How To On-Board Your Team To Project Management Tool

Investing in a project management tool is the best thing you can do to your business and team. It is not about having a fancy brand or tool onboard but a platform that is in-sync with your desired business outcomes and gets the work done! 

Let’s see how our teams typically start their day and go about doing their business from task to task or one project to another, the challenges they face and how a collaborative project management platform can help us save the day.

What is the latest status of the tasks I assigned to my team? Isn’t it the question you begin your day (almost every day!) with?

How many times have you been clueless because someone forgot to hit “Reply All” on an all important progress update?

It happens! And it happens more frequently than we would expect.

These are just two of the million such things that put us on the spot or out of it while we continue to run and manage our projects the traditional way. Emails, Spreadsheets, Word documents etc.

And the result

• The documents and spreadsheets become obsolete almost the moment they were created.
• Status updates and tasks progress not updated in time. And to update, the teams need to manoeuvre their way through are a cumbersome process.
• Add to the mix, the project or document owner has not granted the right permissions to the team and neither the proper steps or agreed flow for updating these crucial project documents.
• All the action is in the emails. And there is no link between your documents and the emails. Thereby, your project update and progress is shelved in multiple disconnected mailboxes.
• The bigger picture and the vision are almost lost in these uncoordinated actions. 
• There is no place for you and your team to see the entire flow, the progress of the project end to end without having to mine multiple documents and inboxes.

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How to Use Resource Availability in Orangescrum

Running a business efficiently is all about managing resources effectively. And the two such critical resources are – team and time.

Resource planning, allocation, and efficient management involve careful planning, analysis, foresight and ability to account for possible risks in terms of rapidly changing business demands and landscape.

It is of utmost importance to be aware of the available bandwidth of your resources, your pipeline, in-flight projects and what you can take up further. Thus it is necessary you have a dashboard or a tool that can give you this information on a single pane in real time.

You and your team must always have access to critical information about your resources’ utilization, availability, leave and travel plans if any. More so when you have a globally dispersed and ever mobile workforce.

In this article, we’ll show how Orangescrum takes care of all your time and resource management woes with its comprehensive time tracking, resource availability, resource utilization and leave planning features.

Let us understand how they work and help us in real time.

How to use Resource Availability?

On the Resource Availability Calendar, you can see the resources’ or team member’s “Available” and/or “Booked” hours. You can use the quick project and resource dropdowns to focus on your most precious resources and projects.

Create a task, and never forget to define the “Start Date”, “Due Date” and “estimated hours” in it.

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Is Multi-Tasking Hurting Your Projects

Let’s accept it! We are all fascinated with “Multi-tasking”! Shamelessly and Extensively!

We take great pride in asserting ourselves as the ever successful multi-tasker (without numbers to back us!). It’s like there is an aura, a certain unexplained charm about the ability to multi-task.

And in sharp contrast (in my view), “Multi-tasking is mindless flip-flop across tasks or activities of the day. It is a self-deployed marketing gimmick for our lack of focus or rather very short attention timestamp to the tasks in hand.”

It is our inability to concentrate on what is really important and of priority than to be easily distracted by phone calls, water cooler discussions, social media beeps and twitter bytes.

Getting distracted easily directly impacts our focus and interest in the work we were doing. As we shift focus, we tend to then play around with our schedule, our to-do list and end up being less than productive.

The same is true in Project Management.

If you keep shifting between projects or tasks of the same project, your output (read quality and efficiency) is bound to dip.

It is scientifically proven – Human brain can never focus on more than one cognitive act at the same time. 

Simply put, multitasking leads to as much as a 40% drop in productivity, increased stress, and a 10% drop in IQ as per a study by Institute of Psychiatry for Hewlett Packard in 2005.

Let us take a quick look at the multitasking perils we must avoid to be

productive at our jobs, efficient in our lives and profitable in our business.

1. Tasks are always “Thrusted” on you (resources) 

Does anyone remember why is Toyota held in such high regard? Quality of course but how?

They implemented a pull system instead of a push on their assembly line. By implementing the pull strategy in your project and task execution you respect your team members’ right to manage their own work.  It always leads to a significant rise in their confidence and motivation.

The converse is also true. If you keep on pushing tasks on to your resources’ queue you end up overloading them leading to delays and lack of motivation.

2. Loss of precious billable hours

Have you ever asked yourselves - Why do I multi-task?

The answer is “to save time” – always! On the contrary, every time you shuffle between activities you lose precious time to refocus and recap to start from where you left. 15minutes is what it takes to refocus yourself on any given task.

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Simplified Time Tracking Timesheets with Orangescrum Project Management Tool

Delivering on time, within estimated time and budget is integral to business viability. Digital marketing agencies, professional services & consulting firms or product and services companies like us constantly battle with questions -

• Are our employees disengaged?
• Do they monitor their time spend?
• Are we able to capture and track actual time spend vs estimated times
• Do they find their work meaningful?
• Are they motivated enough?
• Do they understand the impact their work has on the client’s success?

If the answers are less than affirmative, it is clear that there is unmindful wastage of time within our teams and it is hurting our business and clients.

& we were no exception at Andolasoft Inc.

It also means they are not able to differentiate between productive and non-productive tasks and how they allocate their “Time” to these tasks.

The age old industry adage we love to quote – “You cannot manage what you can’t measure”is surprisingly prevalent in today’s digital world despite of millions of apps and tools to measure almost every human activity.

Activities feed on time; a precious resource!

Before we can ever start making amends to the situation we are in, we need to know

• Where is our team spending their maximum time?
• Does their time spend bring revenue?
• Are we spending as planned?
• Will we deliver on time and within budget?
• Will this project be profitable?

Find all your answers with Orangescrum’s simplifiedDAILY & WEEKLY TIME SHEETS.

Let’s see how it works.

Daily Timesheet

Daily Timesheet helps both you and your team members to track all tasks undertaken for the day, actual time spent on each activity, total time spent, and their productive outcome. It displays both billable and non-billable activities, which helps you analyze their productivity on any given date.

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