“It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, and how you’re led.” – Steve Jobs
The above quote is quite significant for managers. In any organization, a manager works as the connecting link between organizational objectives and employee performance. They’re tasked with not only ensuring that the business prospers but also that the teams they manage, stay happy.
It can feel like a lot to ask from a person, honestly. But managers go about their jobs without complaints or rebukes, handling whichever hurdle comes their way.
What if there was a way to make the manager’s job a bit easier. Or reiterating, what if there was a way to make the managers better at their jobs? We have found a way, and it lies in adopting project management software.
The software isn’t going to make the manager smarter or more brainy. But it can work as the manager’s best friend when it comes to managing project inefficiencies. Let’s see how this is done and how ProofHub, a project management tool used by more than 85,000 teams worldwide can help a manager.
Contents
Broad Industry Challenges Affecting Managers
Virtualization of Teams
Although virtual job roles have existed for a long time, we’re experiencing by far the greatest revolution in terms of the virtualization of teams. Since the onset of the pandemic, more remote positions than ever have sprouted – a trend consistent across verticals and industries.
About 85% of managers firmly believe that remote workers will become increasingly common in teams around the world. While this is an opportunity to build a diverse global workforce, it’s also a challenge for managers who now have to ensure work gets done smoothly in remote settings.
Virtual teams can pose management challenges in terms of communication and productivity. Managers may not be geared to communicate ideas and collaborate as effectively as they would from a physical office. It’s harder to personally connect with individuals using only virtual aids and then to ensure that the team works constructively together also.
Disengaged Employees
It’s no surprise that motivated employees are creative, high-performing, and add to the team’s overall productivity. But maintaining the same level of employee motivation requires managers to understand employee behaviors closely. In the US, the average annual employee turnover in 2020 was around 57% and another study from the ADP Institute found that more than 60% of it is voluntary in nature.
Building an environment where job satisfaction and motivation continue to grow is a forever challenge for managers. Retaining employees and getting the best out of them in such a fast-paced corporate world is skill managers have to develop. They have to find drivers of motivation for employees at the workplace and continually propagate them in order to derive consistent productivity.
Evolving Project Scopes
Talking of software project management specifically, an IEEE paper states that Scope Creep is one of the leading causes of project failure. As of 2018, about 70% of organizations have had failed software projects. Evolving, the unmanaged scope is one of the key culprits that can lead to delays, budget problems, and poor quality outcomes.
Keeping the project scope aligned with the team’s capabilities is a balancing act that managers often have to master. In competitive environments with burgeoning client pressure and performance commitments, keeping project scope under control can be really difficult.
Scope Creep often contributes to difficulties in meeting preset expectations. It can disrupt project plans in terms of project scheduling and resources, which negatively impacts the chances of project success. As stated by the research paper, scope creep is a widespread challenge that project managers have to routinely deal with.
Managing Project Risks
The idea of project management is to create strategic plans that can foresee and minimize risks. But risk reduction in modern projects with a wide array of risk avenues can pose challenges to the manager.
In any given project, managers face risks in regards to technology, skills, costs, communication, operations, and so on. While many of these risks can be avoided using management tools and techniques, many remain uncertain and hard to foresee.
Managers must learn how to align stakeholders with project goals and maintain efficient resource utilization to keep the risks under control. But even then, achieving a completely risk-free project may still be out of scope. It’s about ensuring a minimal risk profile for projects with available strategies.
How ProofHub Helps Managers Get Better At Their Jobs?
Centralized Management
On average, managers may use up to 10 different tools for running their daily operations. This includes everything from spreadsheets to team chat and beyond. Switching between so many screens throughout the day can severely increase cognitive load, leading to productivity drain.
ProofHub brings all the critical work tools into a single, easy-to-use platform that lets managers keep all their important activities centralized. No need of jumping from one tab to another just for one task. With ProofHub, the entire management workflow can be accessed with one login.
This means that may it be managing employee tasks, working with calendars, or reviewing project files – all of it can be done from within ProofHub. And then, managers can instantly chat with coworkers, create reports and do so much more.
Ultimately, managers save time and energy by sticking to a familiar, usable interface. This frees up their mind for business-related decisions and keeps them focused on things that matter.
Core Benefits
- Less time wasted in juggling project tasks
- Free up mental space for better focus
- Lower chances of clerical errors and misjudgments
- Easy to comprehend project information with clear dashboards
Better Planning
Project planning can help managers curb project risks by building predictability and resilience into business processes. ProofHub helps managers plan their daily workflow with accuracy and foresight. Following are the Project Planning features in ProofHub.
Project Calendars
Project Calendars help managers schedule project tasks, events, and milestones weeks in advance. They can rope in stakeholders and build highly context-rich calendars that avoid project confusion. They can have the entire week’s meetings planned at once or have the project plan ready with all the important dates already marked.
Gantt Charts
Once the project tasks are populated, they can be viewed in the form of Gantt Charts that enable managers to view project timelines with a hawk’s vision. A Gantt Chart lays out all the interdependent tasks, expected completion dates, and total time needed to complete the project dynamically. It can accommodate project velocity in real-time which keeps the manager always informed where the project is headed.
Core Benefits
- Risk avoidance with the help of foresighted project planning
- The teams can coordinate easily as members can be subscribed to the project plan
- Easier client approvals with end-to-end plan building
- Lesser time is wasted in haphazard task completion
Quicker Execution
Maintaining a desirable project speed is one of the biggest challenges for managers. They can’t simply ask employees to work faster than human boundaries. They have to coordinate teams in a way that they function like a well-oiled machine that flows smoothly. Then only, they can expect the project speed to get better.
When the team works in accordance with the project speed, it’s easier to manage the deadlines. ProofHub helps managers speed up projects by filling up communication gaps, fostering collaboration, and replacing slower processes with quicker ones.
This is done with the help of Discussion Boards and Team Chat that help team members stay connected wherever they are. No time is wasted in reaching out to each other. Further, ProofHub’s internalized file sharing and Notes app allow team members to share information without friction.
Core Benefits
- Bring teams to work in tandem and increase project speed
- Reduce project friction by resolving project conflicts
- Automate time-consuming tasks such as feedback, file sharing, stakeholder collaboration
- Enable quicker remote work communication which is usually hampered in the absence of a real-time tool
Secure Remote Communication
As stated earlier, teams across the world are being increasingly virtualized. More people than ever work from a remote location, which can cause managerial issues. ProofHub helps remote teams come together and collaborate on an SSOT (Single Source of Truth) which helps keep such challenges as little as possible.
In ProofHub, remote teams can log in from any web browser, mobile device, or workstation. The tool supports multiple devices while maintaining key security protocols. With the help of IP restriction, teams can further bolster their security protocols by enabling ProofHub access only through selected IP addresses.
This greatly reduces the manager’s burden of running the team remotely. Everyone can easily communicate with each other, share project information without fear and ensure that productivity isn’t hindered.
Core Benefits
- Enable BYOD policies for employees with confidence
- Let the team members work from any remote location
- Maintain proper team communication over secured networks
- Project data is always secure with ProofHub’s in-built security features
Impressive Reporting
Reporting is one of the most common KRAs for managers. On average, building manual reports is often time-consuming and eats away at the productive hours of the manager. Even then, it’s one of the most unavoidable job functions as most of the performance tracking is done via reports.
ProofHub has completely automated the project reporting aspect. It offers configurable reports for Workload, Project Performance, Portfolio, Time consumption, and more. Managers simply select the parameters and generate reports with one click. They can slice and dice the reports as per their needs without spending hours on the same.
Core Benefits
- Get instant access to project performance with fine-grained reporting
- Ensure easy stakeholder collaboration with reports
- Display KPIs, milestones, lead time, etc clearly in reports
- Easily export or edit reports as per business requirements
Conclusion
Managers, no matter which industry they work in, are often tasked with heavy responsibilities. They make their way through daily work challenges and high-stakes decisions. ProofHub is one tool that is designed keeping the manager’s core needs in mind. It offers many productivity and management features that make the manager better at their job without breaking a bank. After all, the managers can always use an extra pair of hands while they juggle scope, time, and costs for ensuring project success.