We’re delighted to bring you some exciting new updates from across the Teamwork Platform. We’ve overhauled the existing projects list view, included the ability to add file attachments in Intake Forms Forms, we’ve a new and improved Microsoft Add-In, mobile updates and much more.
Creativity is a funny thing. Creative people need the freedom to be able to come up with concepts and develop their ideas. But too much freedom can be a bad thing. The truth is that even the most out-of-the-box creative projects require firm and structured management if you want to get the most from the team responsible. In this blog post, we’re going to deep dive into the whys, wherefores, and how-tos of creative team management.
As we all know, COVID-19 has had a seismic impact on how just about every industry approaches the work they do. When the pandemic first took hold, many businesses were left floundering, desperately trying to figure out not only how to continue working, but how to do so effectively. The digital project management tools that we have relied on to get us through this extended period of unrest and remote working have been indispensable.
Cross functional collaboration is an important aspect of creating company culture and a sense of unity beyond the office building. As the all star Quarterback Tom Brady once said if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. This quote can have a different meaning for everyone but in the workplace, it’s pretty clear. Getting work done on your own can produce some results more quickly.
You can establish task dependencies with successor and predecessor links. Dependencies define relationships among tasks that determine their order. Predecessors identify tasks that must be completed before their successor task can be started. Using predecessor and successor relationships can help you improve project scheduling and allows you to determine how to shorten the critical path of the projects you are working on.
Now you can get OneDesk to automatically create an item for you as a result of an automation.
It’s easy to say that remote work is a piece of cake. After all, who doesn’t want to have the flexibility that comes with working from home? This is how most people who’ve never tried remote work think about it. In reality, remote work comes with its challenges. As a person, who’s been working from home most of my life, I had to overcome them as well. Although, it was less stressful since I wasn’t forced to work remotely by the global pandemic.
For successful projects, budgets are like a backbone. However, when it fails and exceeds the limit, things can take an unfortunate turn. That’s why it is always mandatory to stay in check with the investments. While it’s pretty complex to execute everything within the budget, you can implement specific tactics that can encourage the same. Today, we will enlighten you with some simple techniques that can help in project budgeting.
Resource allocation in project management is all about balance. The success of your project depends heavily on how well you distribute tasks to your team, stay within budget, and finish on time. A little too much focus in one area will tip the scale and leave you rushing to finish in another. Again, it comes down to balance. Any successful project manager can tell you exactly who is working on what, when each task is due, and how they're trending overall toward their original due dates.
Services and requests are two concepts that go closely hand in hand. Even for internal requests, once a service is requested, there is a certain level of agreement that must happen between the two parties involved. This is often handled via terms and contracts, but these can be easy to mismanage or lose sight of. In most software used for managing work, these aspects are not captured or part of the workflow.
Want to keep your team and the stakeholders on the same page about the project? Ever tried considering the use of scrum artifacts in your business? Using scrum artifacts is necessary for your scrum team if you care about the success of your projects. They also can inspire productivity in the era of digital offices. Here in this article, we will elaborate on scrum artifacts and will tell you how you can use them. Sign Up Here for free to use Scrum Artifacts in your Project Management tool!
With low employee productivity, a team might lose morale or commitment towards a project. They might end up dissipating the project’s importance, and then it might not succeed efficiently. An employee’s motivation towards work is the key factor for any project succession. That’s why it is crucial to discern the factors that can impede the same. If you are an employer who is facing low productivity, then this read can help you with it.
The past year has seen flexibility and adaptation in the face of large-scale changes—with companies investing in tools like chat, content, scheduling, and more to collaborate. That said, organisations haven’t seen a meaningful uptick in productivity. That’s because all those tools aren’t doing what they’re supposed to—helping teams manage and coordinate work.
Agile meetings have two specific features that set them apart from regular meetings: they are focused on delivering value, and are strictly time-boxed. In fact, these two features make them quite productive, in contrast to most other regular meetings. These meetings are inseparable from an effective agile approach to product development. The reason is ingrained in the nature of agile approaches.
You’ve probably heard the old sentiment about “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Or, maybe you’ve experienced it yourself. In many cases, it can be true — too many hands working all at once can feel like chaos. But here’s the thing: When you have a clear handle on who’s doing what, extra cooks can actually lead to peak efficiency and superior quality. Fortunately, a swimlane diagram can help you get a clear handle on everybody’s responsibilities.
Are you struggling to adjust to a hybrid team model? Here are 5 time management and productivity tips to make project management more effective in a hybrid team setting.
Ever thought deeply about what an agile work environment means? An agile work environment is one in which employees have the freedom and flexibility to work in different sections of the workplace whenever they want and whatever they prefer. This freedom of choice in the work environment boosts productivity. However, the concept of a flexible work environment encompasses much more than simply adapting space to meet the demands of employees.
At Vodafone, a leading telecommunications company in Europe and Africa, Darragh Cresham, Operations and Technology Manager for Vodafone Business, has taken an agile and innovative approach to work management. By giving teams a single platform to work in rather than scattered apps and ad hoc processes, Darragh has enabled his teams to move swiftly and effectively tackle the challenges that come with complex processes and a dispersed workforce. So how does Vodafone use work management?
We need to rethink the way we work. The global pandemic has made it strikingly clear that working longer hours does not lead to greater impact. In fact, it leads to burned out, unhappy, and unproductive employees. According to the Anatomy of Work Index, 76% of workers are struggling to disconnect from work. And, in the last year, 7 in 10 workers experienced burnout. To rethink work and life in the new normal, we sat down with Adam Grant at our recent Focus & Flow Summit.
The Gantt chart is one of the most enduring project management tools in history, owing mainly to its versatility, ease of use, and wide scope of application. In fact, a recent survey reported that for 45% of project team members, it is their most used software feature, while for 22% of respondents in a similar survey, it is the most desired project management tool.
“Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.” – Nelson Mandela Just as the original term ‘milestone’ denotes a marker indicating distance traveled, so milestones in project represent a task or activity completed so far. But they are actually far more useful and versatile than that. In this post, we define project milestones, and explore why they’re an essential part of the project management process.
Balancing all of a company’s various business needs can be difficult and often results in using a number of different solutions to get the job done. So often these days, a lot of software focuses on fulfilling one specific need, and doing it really well. While this is great in providing consumers with good quality services, it also results in complicated workflows that see users going between multiple products in order to complete a single project.
The last year and a half has really tested how well organisations in the UK—and around the world—are able to communicate goals and create clarity for their teams. Without strong goals to work towards together, teams flounder and can’t do their best work, especially considering the amount of sudden change and stress people have experienced.
What is PMO and what does it do? PMO is an acronym for Project Management Office. In any organization, PMO is a department responsible for improving project management by improving efficiencies. PMO creates and maintains documents, tracks progress, and offers education on matters about a project.
Project integration management is the coordination of each specific aspect of a large project. A project is more than just tasks, milestones, communications, and reports. Projects have a context; they aim to satisfy all requirements by balancing resources and fulfilling stakeholder’s expectations. In this way, Project Integration Management is the process of managing a project in its totality, including the tasks, milestones, communications, requirements, trade-offs, and resource decisions.
As the popular maxim goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Nowhere is this truer than in the creation of a project plan. And, as training organization PM4DEV explains, “a project can only be successful if the success criteria were defined from the start.” Without a plan, you can’t define or measure the scope of the project or its success.
Stratford Group is a leading management consulting firm based in Ottawa, Canada. Their goal is simple – help organizations and their leaders grow, improve and transform. As the President of Management Consulting, Colleen Kelley leads the business strategy and operations practice for Stratford Group.
Do your projects often lack a sense of general direction? Are you regularly confused about what you should be doing next? To be productive and efficient, you should implement a project management workflow into your operation. This can help to bring order to chaotic situations and enhance your team’s productivity across the board. A project management workflow is a crucial component of any effective operation.
Enterprise Project management software has rocketed in popularity with remote workspaces due to the pandemic. Many enterprises used these softwares and enterprise project management solutions prior to the pandemic for ease of communication and collaboration but now they are an absolute necessity for any team that is working remotely with many different parallels initiatives.
Identifying and fixing siloed processes is more important now than ever before. This includes ensuring that all of your digital tools are constantly interacting and keeping abreast of each other. The new version of the MS Office Add-In does just that, enabling your Microsoft Office tools in Windows to harmonize with Teamwork.
While a company’s headcount might grow person-by-person, its functional complexity grows exponentially. In a team of only 10 people, there are over a thousand possible combinations of working relationships; for a team of 15, there are over thirty thousand. But let’s forget the math. After all, we’re not talking about cracking a safe, we’re talking about working with people. And when we work with people, complexity is about more than a numbers game.
