS can store and display all project information in a visual way, while also giving customers the flexibility to choose how they see their data. On monday.com, you can choose between several views from Gantt charts, timelines, dashboards, and several others.
That’s great on its own, but a Work OS can also result in effective project management by making siloed work a thing of the past. Create documents, attach files, provide real-time feedback, automate repetitive tasks, and endless other customizable actions from one central place. That means you no longer need to open separate tabs for document creation, excel sheets, or file storage. On a Work OS, everything you need for online project management is right at your fingertips.
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3. Communication is key for success
We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again (and again), communication is essential for anyone in a project management position. For smooth a smooth project process from start to finish, project managers need consistent, healthy communication with relevant stakeholders, clients, and most importantly, your team!
Successful project management requires open communication with your team members. Encourage them to share their ideas, suggestions, concerns, and issues. Give them forums to speak about their experience working on the project in weekly meetings or even face-to-face catchups.
monday.com makes it super easy to make sure all team members have the necessary information to make good decisions and help with project planning and execution. With item updates, anyone can write questions or comments right on the item and even tag team members to open up the conversation. Team members can also easily communicate which tasks they’ve completed, are working on, or are stuck on with status labels. Having a way to clearly communicate specific project stages and who is on what leaves less room for confusion.
4. Learn from other high-performing project managers
This one’s all about using your network or even reaching out across the aisle to other project managers in various departments. Learn from others’ successes and failures by simply asking other PMs about the different approaches and techniques they use, plus offer up any project management ideas.
If multiple teams in your organization use a Work OS, ask another project management professional to share their board with you and run through their project workflows. On monday.com, you can share boards or invite others to view your board with just a couple of clicks. If you’re subscribed to one of their boards, you can even see a project process in real time.
5. Set realistic, yet ambitious deliverables
Once you outline the project goals, decide which metrics you’ll use to track your progress. In the project management world, these metrics are known as deliverables, often tangible milestones that work towards your main objective. To be a productive and successful project manager, settle these deliverables in advance so that you can plan your resources accordingly. As a general rule:
