5 Secrets of Project Planning for Project Managers

Project Planning takes time and effort but becomes a necessity for a project’s success. It also guides sponsors, stakeholders, Project Managers, and teams throughout the project phase.

Identifying risks before it turns into a crisis has become critical.

Clearly, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail... Ironical, isn’t it?

Usually, Project Managers rush the planning phase in a struggle to execute the project deliverables.

What are the Benefits of Project Planning?

1.       Project Planning needs Goal Setting

A plan without goals is synonymous with a business without a vision.

Setting goals will help your team members establish a reliable benchmark to evaluate the progress of their contributions. You won’t need to waste time on tasks that do not support the goals.

If there are any conflicts about project deliverables during the process, you can remind your stakeholders and customers of the agreed-upon goals, which can possibly prevent scope creep.

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Most Effective Ways to Manage Remote Project Teams Effectively

 

If you work in a remote team or manage one, you’ve probably realized how advantageous these teams are especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote teams allow you to work in any location at any time.

Unlike company employees, you don’t have to work with a fixed schedule. For your remote team to complete the projects on time, you’ll need to build a close relationship with them. While this might not be an easy task, it will pay off in spades in the long run.

You can invest in the best tools and develop the clearest strategies and procedures to handle the projects. However, the tools and strategies can never replace people.

Every remote team needs clear strategies to develop a strong team environment and collaborate even when they can’t socialize or have a drink together.

Here are some of the most effective ways to manage remote project teams effectively.

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How to Write A Proper Project Management Plan

 

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been a part of a project that has failed to reach its goals. 

Well, as someone who’s also actively involved in project planning, I can say that I’ve had my fair share of negative experiences. 

Even though project failure rates are notoriously difficult to measure and compare, poor planning is without a doubt is in the top five of the most common reasons for frustration. 

Project Management Institute, for example, mentioned poor planning countless times in this guide to the most pressing issues impacting the performance of projects.

Also, the organization mentioned that a lot of problems during project implementation occur because of a lack of a proper management plan. Wellingtone agrees, as their The State of Project Management Survey 2018 found a lack of planning skills to be in the top 3 of project management challenges.

So what does all of this impact the creation of a project management plan? Read on. 

The Most Common Shortcomings of Project Management Plans

In the above-mentioned guide, Project Management Institute highlighted the following errors made with project management plans:
 

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How to Take Your Project Management Strategy to the Next Level

Project management is all about taking an idea, a future product or a future service and turning into the product or service it was planned to be.

How can you do this?

You can do this by using various skills such as leadership, communication, planning skills, time management, risk assessment and negotiation skills. You have to take the idea, the project, and make sure you negotiate the terms of delivery very thoroughly, so unexpected requirements won’t appear along the way.

Then, you need to be able to evaluate it in terms of time and resources. If you are a project manager in the IT industry, you will have to be able to reach an affirmation like this: ‘To be able to deliver this project I will need 6 developers, two quality analysts, one business analyst. They will work on roughly 400 tasks which will be done during 24 sprints.’

Also, a very important aspect of project management is the ability to predict risks, bottlenecks, and, last, but not least, motivate the entire team in order to deliver the project in a timely manner.

If you are already working as a project manager, at least once during your career, you might’ve reached a moment when you thought you need to take your project management strategy to the next level.

During this article, we’ll go through aspects that might help you get over this resistance in your career and turn the situation into a support for the development of your career.

1.      Project Delivery Methodology

The project delivery methodology is one of the most important aspects of the project itself because it can make or break your project and career.

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Task Management - The Key to Productive Teams

The most successful people aren't superheroes. They have the same 24 hours in their day like us. But they find significant ways to “do” more in fewer hours. How do they do it?

When I was juggling for the solution, I found task management techniques to stay on top.

Task Management is more than planning, assigning, and tracking.

It is more about having the right people work on the right tasks in a time-boxed manner and bring them to their logical conclusion.

A robust task management process helps individuals and groups to collaborate and share information to achieve their collective goals.

Take the chaos out of teamwork and get more done!

Effective task management requires managing all the aspects of a task which includes time, priority, status, type, dependency, notifications, and so on.

Different Approaches to Task Management:

Here are the 2 task management methods which can improve your workflow and business productivity.

●       Kanban

●       Agile

Is task management quite hectic for you?

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Agile Sprint Planning with Orangescrum

Developing a product or a service your customers will love, requires exquisite planning and management of the product and engineering teams. Requirement sign-offs as well as the agreed timelines by the customer are critical success factors.

Once you are set to begin execution, it is important to have the project phases, user stories, sprints, and tasks aligned. Furthermore, ensure that your teams understand what is to be delivered as part of each Sprint without losing sight of the overall deliverables.

The focus should always be that of ONE SPRINT at a time.

“Quick & Dirty” or a “Good Enough on time” deliverable has always been preferred over that elusive delayed yet “perfect” result. 

This is where the agile way of doing things scores the most. It is incremental & iterative. Our clients today are obsessed with quick results. What better way than Sprints to satisfy them!

They always want things delivered yesterday!

Not only that, an agile offer us the flexibility of making changes at the right time rather than at an end stage which is detrimental to the project and all involved.

And this where having well-planned Sprints come in handy.

You time-box your Sprints, lay out the tasks involved, have the team ready to execute and monitor results as you make progress. 

And if you look at it from an IT Service Provider standpoint, it gives you greater control over your projects, prevents them from being overrun by unwanted scope creeps & delays and lastly from running out of the budget.

In this short article, I will explain how you can plan and manage your sprints in OrangeScrum.

With OrangeScrum’s sprint planning, you can have the full clarity on your sprint plans, milestones, sprint launch dates, backlogs and all the progress in one place.

As we all know Sprint is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review.

Sprint review and Daily Stand-ups are easier and far less time consuming with Orangescrum!

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Orangescrum Capabilities That Increase Your Productivity

There are a lot of articles, suggestions, tools available to increase your productivity. But at the end of the day, it will not enhance your productivity unless you organize yourself and generate optimum output with minimum input.

Question is why you or enterprises want their employees to be highly productive at a workplace?

• You want to do more work at less time?
• You want to achieve better results of the work you do with your time?
• By more productive, you want to earn more with your time?
• You want to be more productive to relax and make life easier?
• You want time to do something you’re passionate about?

If you look at the above points, then you will get one thing, without managing your time effectively you can’t increase your productivity.

You can use all possible tools and systems at your disposal, but what matters most is “your own awareness of your time & how effectively do you use it”.

“People’s behaviour stats show that they actually use 60% or less of available work time. Even though they are physically at work five days a week, they are only productively using three days. So you pay almost 70% extra wage for getting things done.”

Let us see how an intuitive and smart time tracking solution can help you manage the greatest of resources; i.e. “Time” and lead to optimum results for your team and company.

Time and Resource Management

As amply clear, you can never be more productive without managing your time. And to this effect you need

• An inbuilt Smart Timer – to track your time.
• Resource Availability – to help you decide whom to use, when and where.
• Resource Utilization – to review and analyze how your team fared w.r.t the estimated time.
• Leave Planner – to have a robust resource planning with real time insights.

Let us see how Orangescrum’s Time and Resource Management capabilities help you achieve

ALL of the above!

Timer to Track Time:

With smart intuitive timer, you can track the exact time spent by you or a resource on a task. It will give a better idea how much time you’re spending; accordingly, you can manage your time or you can take corrective measures.

How to use the timer?

You can start timer in 4 ways;

• Task List Page
• Quick Links
• Quick Button
• Task Detail Page

From the task list page, you can click on the dropdown as shown in the below image and then click on “Start Timer” to track your time.

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Why Project Management Is Effective For Your Business And Teams

Hey you, what are you doing here? If you are checking this out it means one or two things. You are determined to learn more about your project management challenges and the next step is to find the best project management platform that would solve your problems.

OR, you have already got a project management platform in place and it sucks!!

By that I mean, it is too hard to use, too unreliable, too freaking expensive.

That’s right. When you think of project management you are figuring having to spend considerable time, money and effort. And that is exactly what general project management platforms/tools are now charging you.

But, there has to be a better way, right? And that is why you are here. In this article, we will discuss the core elements that we sometimes neglect and consider unimportant, which leads to drastic changes in the desired business outcomes.

Whether you are in charge of designing a car, moving your team to a new facility, preparing a solid marketing campaign, preparing advertisement framework for your client, or just about any other project (large or small), you will consciously or unconsciously go through the same four phases of project management: Planning, Defining, Implementation, and Performance Review.

For example, if you are in charge of planning a marketing automation, you’ll typically begin planning with the desired outcome and an estimated deadline for completion of the automation.

Then you will have a ballpark budget allocated to each campaign. Once you are in the Defining and Implementation phases, you will need to structure the framework and start executing the details of the project.

While defining or executing the project, you are most certain to come across new information, and based on the new information gathered, you will have to revise your budget, project deadline, implementation model, etc.

In other words, more you understand the bigger picture; the better you will plan your project.

You see, what stands between us and achieving our most ambitious goals has far less to do with possessing some magical skills or talent, and far more to do with how we approach problems and make decisions to solve them.

And because of the continuous and compounding nature of all those millions of decisions you make on a regular basis, even a marginal improvement in our process has huge impact on our end results.

Now let me prove this to you by taking an overview of each of these phases and the activities involved.

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