What’s Your Support Tool?

Successful project management comes with certain rules, terms and tools which is not easy to achieve. For that reason, my acquaintances in the tech industry expect valuable functionality and productivity in these tools and they want to rely on their resources in order to deliver qualified work.  

While working at an IT startup, I’ve been in search of a smart solution with unique features to help me improve efficiency and I’ve started my software research based on this.

First, I found this article about Evidence-Based Scheduling on Wikipedia and thought that somebody finally started understanding what a developer needs in a project management software. Then it made me think; what more is out there?

A successful project manager is one who can track and visualize the entire project from start to finish, who could envision milestones and estimate delays. To keep pace with business and IT, project managers need support to expand their visions and make their management practices more adaptable. Here are the tips to utilize that support:

1. Be Agile, Develop Agile: Stop thinking traditionally and acting rigid, instead focus on being more flexible and moving quicker. Either have a ton of whiteboards or find an online space but get as visual as possible in order to make quick decisions and build an accurate backlog.
2. Do Not Manage People, Manage Tasks: As weird as it may sound, you will see the benefits once you focus on task management instead of micromanagement. Create cases to contain the necessary information to understand each task, so you can stay productive, with fewer meetings, and monitor your team’s activities clearly.
3. Update Your Project Management Practice: Have a powerful search engine, allowing you to instantly search complete contents of cases, wiki articles, and customer correspondence. Your issue tracking tool should be your right hand.
4. Learn From Your Past: Make accurate estimations based on your past project experiences. Make sure to log all your previous project activities, deadlines, delays, assignments and timelines to look back and compare your set goals with the actual achievements.
5. Time Is The King: You will want to know how much work you’ve left, how much time you’ve spent on each case, ensure a balanced workload, predict project completion dates, improve estimates and deliver on time.
6. Communicate All Deliverables and Activities: Share technical specs with your entire team, design docs and enable them in your shared library, create knowledge base articles, public documentation for customers, complete specs and user documentation.
7. Create Step-By-Step Milestones: Divide your project into manageable tasks and assign milestones for each task you had created in order to accomplish your project goals. The milestones will help you with qualifying events and crucial deadlines.
8. Clear Communication: Prioritize the email sequence throughout the assignments. Set automated responses where necessary and appropriate. Save time with templated, pre-created responses.
9. TBQ (Time, Budget, Quality) Rule: Efficient time tracking, resourcefulness and smart scheduling are the key tools to fulfil the TBQ Rule. You may meet the deadline and accomplish the goals. However, your project will be marked successful only if you are able to manage your priorities effectively, use your sources efficiently and know the impact of unforeseen events.