Project Management Challenges While Handling Distributed Project Teams

Setting up a high performing project team has never been an easy task for project managers. Gone are the days when the entire team was locally available and worked sitting next to each other. Technology advancement has made it possible to have teams globally distributed and still work in synchronization. This simply indicates that more diversely talented individuals from across the globe can be engaged in projects, yet the challenges for a project manager remain the same.

The major challenges that a project manager faces while handling remote teams include:

Project Organization

The major challenge of a PM is to organize and assimilate the project tasks within the team. Since the members are virtually present, it is really vital to delegate and track tasks effectively.

Task Responsibility

With a distributed team, it becomes difficult for the manager to delegate tasks as per the resource’s credibility. Moreover, whenever an issue strikes, it is more difficult to find out who is accountable for that and who must be given the responsibility of executing difficult tasks.

Consolidation

While handling such high end projects, proper consolidation of all project documents is required. A manager needs to put all the critical information at a single location so that he can keep track of all tasks as well as keep others updated.

Timely Follow-Up

If you have a long duration project with a bigger team, it is quite difficult to remember each and every delegated task and related issues. In case the managers forgets to take follow up of an issue then that may lead to serious project deviations. Thus, a PM needs to have a system where he can keep record of all tasks and that must notify him for the issues that need immediate follow-up.

Performance Evaluation & Assessment

Same is the case when you need to evaluate every individual resource’s performance. Due to lack of proper records and performance sheets, you cannot precisely judge every individual’s contribution in the tasks.

Foresighted Actions & Reactions

When you don’t have accurate information about tasks progress, you cannot predict where the task will head or what deviations might occur. This may delay your decision making leading to more serious consequences for your project.

Honest Feedback

This may also make your resource’s performance stagnant as they don’t get right performance feedback that takes up any scope for improvement.

These are the major project challenges that a manager may come across and thus requires an efficient project management system that can not only let the team collaborate over the common platform but also help review and assess team members’ performances and give proper feedback as well as plan future strategies.

What Traits You Need to Be An Ideal Project Manager!

Project Manager is the key factor that can propel a project to its success even when the situations are not favorable.

What traits a project manager need to exhibit to keep project on track while maintaining a collaborative environment:

Establish Great Work Relationships

Must have great people skills and should cultivate a positive environment among the team members by encouraging more interactions related to work as well as fun at work!

Set Best Examples

To epitomize himself as a great leader, a PM must set great examples for his team members and be an ideal and mentor for them.

Know the Needs

Being a polished professional, PM must anticipate the upcoming team needs and do the needful in time. Detect the possibilities much before they occur.

Delivery Driven

All team efforts must be towards a single direction and that is of quality project outcomes. An effective PM ensures that the work is done and in the best manner.

Proactively Resolves Issues

A forward thinking PM can only take the project to its success. He must foresee the upcoming issues and find a solution to avert the same.

Keep Unnecessary Meetings at Minimal

Adopt the talk less and work more approach! Keep aside unnecessary discussions and focus on getting things done quickly and effectively.

Perfect Task Delegation

A leader always knows who is the best fit for individual tasks and thus, allocates them accordingly. Delegate tasks as per individual strength and then see the results.

Always Ready With a Plan

Good PM must always be ready with A-B-C plans and must lead the team precisely in particular directions and if things don’t work, switch to contingency plans.

Emphasizes on Finding Solutions

Be a result-oriented leader. Whenever a problem strikes, don’t talk about things and just focus on what is the need of hour and work accordingly.

Don’t Play Blame Game

An ideal PM must be the epitome of positive attitude. Must not indulge in any blame game and always think straight towards making things better and effective.

Are you a Great Project Manager?? Adopt these traits and see how you ace in Project Management!

Happy Independance Day 2014

Don’t ask me who I am?
Don’t tell me who I am?
By birth and by blood, I’m Indian;
I love my Motherland, Bharat.

I live upon such sacred soil;
I love my land and love to toil;
I’m proud about my heritage;
Peace within and to others is our message.

Our freedom came by sacrifice;
All Indians must always stay wise;
We must preserve our integrity;
We must ensure our security.

Many precious lives were lost;
Freedom came at a heavy cost;
Divisive forces have no place;
Let Indians wear a smiling face.

Let neighbors learn to live in peace;
Let foes all transgressions well cease;
Our strength lies in its billion souls;
We’ll venture forth to space with goals.

Corruption will be wiped out by roots;
Terrorism will have no off-shoots;
Our patriotism will shine;
Our nation will be rich and fine.

To God, we express gratitude;
Let us all change our attitude;
Let prosperity be our aim;
Let’s live unto our good name with fame.
Jai Hind; Jai Bharat!

Copyright by Dr John Celes 31-07-2014

Top 10 Project Planning Mistakes To Overcome

4 Rules – Work Virtually to Manage Project Successfully!!

With the time, there’s been a substantial rise in global as well as distributed projects. This has eventually given rise to tools that can render collaboration among the teams either working physically or virtually.

Although, the demand for successful project and timely delivery hasn’t changed, but adjusting the workforce to different situations is quite demanding. Collaboration can certainly make your virtual team feel sitting together just by adhering to few of these crucial rules.

#1. The Team Is Virtual, Not The Project

Your team might be distributed and geographically apart but your project isn’t. It still needs structured as well as a realistic approach. All the documents as well as the project plans need to be shared within the team, so even while kicking off the project, physical location of an individual does not matter.

#2. Put In Face-to-Face Conversation – Atleast Once!!

It’s important to have atleast one face-to-face conversation so that the team hangs on well before starting the project. Even a web conference meeting would do if physical meeting isn’t possible due to location barriers.

#3. Pick Up The Phone After Defined Intervals

Other than the prescribed telephonic conversation, you need to also jump into the call after every interval to ensure that the work is streamlined. Something like, if there are 3 continuous emails you can switch to phone for further discussion. This would further help eliminate ambiguous situations as well it’ll save time

#4. Maintain Cloud Based Collaborated Solutions

Storing infinite things on individual system and then routing them through it could be extremely cumbersome. Therefore, storing everything right from project schedule to technical documents on cloud may help gain a shared space and eliminate uncertainty. Moreover, project collaboration software can do wonders for your project as it’ll bring the entire team and other project stakeholders over the common platform thus, making things and communication more transparent.

To conclude, having global teams and collaborating with them is a need of the hour! Thus, project managers need to focus more on using effective project management software that can help them streamline workflow as well as maintain effective communication and transparency among the team members.

 

Procrastination – Does It Help Anyway??

“Every procrastinator dwells in the hope of ‘TOMORROW’ and prepares itself for the ‘ALWAYS LATER’ battle.”

Almost everyone in life has once performed the sin of procrastination that has eventually landed them in trouble. Despite knowing the fact that it isn’t a smart way to spend time, you were reluctant to condone it.

It’s a general human behavior to succumb to all present paradoxes and pass them on to future, commonly ‘tomorrow’ which ironically never comes.

The deep-rooted character trait of procrastinator compels them to change their avenues and embrace their comfort zone which always attempts to failure of “Right Work On Right Time”.

Structured Procrastination has completely transformed the terminology into a new vision that not only reinforces the productivity but also metamorphoses your weakness into strength. If you see an extremely dreadful task in your way, you can adjourn it for the time and continue with something that holds your interest and attention. Setting it at the end of the list and prioritizing the task that has flexible deadlines can help you put the time to its maximum use.

Structured procrastination runs with the productivity instead of going against it. Now, procrastinators are considered as wonderful resources if they can utilize this trait to render absolute outcomes. You can regard other tasks as most important and put the tedious yet important task for later. It’s basically just tricking your mind or self-deception to carry out the task and reorganize your workspace.

The beauty of structured procrastination is that the dilly-dallying guilt that sabotages self-motivation is utilized as the fuel for rising the productivity and momentum.

Indian Markets ROAR, while your projects SOAR!

The Indian markets (SENSEX, NIFTY) have surpassed all limits by crossing the 25,500 and 7,600 mark respectively. The sky is the ceaseless limit it seems. The flourishing success of the Indian markets can well be reflected in your projects too!

The bulls and bears of the stock markets can be compared to Over-achieving and Under-achieving of goals in a project. These sudden erratic boosts or changes can affect the growth of any business. The key to unremitting success is the logic mantra on how to deal with such changes.

Ups and downs are a part and parcel of our everyday routines, be it the simplest of tasks like reaching to work. Imagine getting late due to some accident or traffic jam one day. We don’t just presume that now we’ll be late every day. Instead we accept it as an exception. With the ever increasing congestion we have to get in terms with the extremes and should not panic when faced with such a situation.

A similar analogy can be made with the stock market. We don’t really learn such things from text books (They can provide a great heads up though), but real learning comes from real experiences. A bird can sit back in its nest and keep on complaining how deep the cliff is, but it will never know for sure unless it unfolds its wings and take that leap of faith. So, taking calculated risks is an inevitable part of any project.

What matters the most is not the extremes, but the middle average. The average economic growth required just to meet our financial goals. We can’t just start counting our chickens before they even hatch, this may lead to felling for the same hype of the everyday media. Everyone likes attention and we might fall prey to being addicted to it.

Similarly, in a project, while encountering any problems, we should judge properly if it’s an ordinary routine problem or something really out of the blue which needs special attention? The time taken to fix defects, figuring out details can be really cumbersome. Getting into the panic mode when something goes wrong is not the solution. Smoothing out the extremes can do the trick.

Reaching targets, meeting deadlines, setting milestones.. a child’s play? Not really.

While you are busy tracking the growth of the ever-increasing Indian markets, Who is monitoring the growth of your project?

PM Aura helps Online Project Track through all thick and thin by using Time sheets with the accept/reject feature, Time Tracking and Collaboration Tool helps check current status and percentage growth of the project along with decision making reports.

Performing beyond the expectations of clients, getting more than what you expect can really help your project get back that “ROAR” !!

Estimating the Project Success With Time Tracking and Collaboration Tool

“Master your time but do not let time master you”

A credible saying, that holds valid existence in almost every entity. So goes with Project Management. Time management provides the baseline on which the Project Management works.

It caters you with the following equations:

If we evidently understand the meaning of the above two equations, we could analyze and recommend the highly optimized Time Tracking of PM Aura. Not only does it monitors the work but also brings the resources as well as the manager to work on the same ground which increases the compatibility and in builds faith among them.

Time Tracking and collaboration tool focuses on “how to track the status of the project?” rather than demonstrating its features. With the resources as well as managers keeping eye on the health of the project, it becomes important to ensure the well being of the same. Therefore, this time tracker provides a complete report on the robustness of the project illustrating them each and every single detail; may it be displaying charts (pie, bars or graphs), estimated schedule or likely budget of the project.

No matter how effective planning is done, it holds no existence until and unless it is executed efficiently on time. Therefore, it becomes crucial to track the time via monitoring each and every aspects of the project to meet the prospects and reach success.

Project Planning Escorts You to a Better Success!!

Have you ever juggled to meet the deadlines? Every Project Manager has to face it once in his work tenure in order to meet the success line.

Planning for the tasks and executing it into actions with a practical and achievable approach is one of the best ways to escort success. In this case Project Planning Software could prove to be of great help.  PM Aura provides its users with convenient features which help them make their work easy. Managing the work with the help of planning software becomes a child’s play. There are several features which extend a helping hand to its users in order to ease out their tasks.

A good scheduling feature may help to chart out the schedule of the task which in return can manage their time efficiently. It also provides a program that can be accessed by anyone from anywhere. It aids the resources to keep a watch on the constant progress of the project which further helps them to maintain their required speed.

Hence Project Planning Software clearly shows how to complete a project within specified time, given budget and under a specific set of resources.

Using it makes your job easy!!

Managing Time Efficiently With Time Tracking Tool

It is an extremely difficult skill to develop but once refined sails great hurdles. People find it challenging to keep a record of every second and utilizing it efficiently. Tracking every hour or adhering to the time tracking policies also makes a big difference in catering productive work. It helps our users to follow the transparent approach and keep them updated about their work.

Time Tracking tool is the most sought solution for it. Another feature in the Project Management Tool that serves great purpose also enhances the productivity of the resources. It does not distract them from their objectives. Beyond that, organizations where time spent are directly tied to financial benefits; misusing it could make them pay back heavily.

Time tracking may help get the detailed record of their accomplished tasks or in near future about to get accomplished by the available resources. It could be of great avail to the company as it also renders the records of the amount of work done by each employee which aids to their further assessment.

Every project when started has an estimated deadline to be achieved regardless of its criticality. Time tracker also helps resources as well as Project managers to endure the rolling watch on their screens which further pushes them to stick with it. When you are in race with the time; there is always the possibility that one finishes the task on time or may be early.

Therefore, it is good to keep up with the tool so that one always has the successful lists of accomplished projects.