Managing a project is all about results and, no matter how efficient you are as a manager, the results come from the joint effort of your staff. Therefore, an adequate project manager is the one that organizes business and creates conditions in a manner that will allow their team to perform admirably. In other words, all you have to do is make it easier for your staff to do their job. Here are several project management tips that will help you achieve just that.
1. Squad-based teams. If you’re determined to promote teamwork within the office and aim to do this on every level, you should really consider making squad-based teams. Therefore, you need to understand that these squads can consist of as little as two people. Sure, whenever you make a team, there’s always a probability that you’ll allow some people to slack and take advantage of their hard-working colleagues. Nonetheless, with adequate monitoring, division of labor and a record-keeping system, you can minimize the chance of this happening. Naturally, you need to ask your employees for a feedback later on and inquire whether they’re satisfied with the squad or would they prefer a transfer.
But keep in mind squads aren’t for everyone — they might diminish the efficiency of the most gifted introverts within your team. So be sure to leave some slots open for individual work, just to have this covered on all fronts.
2. Outsource and automate. While this may sound like a strange combination, you need to understand that both of these concepts provide you with an advantage of allowing your squads to focus on their main tasks. Outsourcing takes away responsibilities that they’re undertrained or under-equipped to handle, whereas automation allows them to focus on creative tasks, those that have to be performed by humans. By reducing the diversity of tasks handled by your staff, you’re reducing the probability of human errors and by allowing digital tools to take away some of their repetitive responsibilities, you’re making their job a lot easier. Both of these trends work to everyone’s benefit.
3. Be less invasive. One thing that you need to understand on the project is the fact that you have to find a middle ground between letting your team be completely unsupervised and being too meddling. Fortunately, with adequate tools, you might just be able to find a solution. With the help of a staff tracking software , you’ll be able to know what everyone on your team is doing without having to look over their shoulder. In this way, your team will be under an impression that you trust them 100 percent, and you’ll still have all the strings tightly in your hand.
4. Efficient time-management. Any project is a game of coordinating resources and managing time, therefore, with an adequate time-management technique or tool, you can easily improve the success rate of your employees. Sometimes, you won’t have that much flexibility when it comes to deadlines and timetables, however, if you initially set these deadlines stricter than you have to, you might gain a bit of maneuvering space. This may seem like an illusion, yet, it’s an illusion that will alleviate some stress and put your team under less pressure.
Alternatively, you could try out a time-management technique or two, just in order to make things a bit more dynamic and, therefore, interesting. The most beginner-friendly technique is the so-called Pomodoro, which works on the principle that your staff works for 25 minutes uninterrupted and then rests for 5 minutes afterward. While this may seem inefficient, because you’re then losing 10 minutes every hour, the productivity is actually quite high for users of this technique — because there’s a difference between work and effective work.
In conclusion
A good thing about most of these techniques is the fact that they improve your business model as a whole, thus allowing you to keep the momentum, even after the end of the project. Overall, each of these four methods boosts the overall productivity, making them valid choices regardless of the project that you’re on.
