Project Management Essentials – What do you Need to Start a “Project”?

We all talk a lot about Project Management; but, before we proceed, let us just understand what is a project? Does any activity carried out by an individual or a group of people for a prolonged duration classify as a project? 

Wikipedia explains a Project as –

In contemporary business and science, a project is an individual or collaborative enterprise, possibly involving research or design that is carefully planned, usually by the project assigned team, to achieve a particular aim.

One can also define a project as a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations.

PMI has outlined the following description of a Project –

A project is temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and therefore defined scope and resources.

And a project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal. So a project team often includes people who don’t usually work together – sometimes from different organizations and across multiple geographies.

The development of software for an improved business process, the construction of a building or bridge, the relief effort after a natural disaster, the expansion of sales into a new geographic market — all are projects.

And all must be expertly managed to deliver the on-time, on-budget results, learning and integration that organizations need.

The definitions above are very distinct and crisp. They have established that we must know the following at the least before we dive into a project.

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Why Every Business Needs an Executive Dashboard?

An Executive Dashboard is a visual representation of real time progress of your team’s work. E it projects, costs, time, resource utilization and overall operational statistics at the organizational level that gives executives a quick and easy way to view their company’s performance.

The Executive Dashboard pulls all project information into one place so you don’t have to switch between projects. It can also provide data as per your requirement so the information is in a more meaningful format.

Significance of Executive Dashboard in Project Management 

• You sense that your company could be improving, but you have no idea how to tell for sure — or figure out exactly how you could be improving.
• You’re monitoring and/or gathering data but are meaningful and actionable.
• You’re wasting a lot of time trying to create tools to help you leverage your data.
• Your current solution isn’t giving you the ROI you need.
• Your competitors are leaving you behind in a trail of e-dust.

It gives executives numerous benefits including the following:

Visibility

An executive dashboard gives you great visibility and insight. You know exactly what’s going on in all aspects of your business. It allows you to better manage it and at times pre-emptively thereby saving you from precious waste of time and money.

Ongoing Improvements

Peter Drucker had very rightly said – “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Executive Dashboards allow you to measure your performance throughout your organization and thus improve it.

Time Savings 

Many executives spend countless hours logging into business systems and running reports. Conversely, the right executive dashboard always shows you the latest results from each report you need. This saves precious hours each month.

Measure Performance vs Your Plan

Many executive spend time creating a business plan for their organization to follow. However, that’s just the first piece of the puzzle. The second is making sure your company is following your plan. Implementation and Execution is the key. Your Executive Dashboard could do just that. That is, in your dashboard, you can automatically show your goals from your business plan versus your actual, real-time results.

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Major Update to Orangescrum Project Collaboration Tool Mobile Apps

The wait is over! Now you can use our premium features in our mobile apps as well. You can update apps on your iOS/Android device from the Play Store or App Store. This major Update provides you the latest features of Orangescrum. 

We know it is very difficult to exclude mobile apps from our business interaction and communication. The customer doesn’t want to wait for a reply, you want to allocate your resources and assign tasks while you’re on the go; all these things can be done using the mobile app to increase your communication & engagement with your resources and clients/customers/stakeholders. 

So here are our major updates available for both Android & iOS app, but please note the premium features for the open source/community version is only available subject to their add-on installation on their web version: 

Enter and Manage your Time Logs

You can enter your time entries for a task through your mobile app now. The spent hour will be calculated as per your start time and end time excluding the break time.

Now you can do the following actions through your mobile app:

• Time Entry
• Edit, Delete Time Log
• Billable and non-billable time log
• Time Log List view
• View Time Log in Task Detail page

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How to Get Daily Updates from your Team Without Fail?

When running a SMB unit or large enterprise business, maintaining your daily operations is vital for your efficiency & sustainability. As your business grows, a simple string of tasks updates and reports from your daily updates can easily help you stay ahead of the game.

If you don’t monitor it carefully, you will lose track of what is happening within your business.

If not dealt timely, sooner or later, your business’ growth is going to be impacted and may lead to a grinding halt. That is precisely why you need to establish who is going to be responsible for what and making them accountable.

When things go wrong or don’t go exactly as planned, you can skip the blame game and go straight to the person accountable.

As your workforce continues to grow larger and larger, maintaining total control can become too time-consuming and stressful.

As a “business owner” (Project Manager, Team Lead, Head of Operation/Delivery), conducting face to face meetings to get a detailed progress summary of your projects, campaigns, delivery and employees is a precious waste of time and efforts by all involved.

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