Does Your Team Need Project Management Tools?

We’ll be talking about 10 signs your team needs project management tools. Here, we will also dissect the reasons a well-equipped project management system may work for you. That way, the next time a workplace mishap occurs, your team remains unfazed. 

When managing a business, uncertainty and unpredictability are common key factors to its overall progress. After all, people and businesses don’t live in a bubble. A sudden thunderstorm could cancel meetings, and a contagious disease will postpone events to a much later date, sometimes months away.

Given that both  internal issues and environmental events may interrupt schedules and workflows, it’s important to plan thoroughly. Because without enough preparation, you might end up in a big mess of mishandled tasks and unmet deadlines. Next thing you know, you’re starting from scratch.

And we don’t want that to happen. Fortunately, there are several work and project management tools available to prepare your team for unpredictable times. But to know what you need, you’ll have to recognize and accept the roots of your teams’ problems.

Now, let’s dive into some telltale signs your team could function better than it does right now.

You have too many missed deadlines.

If you find yourself or your team members frequently rushing last minute on a task and putting out fires here and there, you might need to reassess why that happens so often.

Once delaying tasks becomes a habit, you’ll tire yourself over old tasks instead of current ones, which need just as much attention. Unless you find a productive solution, your team will burn out.

Without a centralized system for tracking your due dates, teams rely on nothing but scattered emails, sticky notes, or mere memory. To stay ahead, you should dedicate a standard communication channel for updates and reminders with your team.

No one’s assigned to manage tasks.

The heavier the tasks, the bigger the team, and the more complicated the projects. To solve this, you divide your team into smaller groups or departments that handle specific tasks. At this point, you might think the worst is over; you’ve successfully delegated tasks and covered deadlines. 

However, task management doesn’t stop there. It’s better to assign specific task managers than hand your departments a task list and wish their teamwork is enough. 

What’s worse than missing deadlines is completely forgetting about them, which happens when there’s no one assigned to spearhead tasks. Teams without a structured workflow assume someone else will always want to step up. But more often than not, assuming only leads to bottlenecks. 

Project management tools enable task assignments, like collaborators and managers to projects. This helps clarify who’s responsible for each task, no matter how small they are compared to the project they are part of. 

Your team uses many communication channels.

Another culprit for miscommunication is having too many messaging windows open. Conversing and sharing updates across multiple platforms makes work confusing and tedious–not to mention the bombardment of notifications.

When you take work to different playing fields, you lose important details to miscommunication. Why take the conversation to different chat rooms when you’re all on the same team anyway?

Whether it’s to distinguish them by topic or to avoid mixing up teams, there’s always a more practical solution.

By centralizing communications with a project management tool, you can keep all relevant discussions in one place for easy reference.

Too many people are doing one-person tasks.

Notice team members unknowingly working on the same task often? Work and effort overlaps tend to happen with poor planning and communication. By ignoring duplicate work, not only do you waste time on simple tasks. You also cut your team’s manpower significantly. 

Without a shared project workspace for your team members to share their individual progress, the team will be prone to redundancy. A project management tool shows task assignments and progress updates, and dependency fields that can ensure no task proceeds when another is still ongoing. 

In fact, project management tools can also eliminate ritualistic tasks such as creating daily to-do lists and reviewing past work. In project management tools, there’s a way to automatically migrate tasks to different sections in your workspace, depending on their status. 

For example, marking tasks as complete can transfer them to a section such as a custom “finished tasks” column instantly. With such features, you get to focus on your immediate tasks rather than past or ongoing ones, thus eliminating the chances of work overlaps.

No one knows what’s going on.

Have you experienced setting yourself up for a work day so well, that you actually look forward to the rest of it, only to end up feeling lost again because you don’t know your tasks upon clock-in?

Sometimes, you won’t even be handed your tasks until right around the end of shift, forcing you to work twice as much the next workday. Frustrating as it sounds, it’s a common scenario in a workspace lacking in organization. 

When people have no clue about a project, tasks pile up unknowingly and priorities become unclear, all leading to an inconsistent workflow. 

But beyond assigning tasks, project management tools keep momentum going by providing clear timelines. This will enable you to plan ahead while you accomplish your current tasks, which makes for a productive workday.

Finding docs is difficult and time-consuming.

Scouring through your file database can take time, especially if you don’t have a centralized file management system. If you find your team constantly asking the whereabouts of a particular doc, it’s one of the signs your team needs project management tools for easy file storage.

Having a poorly organized file system will make you depend on email threads, personal drives, or single-purpose cloud platforms to keep your files. It’s no different from using multiple communication channels, which is inefficient.

Project management tools can act as all-in-one file storage systems amenable to database app integrations and file-sharing options. This makes sharing documentation, media files, and company wikis among team members seamless and simplifies data migration.

You frequently hold meetings that could be emails.

When every small update calls for a full team meeting, work itself slows down. Spending significant time in meetings, especially when they could be done through chat or email, is among the signs your team needs project management tools.

Not all issues and concerns require a meeting. If certain topics need immediate resolutions, you may opt for a project management tool that allows asynchronous updates, commenting on tasks, and assigning roles and deadlines in real-time.

That way, your team can save meetings and team conferences for critical and high-stakes discussions, leaving more time for immediate tasks.

Your team struggles with scaling.

There are workarounds for managing small teams, but as teams grow, existing systems need to upscale, too–even in human resource operations.

A sign your team needs project management tools is a slow onboarding process. When you don’t have a standardized and automated onboarding process for new employees, each new team member takes a whole day to assist. 

With all the company wikis, existing projects, and tasks handed down from a previous employee, new hires will find the transition period overwhelming. The same goes for downscaling, wherein teams may struggle to delegate tasks to a smaller team, risking heavy workloads.

With a project management tool, you can create standardized projects for onboarding new members, so they can acquaint themselves with the team at their own pace. As for scaling down team members, you can assign secondary persons in charge of tasks. So when a task manager becomes unavailable, another person can take over in no time.

Migrating databases takes a long time.

Traditionally, migrating databases takes weeks or months and requires participation from everyone in the organization. But even with all the help, the task itself is exhausting in many ways.

With a well-equipped project management tool, especially one with third-party app integration features, you can seamlessly transfer workspaces in the background while you work on your tasks at hand.

Moreover, with integration capabilities, you minimize the risk of losing files to human error. Some file types may need to be converted before transferring, and that could require skill and time. Fortunately, there are project management tools that have advanced features for storing files of various file types. So now, you don’t have to worry about file incompatibility once you migrate databases.

You have uneven workload distribution in the team.

Do some team members drown in tasks and deadlines, while others are left with hours of vacant time? It may be among the signs your team needs project management tools.

A common occurrence both in startups and large corporations, workload imbalance may lead to burnout and low confidence in the workplace. And if left unchecked, this may extend to inefficiency and overall poor performance that directly affects the business.

With project management tools, your team exercises progress visibility and equal task distribution. Project management tools ensure that you divide tasks fairly and your team accomplishes tasks with exemplary quality.

In addition, some project management tools have reporting capabilities that teams can use to track workspace productivity and allow managers to recognize hard work with real insights from data. Such features help to show support for the team and to lift team spirit after a hard day’s work.

If you identify with the above signs your team needs project management tools, consider employing one for your workspace. It’s never too late to start optimizing your workflow.

Streamline your processes, improve work collaboration, and track your projects with ease–check out our project management solutions today!