Project management drives many organizations, and if your project management skills are weak your entire team and even your bottom line could be suffering.

Project management tools and skills are what holds your team together, guides you toward goals, keeps you on budget, keeps you on schedule, drives positive results, and keeps you on track for success. When projects are managed successfully, that creates a positive impact that pays dividends throughout your entire company.

5 Project Management Tips For Project Managers

2020 upended not just lives but also workflows, with teams pushed to remote work and deadlines hampered by a lack of resources and overall stability. Are you looking to get back on track in 2021? Here are 5 tips to improve your project management in 2021.

1. Manage your time more efficiently

Time management is at the heart of any project, and managing it is essential to downstream operations and successful task completion. This is where a sound project management workflow tool can be worth its weight in gold. Good project management tools will lay out and help you schedule critical features such as:

• Project initiation
• Planning
• Execution
• Performance monitoring
• Closure

With project management software, you can easily tie in affected parties, set deadlines, and have team alignment through all the steps of your project while also integrating those with the timelines from all the other projects you are working on.

2. Adopt holistic planning solutions

Planning is the heart of project management, and thorough planning at the onset of a project can save you time, resources, and money down the line. Don’t adopt a wait-and-see attitude, and certainly don’t put off planning details until it’s too late. Detailed planning, though, is certainly not easy, and a detailed project workflow solution will prepopulate many tasks when you create the workflow, saving you time and making it less likely that individual steps will be forgotten or inadvertently combined with other steps.

3. Open the lines of communication

You can plan as much as you like, but if team members and stakeholders don’t know what the plan is it might as well be a secret. Open communication and clear team visibility ensures that all parties have insight into the project, its details, timelines, and resources. Unfortunately, creating a clear communication plan may not be as simple as it seems. Creating a workflow in one software platform and communicating in another can lead to confusion, crossed channels, and missed opportunities. Embedding your communication within your project management software ensures that everyone is on the same page – literally – when it comes to getting work done on time and on budget.

4. Organize your resources in one place

This goes back to the open lines of communication skill set. Keeping all of your resources on one platform will save time and energy, not to mention confusion, and align teams around a common goal. Spreading your resources across multiple platforms can be tempting when there are so many great tools available, but this can simply be an invitation to confusion and lost time: What’s the value of keeping your files in one cloud and your communication on a separate platform when so much time is lost toggling between tabs, not to mention logging in and out of online tools. Simply searching for information can lead to a massive drain on time, which points to the value of choosing one work tool for all of your tasks, from invoicing to communication, and sticking with it.

5. Debrief after big projects

Big projects can be exhausting but also present valuable opportunities for learning – and especially for streamlining future workflows. A short meeting after the completion of a large project can reveal roadblocks, time-saving ideas, and more that can be applied as lessons learned when it comes time to launch your next project. Showing a customer what you’ve learned from previous work can boost confidence in your work as well as save your own team time and frustration.

Improving your project management skills can save you and your team valuable time and money, and lead to happier customers and less stress in the workplace. Looking for the right project management tool to make it all happen? ProWorkflow makes project management and remote collaboration easy, with a long list of tools and solutions that help speed your projects to completion, including flexible task types, custom workflow categories, easy contact management, comprehensive reporting, a built-in invoice and quotes manager, and inline communication tools. Contact ProWorkflow today for a free demo.