Did you know that more than half of organizations have experienced a failed project within the past year? While it’s easy to blame market conditions, competitors, or insufficient resources, the usual culprit is often much closer to home.
A lack of effective leadership and obsolete processes is an illness that significantly impacts a project’s success. Effective leadership motivates and develops teams to their maximum potential and constantly evaluates business processes to ensure maximum productivity through the life cycle of a project.
Whether you’re a veteran or junior PM, you’ll be able to incorporate some of the skills the most effective PMs commit to their projects with these tips.
Workload management is effective delegation and the development of team productivity. The structure is often directed by frameworks and methodologies such as SCRUM, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), or Kanban.
Working under the umbrella of these theories, tasks are distributed accordingly. Rules for prioritization and change management are also put into place and define the Definition of Done and the Definition of Ready. Your role as the project manager is to optimize and customize these principles to achieve the best output.
As part of enhancing workload management and fostering a productive remote work environment, consider providing opportunities for professional development, such as project management courses with certificates. These courses can offer comprehensive training in various project management methodologies and tools, providing managers and team members alike with valuable skills and knowledge.
Proper workload management results in a more productive team and a strong sense of the health of a project. You’ll have a clear view of predicting bottlenecks and draft a plan of attack before they occur.
With a well–managed workload process, you’ll determine whether more resources are required to meet milestones and who your most effective resources are.
An added bonus is team members are motivated and therefore emotionally invested in the results of their work. The results are a more productive team, less churn, greater communication, increased quality, and the introduction of more solutions from team members.
It is hard to understand the actual amount of workload for each member when there is a heap of tasks and multiple projects running simultaneously. Here is what you need to do to determine the workload of the entire team and individual team members –
Once you have an idea of your team’s workload, you can define task distribution. Allocating resources should be done so that the workload is fairly distributed depending on the capabilities of each team member.
Here is how you can allocate resources effectively:
As you analyze progress and receive feedback, be sure to resolve problems as soon as they arrive. Frequently, business needs can change mid-stream, and this is where your change management strategy comes into play.
Typical examples would be changes in a feature or if a dependency was too complex to implement as planned. You can refer to priorities in these events and recalibrate expected delivery by swapping out future priorities with current priorities not ready for completion. To establish practical deadlines and modify them with ease, it’s highly recommended to create a timeline to support your team every step of the way.
Whether you’re working on a startup and are looking for ways to improve your product development process and deliver a Most Viable Product (MVP) or reverse-engineering an established product, always keep an eye on the velocity to maximize execution. Through proper planning detailed above, you should have a strong sense of dependencies as well as team capabilities.
Plan out your long–term workload via a project roadmap. Set a monthly or quarterly deliverable schedule for the project’s life for the completed workload and annotate it with risk factors.
Resource scarcity is a reality in even the best-funded companies. Some of the most successful companies will set strict budgets for time and expenses and may not budge to procure additional resources. The ability to control both your team and its results is a cornerstone of workload management.
The best way to analyze your workload management and mitigate problems is by using the right tools. A full PMs suite such as Azure DevOps or Jira is a common solution for larger projects. Other options include Trello, Asana, and Basecamp. Among their advantages are instant task modeling, the ability to control each step of a task, assigning specific terms, instant reports, etc.
No matter your choice, from a workload management perspective, reports are essential to optimize productivity. In daily meetings, you can bring up bug reports, velocity, burndown, and other important factors to investigate any lags in productivity.
For instance, if you promote a website, you need in–time reports reflecting current search results positions, visitor number changes, the number of links to the website, etc. Those reports are easy to make automatically by using the SEO Report Generator that includes various report options and gather website performance data (you can also gather it from website monitoring tools), keyword ranking analysis, competitor research, etc.
Proper workflow management is nothing without these two essential components. You must learn how to motivate your team and avoid conflicts. It is not just an obvious fact but a basis for numerous research attempts and discoveries.
It can be crucial in raising productivity. At the same time, its lack can destroy a team and the project as a whole. A motivated member is significantly more productive than an unmotivated professional. Here are basic recommendations:
No team can do without conflicts. As a leader, you need to resolve them and make them easier for both sides. Conflicts in a team are a separate discipline with rules, terms, and knowledge systems. It will take hundreds of pages to cover the whole issue. Here, we’ll just give some general recommendations:
Workload and team management are essential both for a separate project and a company as a whole. Mind the proper algorithm of your activities, use the proper tools, and learn the ups and downs of your team to obtain results.
As soon as you start applying the mechanisms described in this article, you’ll see positive changes. And in some time, you’ll experience enough to solve more complicated tasks simultaneously.